Compassed

The waters compassed me about, even to the soul: the depth closed me round about, the weeds were wrapped about my head. I went down to the bottoms of the mountains; the earth with her bars was about me for ever. Jonah 2: 5–6

 

Even before the equinox, one after another, fronts bring gale-force winds. It happens in part because, early in the month the atmosphere tens of kilometres above the south pole unexpectedly warms by more than 30 degrees Celsius in less than a week. This Sudden Stratospheric Warming happens every couple of years at the north pole, but almost never over Antarctica (loss of sea ice creating conditions for a blocking high is thought to be a factor in this year’s event). The warming slows the fiercely cold, winter-formed vortex above the pole, so that its winds spread outwards like the skirts of a dancer winding down after a fast spin. They touch us here on the southern coasts of Australia.

I hear huge gusts strike the forest canopy then pick up speed on the slopes below us. When they arrive, they shake the house and make the windows creak in the vacuum created by air sucking past. Strips of bark two, three, four metres long have been shed by smooth-barked eucalypts as trees gain girth in the rain, and now these streamers go flying far overhead. There’s a great scattering of twigs and branches, and the wind must surely have knocked nests and eggs and nestlings down, but I haven’t seen any.

Even though the wind brings damage, and sometimes splits or uproots trees, the trees themselves seem to me to enjoy being tossed around – they look exhilarated. And the buffeting always brings leafburst to the birches out front of the house, and the little hornbeam near my window on the other side. Bare twigs cover themselves in a pale green haze after the first storm. Small hail and sleet rattle against the windows – grains of ice that sting my skin when I go outside. The mountains, in the brief glimpses we get, are white.

After each front passes over, the quiet that follows is stunning. Absolute stillness into which rain comes, that will bring flowers and nectar and seeds and insects so that birds whose nests have been destroyed can start again. Then after a time, wind sighs and breathes again. I hear it around the house all night. We hunker down and eat soups and stews. But the season has definitely turned and there’s a riot of flowers preceding the leaves on fruit trees everywhere. Travellers who decamped for winter start to come back with the migratory birds. I make sauerkraut for C who has been in South America and Europe for months, and wants this familiar taste to ground her now that she’s back.

In fact the welcome swallows were nearly three weeks late – unheard of. Usually they arrive on the first of the month, first day of spring. With them came the shining cuckoos, pallid cuckoos, fantailed cuckoos. Black-faced cuckoo shrikes arrive a week or so later, churr churring, shuffling their wings as they land. They’re neither cuckoos nor shrikes; they comb the windbreaks and forest canopy for insects, and build their beautiful cobweb-bound nests high in the forks of trees.

A lunar eclipse is followed by its solar companion, as earth, moon and sun line up. There’s a palpable feeling of squeezy intensity as the light is swallowed – by a frog or puma or wolf or beheaded demon, or doused by sun-moon lovers who want intimate darkness, or because they’re fighting, or the light is withdrawn when the sun and moon sicken or become enraged.

In a seamless process, the actions and thoughts of our daylight selves generate dream images endlessly each night, and dream images affect our waking lives and on it goes. We dream stories, songs, the body – and the body dreams the selves we inhabit. We build the breath boat slowly each night and step into it when we wake.

I’m still thinking about Tom Singer’s assertion that cultural complexes are ‘the equivalent of biological systems’ such as those that carry out digestion and excretion or maintain blood pressure. It seems to me that on a creaturely level, complexes are not just ‘like’ body systems – our body systems are the place where the complexes – ancestral, familial, personal – express themselves. This is especially so in the experience of chronic illness as it develops over the course of lifetime – impervious to insight, the body has its own journey, and our agency lies in whether we turn towards or away from what is happening.

In the Cleveland Museum of Art there’s a collection of late Roman sculptures from Anatolia called the Jonah Marbles – a dozen pieces found together in a pot. Four of the pieces show events from the Old Testament story of Jonah, who tries to sail away from his fate, but this raises a storm that sees him cast into the sea by his shipmates, and there he is taken and after three days tossed back on land by a sea monster.

Two of the sculptures are paired. One shows Jonah being swallowed by what looks like a kind of dolphin-dog – the artist’s interpretation of the Greek cetus, a holdall term for a large sea creature. Only Jonah’s legs are visible, partly flexed, relaxed-looking, with toes pointed as if he’s just made an easy dive into the monster’s open mouth – it’s a game they’ve played often.

The second sculpture confirms this sense as we see the prophet’s torso emerge with arms raised as if he’s just completed a practised flip turn, with the cetus boosting him back out like his synchronised-swimming partner. They’re images that confirm the terror and delight of letting life have its way. Now it’s light. Now it’s dark. We turn away from our life, we turn toward it; and we are all of it – the tantrum-throwing prophet and the terrified sailors who throw him overboard; we’re the storm and the monster rising from the deep.

We’re the eclipse and the thing that’s eclipsed. We’re the darkness and the return of light. Rivers of dread flow through us, and rivers of happiness, turning, turning.

 

Thomas Singer. “The Cultural Complex and Archetypal Defenses of the Group Spirit.” The Cultural Complex. Ed. Thomas Singer and Samuel L. Kimbles. Routledge, 2004, p. 20.