GALLEY BEGGAR PRESS EXTRACTS

My Mind To Me A Kingdom Is, by Paul Stanbridge   

Chapter 1. SEA/ROCK/CAVE

IT WAS AT A PARTICULARLY DIFFICULT PERIOD OF MY LIFE, one which I continue to find myself unable to look at directly, that I first began to develop an interest in the toponymy of the North Sea. A previous piece of work had involved my going through as many of the early maps featuring the British Isles as I could find, from the second century Ptolemaic, through the mappae mundi of the Middle Ages, to those of Caxton and his contemporaries in the Renaissance, and further, into the Enlightenment, the time of the great instruments, when the land mass, I noted, like a developing child in the womb begins to assume a shape with which we are familiar, one recognisably our own. What I was then pursuing, I cannot remember. But certainly, at that time, I was interested in what, to our thinking, is there: the land. It was only later, when that great shock befell me, that I first began to conceive of a greater attraction to the waters between.

Day by day, I downloaded more and more maps of the North Sea, and very soon was struck by an impression that we humans cannot refrain from naming things, that everything that is — and even isn’t — must eventually accrue a denotative tag, even the shifting waters and unguessable floor of the ocean, as those mysterious names of the regions of the North Sea attest: Doggerbank, Farn Deeps, Utsira High, Revet, Broad Fourteens, Devil’s Hole, and so on. Nothing, I understood, was beyond the limitless power of words to name it: not the unseeable ground; not the shapeless water which, continually mingling and separating, is only ever itself in a single moment; not even the infinite extension of blank space above us — so like an ocean — and, within it, those great concentrations of gravity at the centre of which light is held still and time is said to stop, or not yet to have begun.

From a simple starting point, an innocent budding of the intellect, there may ensue a dogged, all-consuming undertaking which depletes the body, overstrains the senses, and destroys the mind.

I can clearly recall the moment at which this interest in the names of the North Sea began. I was quickly scrolling through my library of images of historic maps — I believe it had to have been quickly, or else the effect would never have occurred — and as I did so the borderline of land and water as it made this sea on each map hopped and lurched in shape from one image to the next as if the sea were a living creature under the force of some paroxysm emerging from within itself. The name of this expanse of water, though, remained the same: there was a solidity — and a comfort in that solidity — to the placement of one letter after another: NORTH SEA. The name, it is true, mutated in shape, position and size from one map to another, but still the sea was so much the North Sea that the words required no reading. But solidity, and comfort in solidity, is only understood when it is under threat of being taken away. Thus the ground was prepared for an aberration: on one of the maps the sea was denominated GERMAN OCEAN. It leapt off the screen in a shocking act of defamiliarization. My initial assumption, that the conflict of the First World War must be responsible for the renaming — one, moreover, presented thus in the slender research into the matter — was quickly disproved by the most cursory image search of historic maps, the ‘North Sea’ being the denomination, I noted, on at least two mid-Nineteenth century maps.

And so it was that I began to collect these maps in earnest, and to look into their ways with names, to seek a story or a sense to the movement of time, which must be the same thing. I interrogated my database as if it were an ancient text which promised to disclose the greatest mysteries of the world, and returned to the maps, moving back step by step. Back I went, from Ernst Debes in 1876, through Batholomew’s Times maps of the 1860s, through the maps of Stielers, Petermann, Berghaus, back through Teesdale and maps made for Mitchell’s School and Family Geography series, both in 1840, through Gilbert’s in 1838 and Thomas Moule’s the year before. Back I went, through John Cary’s attractive presentation of 1811, through an anonymous map produced to commemorate the Franco-Russian treaties made at Tilsit in 1807, back through a 1749 Anglicized copy of Homann’s Nuremburg production, whose representation of Britain and Ireland, with part of Holland, Flanders and France, it was pleased to describe as being ‘agreeable to modern history’. Even in Thomas Bowles’ plagiarised 1732 version of Herman Boll’s original that expanse of water was denominated ‘The British or North Sea’ a full 150 years earlier than the academics describe the shift taking place. It was only upon reaching Robert Morden’s maps of the first decades of the eighteenth century, published in Camden’s Britannia, that the name change became observable. Morden’s 1695 map designates it ‘Germanicus Oceanus’, while his 1722 map carries the legend ‘The English or German Ocean’. Ten years later Bowles calls it ‘The British or North Sea’, and we arrive at the present habit for naming that watery mass.

Had I been capable of observing myself more clearly at that time, I might perhaps have found it reasonable to clear away all these maps, close the many dozens of tabs in my browser, shut my notebooks, to cease generating and turning over and through vast quantities of data as if they were those waters themselves. In fact, it would be true to say that within only a few hours I had gathered enough information to make a persuasive case, against the untenable argument of the academics, that it was the Hanoverian accession of 1714 rather than the war of two centuries later that was the cause of this alteration. Why, if I had my answer, then, did this task preoccupy me for many months further? This general truth — that the renaming of the North Sea was a gradual process tentatively initiated in reaction to the politics of the early eighteenth century — was not enough. It was not enough because it did not satisfy. I pursued this new interest as if I were a plant and it were the sun: relentlessly, somatically, and under the force of a desire which swept every other consideration into irrelevance. And so how could something so impoverished as an answer cause me to cease this undertaking? It could not.

Even as I worked, I knew that I drew further back from my aim — whatever that might have been. I extended and deepened my database of antique maps, read every article I could find on on Anglo-German relations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, studied the long cartographic tradition linking Britain and Germany, phoned leading researchers in maritime history at universities and research institutions all round the world, and yet the true and inner meaning behind this toponymic shift from ‘German Ocean’ to ‘North Sea’ drew further and further back from my view. It is only now that I can observe myself at that time and understand that the answer I was looking for, far from being the initial and particular spark of this alteration, was in fact the very recession of sense though these layers of information away from my comprehension. I had made of myself an engine of distraction.

When night came, I put away my work, ate a little if I remembered, and then took myself to bed, where I would lie down and surge through the dark waters of a now nameless mass, always down, down through the plaited currents, down into the motionless fist-strong salted heaviness of it, down through the layers of sediment, marl, clay and rock, until, eventually, I found that cave which I had prepared without knowing for myself, one which the geology of the North Sea bed declares must be impossible — and yet here I am nevertheless — and in which, when lying there within its enclosure, I discovered there to be no necessity of sleep. A vast ocean of insomnia swelled up around me and I entered it willingly, with an avid hunger for that silent nightlong wakefulness which under normal circumstances would be intolerable. 

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At some indistinct point of my investigation the true pip and point to the reason for the change of the German Ocean to the North Sea ceased to be my concern, replaced as it was with a more specific — even if more scattered and less quantifiable — inquiry into the individual people who had made these maps and the relationships they held with the regions they sought to represent, all conducted in a final stage and with a growing sense — one which I now see to have been incontestably pathological — that if I could uncover the full and minute history of these forgotten lives, some amorphous form of redemption might be allowed to take place, though whether for me or for them I could not say.

I read of Heinrich Berghaus, and of Justus Perthes, the firm which published the maps he made with unparalleled attention to detail. I read of Alexander Keith Johnston, a partner in an Edinburgh publisher which in 1848 bought the rights to Berghaus’s maps. I read of how the engravers, receiving copies of the German plates, made tracings of the place name plates, and converted each name — where it had been changed — back into its native form on a fresh piece of burnished copper. Looking at each map, I wondered about the interior life of its engraver — where and in what form, now, were the thoughts which had been produced by the engine of that brain? I read of August Petermann, Berghaus’ protégé, and his visit to Edinburgh and London, where he stayed for nearly a decade from 1845 on, and how he caught the attention and acquired the devotion of a young John Bartholomew Jr, only sixteen years old when they first met. Later, after Petermann divorced, married again, and finally gave it all up in 1878 by shooting himself in the head, Bartholomew had a bust made of his industrious hero, which he displayed in the boardroom of the firm his father had established, and which was still there a hundred years after his death, though now has gone. We humans are like planets, and the motion we present in the world, though its ultimate cause be what is exterior to ourselves, is a corollary of the deeper, stronger and faster motion at our cores. Petermann, it seems, fell into that same affliction which creeps into us all, except that it was beyond his forbearance: a slowing beyond tolerance of the spinning at the centre of oneself. He found that nothing good could come of it, felt the spin wind down, and all that he had held to be in orbit of him drifted off to find some new star and moons and be left without light or tide.

I read into the deepest creases of these forgotten lives until there was nothing more to discover because all other traces had been lost. I felt a pull, a gravitational desire, to leap across from the known to the unknown, to discover the inner secrets of the dead and make solemn record of them, just as a child's desire to exhibit a found pebble or shell to parents is so serious and clear. This being an impossibility, however, I sought meaning, as many do, by looking for origins, not knowing then what I know now: that historical origins are as chimerical and problematic as the inner thoughts of the dead.

I began to look further back into the history of map making of this region, seeking in all probability a universal solution to the mess of existence which troubled me all the day long. In Herodotus's map of the world, made c.450BC, I found organised the peoples and places of Europe, under unfamiliar names, on an unrecognisable physical mass of land about or within a sea of chaos. Here, before Rome, there is no Britannia or Germanicus, no Teutones, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Vikings, Franks and so on, only Celtae, Ligyes, Sigynnae, Eneti and Getae, found in this Roman copy of Herodotus in their later Latinate forms — already the names for things are being threshed through competing empires. In this early time, at the very beginning of history, the world is a strange shape: it huddles its land masses together at the centre, as if in fear, and is engulfed by the waters of multiple seas and oceans. It is in Pliny, Tacitus and Ptolemy in the first and second century that we first discover ourselves. In these accounts, as in the great mappae mundi of the middle ages, Britain is separated from continental Europe by the ‘Oceanvs Germanicvs’, though in the medieval maps the earth has been turned ninety degrees by the power of Christ, cardinal orientation north is abandoned in favour of the east, and Jerusalem, the site of his wonderful self-immolation, is made the great navel of the world and its eschatological history, at least for a time.

One particular medieval map, found within a compilation of historical accounts called La Mer Des Hystoires, and published in 1491, caught my attention. It presents the earth in the Isidoran T-O format which prevailed at the time, where the known world, its landmasses and seas, is surrounded and protected from the nameless blank space of the page upon which it is printed by a firm dark bounding line in a perfect circle; and where the seas — which go unnamed — pour out their source at the top of the illustration from a kind of walled spring, within which two men look with ambiguous purpose at one another across the dividing line created by the spine of the book, which runs as a fissure of vacant space through the centre of the earth between them.  The brothers — how could I see these two men otherwise, after what had so recently happened with my own brother — stand within a walled enclosure above the Inde, beyond the eastern limit of the earth, and tend to the pouring of the seas out of their font down to the wretched human realm beneath, whose surface is covered only in cities, except where the pope resides. The devil is led by the hand by some unidentifiable personage, and two human-faced flowers are enwreathed by the water’s threads. The two angelic brothers eye one another at their task, and who can say if they are not in fact corporeal forms, ordinary men, engaged in mutual admiration, or devotion, or even suspicion that the other seeks not to water but rather drown the world and thus, also, himself, his rival? 

This map was just one of many diversions which I was led to pursue, and which, taken in totality, were as intertwined, though purposeless and impenetrable, as the ribbons of water they neglected to try to represent. Looking back now on the manner and extent to which the waters of the German Ocean came to consume me — I do not believe this to be an overstatement — it seems impossible that it did not even occur to me that what I sought was not so much a subject in itself, a story to pursue, as a means of escaping the terror of looking at my own, in which, still, if I try to turn towards it, I discover only a blinding glare of terrible darkness which draws all words towards it and destroys them by the power of its gravitational pull. The naming of things, it is true, is no more than an attempt to subdue the terror of existence. Equally, though, hindsight has discovered for me that, whatever it is that preoccupies the thought and feeling, whether for good or bad, does in fact turn all eyes upon it, though under different forms or species, those interior eyes which we do not see with, or know, but which are most certainly there. Thus, what I avoided was precisely what I travelled towards, as, during those long insomniac nights, I flowed out like a river from this land of the living into the shifting waters and dwelt in a body of unobtainable insolidity. In truth, I was remaking myself and my world because the events of life had unpicked that which I had lived among, and that which I had until that time no cause to believe was unreal. Now there were only names, absences, gaps. Everything had melted into the watery elseness of the North Sea.

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I circle, I do circle, and it is not within my remit to say if it is like the vulture around remains, or the wolf around its living prey, or the polecat, which returning from its own hunt circles the den which holds its cubs so as to check the territory for safety, never to lead the wolf or vulture back to the den to make prey of what is most precious. I cannot say what it is that I am circling, but it is true that I circle, I do — even down here, among the ribbons of water, deep within this cavern of rock.

After you were burned up and what had been you risen up the chimney to drift in the shapeless air, I walked out of the crematorium and saw your place marked with a name card and no wreath, because no one for shame can be allowed to see remnants of you, you who inhabit now your self-made box. There rose in me the great urge to remove my two shoes and place them there in that absence, because somehow it was you that required them more for this new state of existence — you who chose not to wear shoes in the street even in life — and yet I didn’t, and so no sign was made for your commemoration, not even one so temporary as that. So now, not knowing what such things as temporary and permanent can possibly mean in such matters as these, I must make a sign, I must.

I circle, and I ask questions, and I find that they are the same thing.

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The obsession I had cultivated with the maps of the North Sea led me through numerous libraries and archives in the South East until it brought me to a collection in the Norwich Castle Museum — and, in particular, to a manuscript written by an unknown resident of that city between the two world wars — where that obsession was abruptly put to an end. This person’s handwriting was poor, the script littered with crossings out and additions, and the pagination chaotic and disordered. (It is, according to the one I spoke with, a principle of archivists that the order of pages, even if disordered, is a feature of the archive, and should not be corrected — such a correction, indeed, is a movement away from truth rather than towards it). Wearing white cotton gloves, feeling like a coroner of culture, I carefully turned these loose leaves, and instantly I saw how much there was of interest to me here. The identity of the author was unstated and unknown. There were no names, neither of people nor of places, and the time of writing was only indicated by the date ascribed to the archive which contained it. Yet here spoke a direct and unmediated voice, a true and real person, whose words, though their writer must now have been dead for a number of decades, came directly to me out of — where exactly? I felt a thrill of penetration which had eluded me in the search through the maps.

This person, in keeping with his or her place in the map library, held an interest in the cartography of the region. He or she had a vast collection of antique maps, and kept notebooks which functioned as a record of work undertaken with these maps as subject, but also of daily events, such as occurred. In another context this would mostly have made for very dull reading indeed; but whether it was my own state of mind at the time, or something quite other, I hung on every word. Every weekday I walked through the city and round the walled mound of the castle to the old portcullis-like door which was opened to me by an assistant and by whom I was ushered into the frigid dark stone anteroom of the library. I stowed my coat and bag, collected the notebook I was working on, took my seat under the leaded window, pulled on the white cotton gloves, laid the long ribboned paperweight over the book's open pages, and read on. There was the occasional mention of walks and meals taken, domestic duties performed, thoughts on public life, but almost all of the space of the notebooks was dedicated to cartographic observations. Each new map acquired is recorded on a new line with asterisks at either end of its title. The general impression of reading the notebooks is a quotidian disordered smallness, like looking at worms at work in soil behind a plate of glass. However, at a certain point — with the earliest mention of one particular map — I began to experience an impression of a narrative thread emerging in the writing. The writer had ordered a number of maps from an antiquarian in the North somewhere, forgotten about them, and then was surprised several months later by their arrival by post, following a diversion through numerous sub-post offices across the country. Opening the roll, the author of the notebook discovered that one of the maps was a duplicate of one already owned. Nothing is recorded further in regard to this matter for a week, and it is only with hindsight that both the author and I the reader note how this duplicate map is beginning to take on a certain role. A detailed comparison of the two copies of this map of the North Sea is recorded for the first time in notebook 26, and by the end of that same notebook ten or so days later the two had evidently been pinned up beside one another. Imagine (writes the author, reminiscing about this moment of discovery several months later) if I had sent the map back!

At some indeterminable time, the author of the notebooks begins to make more and more frequent assessments of these two copies of the map, and with more and more enthusiasm. ‘Every morning,’ as is written in the middle of Notebook 28, ‘waking up in a fever for the day’s work. Come into workspace, bring up blind, uncover mirror (my old & incurable conviction that uninhabited rooms should not have mirrors open to their vacancy, poor mother), full of fear that nothing has happened, but also that something has. Baffled.’

The entries from this point onwards become longer and more detailed, and full of references to an impenetrable code system to describe different regions of the two maps. The pages become increasingly dense with alpha-numerical codings, sketches of emergent shapes and transcriptions of a kind of runic language. As in content, so likewise in form: the lineation in the notebook becomes less and less strict, until each page is a chaos of uninterpretable signs scrawled over one another; one which ends abruptly in the latter part of Notebook 47, and following which there is only blank space for the remaining pages. From the evidence, it seemed that the author of these notebooks had conceived of some kind of livingness within one of the two maps, and descended quickly thereafter into insanity. Disappointed and somewhat chastened I made agreement with myself that these researches of my own might for the sake of my health be suspended or at least curtailed, until I discovered a note inserted into the archive referring to the records for a Jan Baumgarten held in the Norwich Borough Asylum archive. Of course, and against all the determination of my resolution just then made, I immediately phoned the Norfolk County Library Service in order to request access to this archive. It was here that I discovered that the author had been committed to the Asylum, though for blindness rather than mental incapacity, and that a record had been made, presumably by dictation to an employee at the hospital for the two-fold purpose of individual diagnosis and general medical research, of the narrative which the notebooks held in code but which I was incapable of translating into meaningful words.

I quote the narrative in full:

‘It was at some point during a long period of hot windless weather that I noticed at the centre of the region of sea which formed the locus of my current interest a discolouration which, owing to the unseasonable heat, I would normally have not hesitated to ascribe to a reaction of the lignin in the wood pulp to the light, yielding those destructive blooms of acidity familiar from even such brief exposure to old books as is afforded by browsing in some old fusty bookshop. It is frequently the case that antique books and maps which have been stored since publication and appear to be utterly inviolate — objects which often astonish one by their capacity to transport us in mind back to the time of their production (it is not at all uncommon to discover the pages still uncut) —  may, as soon as they are brought out of their long dwelt-in darkness into the light of our present day, find themselves subject to an immediate and rapid corruption, as if the light of our contemporary world was too much for their lack of sophistication (in the pejorative sense) to bear. I  sprayed both maps with my preferred de-acidifying solution, and expected no worse to befall either.

‘Within not much time at all, however — several weeks at most — numerous fine lines became visible on the map in question and not the other, some apparently dotted, as if showing the route a passenger ferry might take, though all these routes were meandering and led nowhere at all, and all of them remained confined to that area of sea between Britain, Norway, Denmark, Germany and Belgium within which the crooked legend ‘THE NORTH SEA’ was enclosed. In fact, I was intrigued to note how the network of lines, taken together, seemed to be concentrated around that area of the North Sea where Doggerbank lies beneath its surface. Under the scrutiny of a 40x magnifying glass, the situation only became more confounding. Each of the lines made upon the map was in fact composed of a multitude of little scratches, similar in kind if not in cause, it struck me, to those on the Hereford Mappa Mundi by which numerous Francophobes had demonstrated their predilections and defaced the city of Paris, for each ran if not in absolute parallel with the others — such a thing we are informed by the scientists has been shown against all right sense of judgement to be an impossibility — then at such an approximation to it as to insist even moreso the agency of a fallible human hand rather than the efficiency and uniformity of a machine. This was the first time that such a thought had occurred to me, and I present it now as if it seemed a definite possibility. At the time, as now, I believed there to be no such possibility of foul play.  Howsoever another person might enter my locked study, within my own home, a home moreover which I so seldom left. By what means that person might be capable of knowing to concern him or herself with the representation of that area of ocean between the 50th and 60th parallel, from the meridian line to ten degrees east — in short the area with which I had been preoccupied for so long myself — I must admit to finding myself incapable of conceiving.

‘This was merely the beginning, however. The stitch-like lines which I believed to have begun appearing in the North Sea of this map soon appeared to complexify, to become more varied in structure and interrelation, as if they were the growing network of capillaries of an organism as it matures. I could not bring myself to pronounce this emerging set of marks as part of a system of scribed communication (I had not yet entirely lost all sense of proportion). Yet these marks, which, taken in totality, viewed at a distance — from the land so to speak — appeared to be the random results of the original copper plate having picked up scratches, patches of oxidization and other blemishes synonymous with a poor system of storage — a state of affairs which perhaps would account for the willingness of Justus Perthes to allow the plates to go to Bartholomew for a quarter of their value — appeared, when I brought my attention out into the ocean and down to a small area of its waters (to the location of the Witch Ground Graben as it abuts Canary Terrace, or of the highest hills at the western end of Dogger Bank, for example) to form discrete and intentioned entities from some manner of runic alphabet whose forms were now unknown and whose meaning was irretrievable.

‘In the ensuing weeks, the network complexified further, the threads meshed with each other like the capillaries of a mold which, having rapidly penetrated the full body of a fruit and found its resource of sustenance to be apparently inexhaustible, extends itself further from the surface in a cloud of decay, until the map was supplemented with an alternative account of reality, one which, as far as I knew, seemed by what could not possibly be accounted for by chance alone to accord with the reality beneath the waters to a far greater degree than that ordinarily presented even by such maps as concern themselves with the ocean floor. Indeed, the moraine of Dogger Bank swelled up out of the sea to become Doggerland once more, as if the intervening ten millenia had never occurred. The Devil’s Hole sank down into a deeper obscurity. What now was, was embellished with what once had been, and inevitably would be in the long drag down into the future. Most interesting, though, were the waters themselves, that which no map seeks to represent, being to all intents and purposes for the mapmakers empty space, and which appeared in all the impossible complexity of their movement of mingling to be represented in the map’s new and continuing work upon itself.

‘The apparent fragmented letter forms which I had observed changed from one day to the next, merged, crossed one another, only to emerge a week hence, sometimes the same, sometimes transformed. (The reader may consult my journal for a diagrammatic record of this part of the development of the map, should he or she desire to do so.) There was antagonism and even on occasion what one might describe as a manner of watery understanding, or so it appeared, to the flux of signs upon the map. Within a year of first noticing this efflorescence of signification — if that is what it might acceptably be termed — I seldom left the house except to obtain the bare essentials, and in fact confined myself to a single spot within this one room in order to observe the intricate developments which occurred within the shallow bowl of the North Sea. By the procurement of two ceiling-mounted Osram halophosphate lamps I was able to relieve some of the strain from my eyes, and yet by the same token, my working hours thereby greatly extended, my eyes began again to suffer with the effort of such long periods of close work. Although the quality of my vision did not at this time decline, I was beleaguered with sharp headaches and strains to the eyes which made me irritable and would have made me bad company if ever I had been in any such. I worked through this pain and discomfort and found my sufferings rewarded with observations of great arabesques of uninterpretable signs, swarms of runes and letter forms built out of one another in cycles of interpenetration up, down, round and over, so that what appeared to be at the top, the latest development, was invariably also at the bottom, underpinning the crystalline shapes which emerged from it. Everything was — impossibly, tantalisingly, incontestably — both the source and outcome of its sibling others, flowing round and round like the water it represented.

‘It was in the eighth year of my observances that I first experienced a bout of sightlessness. I remember I had been paying particular attention to a constellation of heptangulate particles which had developed out of the eighth quadrant of Sector C4.2 — or so I had been urged by the quantity of data I by then had gathered to name the separate regions of my map — which, had the map shown such subaquatic features (which of course it couldn’t, these having yet to be found sufficiently necessary of investigation at the time of the map’s publication), was a little to the west of the Outer Silver Pit. I was expectant of a radical mutation at any moment, something I had not so far witnessed except in the retrograde, from the evidence of subsequent formations according to the caprices of these nameless forms. In short, I was in a state of perpetual excitement and agitation for an event continually deferred as the ocean was opening up like a galactic expanse into ever greater spatial extension, infinite space within finite bounds.

‘The original map, I should point out, had by this time become a mere foundation to the baroque structures which now grew up from its surface, like Chartres as it sprouted up from the flat plain of Normandy in the twelfth century, or the robust salt towers which have been growing out of Lake Urmia in Iran since a time far, far beyond. On the day in question, at approximately 2pm, an excruciating pain punched into the backs of my eyes and every scrap of the visible world was swept out of existence, everything around me turning not dark as the story goes but being engulfed in a shapeless swathe of bright light, as if the foamy waters of this sea were rising with resentment, a show of mastery, up around the sight which attempted to master them. During this period (these bouts at first only lasted for a quarter of an hour or so) it was not the loss of my sight per se which perturbed me, but the possibility that I would miss what it was I sought so ardently to observe, such was the rapidity with which the map was shifting its shape and growing out of itself. I was relieved, therefore, when my sight returned, dimly at first, to note that no dramatic changes had taken place during this period, and that the small holes in my data which had been opened up by this brief enforced hiatus would permit of being filled without too much guesswork. Nevertheless, there is always a perilous inexactitude to filling in the space between what was and what is.

‘These bouts of sightlessness, however, became longer; and, with time, increased in frequency; until it was not unusual for my scientific enquiry to be forced into suspension for more than half the day and night taken altogether. People who have pursued an ardent passion, whether in youth or no, may perhaps excuse the apparent cavalier attitude I exhibited in neglecting the care of my sight, comprehending as they surely will the force which drove me on. To those who have not, and so cannot, a word: I fear you have not lived.

‘In short, it was not two years hence, a mere ten years into my researches, and in spite of the introduction of certain precautionary measures meant to counteract such an eventuality — working in three hour shifts; resting the eyes with closure between; administering cold compresses to the temples between bouts of work; sighting a distant solitary tree for a time from the attic window (I do not mind admitting it invariably put me in mind of Golgotha and the Cross, except transposited to our cold and northerly climate, and not a tree of cypress or cedar, but of oak) — that I permanently lost all semblance of sight, and live now permanently within the bright clear waters of blindness which have risen up around me.’

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Deep at the heart of things, time slows to a stop. This is why I am here and this, you the formulae on the sheaves of paper which filled the container of your rooms like waters. There is a romance to becoming a black hole.

But what can lie at the centre of an undifferentiated mass? Perhaps some unimaginable crystal structure eternally forming in no-time. Has our earth grown a pip or seed, a veritable centre to itself, an axis, stump, root or omphalos? The scientists by cunning cross-threshment and combination of figured planes can see past the origin of the universe back before the bounce through the dark eye of our becoming in which time stopped, and they have tried to explain. Across billions of light years back in time through the channels of the fini-infinite mollusc, the uneternal holes, and down to the Planckton of being, the shortest possible thing, across which even light must crawl hideously in its journey. But you cannot look a little way into the ground. Nobody can know what is at the centre of us, whether seed or crystal, root or perhaps emptiness, as some nuts open up an airiness inside themselves in the vigour of their own growing.

Deep beneath the ocean, splashing about in our nickel bath, observing the spinning at the centre of this earth, I find that his voice comes not to or through me, but out of as it were myself, an inestimable thing: Each planet, moon, star makes a pulling of itself by hand of matter, by fist furled having centre to itself, like desire. Yes, everything you see and don’t see around you is predicated upon desire. And so do not come to me with shoulds and shouldn’ts, because the sword is swung, desire ran through, and here I am, everywhere.

And when I wake up he is again gone.

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It was during the return journey home from the Norwich Millenium Library, with a photocopy of this manuscript in my bag, that I first felt a drag at my left side, in manner like gravity or a current of water, an undertow, one leaving me feeling frightened and faintly nauseous, that has since become a regular fixture in my neuro-physiology. Lying on my bed that night, I again went down into the cold waters of the German Ocean which had claimed the sight of my new unknown friend. Down through the ribbons of its darkness, down, until I reached the silts and sands of its own bed. I burrowed like an eel, disturbed the dormant sediments, the grits and dusts which had been disgorged by the great rivers all around me: Rhine, Elbe, Glomma, Ijssel, Meuse, Weser, Humber, Tay, Scheldt, Tweed, Thames — even, as I was to learn, the mighty Bytham, which had flowed out of the land mass we now know of as Norfolk, until it was abruptly erased from prehistory by the Anglian glaciation half a million years ago, though its sands still lie beneath those of its watery offspring, awaiting their next orogeny.

In view of my condition, what had recently happened, the attendant or consequent insomnia, the vertigo, the desire to be deep down there, it takes little effort to conject the cause of the attraction I felt for one particular feature of the sea bed which for centuries, owing to its predilection for robbing trawlers of their nets, has been denominated the Devil’s Hole. Did I not make my way down into its depths every night? By day, I sat in the library and undertook my researches.

In early investigations of the North Sea bed, dynamic positioning was most effectively made by use of a taut-wire lowered to the sea bed, whose accuracy, even taking into account catenary deviation and the effect of current on the wire, has been proven to be surprisingly good. HM Fitzroy, a surveying ship leaving Aberdeen one rainy morning in May 1930, ran back and forth above the trenches taking soundings, and, by use of all that could be found of solidity in that shifting realm — taut-wire, beacons and star-sightings — the positions and depths of these trenches of the deep sea were asserted to a hitherto unparalleled measure of accuracy. The normal gradient of the ocean floor — a single degree, it was discovered — is superseded here by a comparatively steep ten degrees at the location of the trenches. The mean depth in the surrounding area — a mere eighty to ninety metres — opens down, so far as the Fitzroy discovered in its investigation, to two hundred and thirty in the deepest part of the trench. The trenches, then, are not those tectonic types which are characterised by vertiginous drops into nothing, and which are liable to terrify the mind, but rather are — or were found by the Fitzroy to be — the gentle rise and fall of a pattern of silt, sand and dust deposition (predominantly quartzose with a subsidiary quantity of metamorphic rock fragments and heavy minerals) from the rivers to the west. This layer of loose material, it was later discovered by the drilling of a borehole at the edge of one of the trenches, is approximately ten metres deep, though much deeper at the deepest part of the trench. The trenches themselves, which would be far deeper and steeper had the river depositions not filled them in, have been formed in an undulating clay bed probably by river erosion when sea levels were much lower and this area of land, by the happenstance of geological development at the time, had not yet been forced down into a dip by the violence of the Alpine orogeny to be flooded by the sea, long after we — I mean here not myself so much as the landmass on which I live  — had left the equator for good some 500 million years ago on Avalonia.

Developments in seismic boomer technology have since allowed a more detailed picture to be built up of this subaquatic region, but no method of analysis so far developed has proven accurate or sensitive enough to gain a true picture of the surface of this undiscoverable ground. In my own nocturnal explorations through the briny ribbons of the North Sea I discovered hollows within hollows, narrow burrowing passages into the sand and soft clay of the trenches, down to the stiff clay and sand of the seabed; and, within that, those narrow fissures within the depths of the trench which I have already mentioned, and which run far deeper and steeper than any ship may measure; and from which the emanation of fine currents of water could be felt by their temperature differential, tickling as they did at my skin. Had I felt the desire to go further, I would have discovered no doubt a route through all the clay deposits, through the shale, past the igneous anomalies, in whose glacial pebbles the ancient fissures can be traced in varicose patterns, down, through cretaceous chalks and flints, down through the sandstone, through the pools of oil and pockets of gas, down, past fragments of the Manicougan asteroid — if, indeed, it existed — down through the mudstones, the metamorphic crust which had been Avalonia, and which was now no more, down, down to the igneous origins of us all, where the heat can be felt through the dark rock, down, through the cracks, where the water is already gas, and the sublimating minerals spurt out; down, into the iron and nickel bath, the swirling flood of molten metal, that which, like the crust above, will eventually itself solidify as the earth passes into middle and late age, and like the creatures which live on its surface feel, with the advance of age, the galvanic force within ebb away to open the pathway to the approach of death; down, to that ball of metal so dense of itself that it has solidified in spite of the excesses of its temperature which it itself promulgates, spins, keeps melted all that surrounds it, that which is the same as itself, the ball which spins like a fury in its cage, and whose minor aberrations can be detected in the quivers of needles we place for what reason we cannot say to measure the flux of magnetism. By an ineluctable process, now at the centre of things, there at the core of this spinning ball, and with no more down to be found, I was led back further to a contemplation of the gathering of these initial metals one to another, the beginning of us.

So it was that for a long time I lay upon my side through the night and thought my way into that singular event, the origin, an initial combination of nothing but elemental particles, which, given only time, yielded an entire planet. It was only then that it occurred to me that the formula ‘dust to dust’, which appears to be so incontrovertibly terminal, does in fact express also beginning, that first gathering of the planets in making of themselves, and that without knowing it, many had said what they did not know, but certainly felt: in my beginning is my end, in my end is my beginning. Every little mote, we must admit, declares: I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last.    

The universe, in its youth, must have been a fearsome thing, and yet how quickly it lost the greater part of its zeal, matured, settled down and waited, now in its vast middle age, for the long drag back in to begin again at the next big bounce, for how else other can it be?

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The Witch Ground Graben which can be observed in the North Sea, running north-west to south east between the Moray Firth and Viking Graben, presents a picture of what may happen if one becomes too heavy for the world, if what supports us suddenly is found no longer to be capable of supporting us, and the fault lines open, and we sink. Under the right light, a graben can be seen to have opened up on the surface of the moon, and thus what we had considered to be cold, lifeless, uniform rock, nothing but an accumulation of undifferentiable and homogeneous matter — what, in fact, we in all probability have failed to give proper consideration to at all, except insofar as poetry, that mirror of signs, has turned the moon into  — might in fact be as living as our earth, except that there are and can be no trees, and trees are everything.

There exists a cryptic fragment in the diary of one James Skeltone, a berger in seventeenth century Wiltshire, recording an encounter with John Evelyn, one to which I cannot help myself being pulled towards, though I cannot say why: ‘Today met and went walking with Evelyn, the King’s great advisor on all matters arboreal — a poet of the tree — and he informed me that the centres of trees are in fact dead. I did not know this, I said. Nobody does, said Evelyn. Neither that it is the same with men.’

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Whenever I seek to approach the matter directly there is a shifting, like the ordinals of the map, where north replaced east as up, and abruptly I am exiled from a vision of the matter, even though that matter be myself. I will try to say all that I can plainly say:

On the evening of Monday 4th May, two men walking a dog in the fields north of Stoke-by-Clare in Suffolk came upon the dead body of my brother. The dog, it must be supposed, had strayed from the path at the edge of the field into Lords Wood, because, so I remember being told, his body was found hanging from a tree deep within those woods, and one of the two men expressed surprise that they had found it at all. I say it was the evening that he was found, but I cannot be certain of this. Perhaps it had been the morning, and the police were preoccupied and did not pass on the information immediately. All I know is that I received a phone call from my father at about half past ten at night, just before the last light of day entirely vanished from the sky. Certainly it was after 10pm, because the first two thoughts I could form out of the vertiginous rush of terror which was blowing all around and through me was that I must have a drink, and I must smoke (though I had given up long ago), and the shop at the end of my road had closed a half hour before.

Of course, it would be possible for me to say when exactly these men had found the body, just as it would be possible for me to discover how they had found themselves walking the fields together, and for what reason they had ventured into the woods, why the dog had led them there, and also when my brother had thrown one end of the bale twine over the bough — so characteristic of him to have cut the string from a bale in the fields for his scheme rather than to have bought it, and I could ascertain the truth of this assumption also —  as well as how long it had taken for him to expire, the moment by date and time, near enough, of that expiration; of what species of time it is within which death comes upon a body; how long after that therefore that he had been hanging, after he had become his body, this — it — and in fact all of these events, these truths, not merely possible to be discovered but easy also. All I would need do is to stand, reach up to my left, above the printer, up to the top shelf, pull down the dogeared white envelope, and read the coroner’s report contained within it. But this is not something I have been able to bring myself to do.

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