Dry Stone Walls / entropy

Shortly before a solar eclipse in the summer of 1999, I began work repairing and rebuilding dry stone walls in the hills near Macclesfield, Cheshire. This solitary work continued throughout winter and into the new millennium.
This was an intense period of letter writing; many of which were never sent.
What follows are edited extracts from these letters. The pictured wall remains incomplete…

This wall is under construction.

Dry stone walls are a collection of chaotic, disorderly, randomly shaped lumps of rock which are placed together to form an ordered and functional object in the environment. The re-iteration of a line on a map.

Some maps are drawn based upon what is present. They are representations of a physical landscape. Whereas sometimes a map can define what is built on the ground; the physical landscape conforms to the way it is represented.
When building my own wall, I always had the strong feeling that I was obeying the line on the map depicting the wall I was rebuilding. In that respect my experience became a part of the map.
A map of experience to go with its residual artefact.

In the long and often uncomfortable pursuit of an ordered chaos, in the form of a dry stone wall, I was also trying to bring order to my own seemingly chaotic existence. There was always the romance of losing myself in the hills in the solitary performance of patiently stacking stones. I was trying to forget myself, to lose myself, to wash myself out of my consciousness.
The mythical pursuit of purity, accompanied in my case, by shaving my head and not speaking to anyone but myself for days. Self inflicted solitary confinement.
I lost the faculty of speech for a while back there in amongst the grit-stone heartings and the endless firmament.

interstellar

It has been many years since I was jettisoned from a rocket bound for a crash and burn trajectory with the sun. Its' mission long gone, leaving only a trail of minor space debris to drift in a close earth orbit according to no plan.

The pull of gravity is weak up here, gazing down on a bright blue planet. An unremarkable satellite, just the other side of invisible. There are light years between the random assemblage of parts from which I draw constitution, fractured in time and space between the here and there. I am the rings of Saturn and the moons of Jupiter. From frozen wastes of Neptune to the steady ache of Pluto. In the spaces in between us.

Some day soon all this will come crashing down and I'll come back glowing sulphur in a meteor shower, or perhaps as the magnetic indecision of the aurora burning out and fading away. Till then the frigid lack of oxygen keeps me from luminescence; it keeps me awake and focused on my perpetual emptiness.

Everyday I stare out into open space and perhaps I've been lucky to gain all this freedom in this endless vacuum. This time to sleep, perchance to dream, safe in my hiding place. But freedom is just another word anyway.

I am gradually freezing inside, a frost that creeps with the ruthless geometry of snowflakes, my heart approaching permafrost and lungs pierced with a million crystals. I am a glacier receding into the mountains as the summer eats into me. I am winter, an onlooker in various shades of blue.
I am imploding, retreating and I've been meaning to crack all week.

sub atomic

I refer back to homesick space flotsam analogies to reflect my inertia. Adrift in a cold infinity, unable to reach a world of warmth and possibility just below me; just within sight. A galaxy of lost souls waiting to be found, a billion nebulas waiting to be fulfilled. Every star and every planet, searching for their twin; waiting to be complete. The harsh actuality of science tells me that infinity is a cold dark inhospitable vacuum. But that still doesn't stop me. At least there is a release from gravity.

Maybe all I ever wanted was to float without the fear of falling. An infinite interstellar free-fall, adrift in an endless ocean. My romantic notion of a block of ice set to sail away across the limitless void. Lost amongst the subatomic debris and the cold dark matter. Terminally alone but content without the concept of loneliness. I'd soon forget what it was like to melt in the warmth of another person.

My awful solitude has out-shined the sun. I am sleeping in the periphery.

I woke up again. It was just before noon.
The gentle accompaniment of grey rain on a grey slate roof had previously prompted me to roll over and pull the duvet up over my ears to deaden the acoustic. Short term morphine memory lapses. Denial. Sweet denial.

Fever

Today it rained drops the size of babies fists, so I stood outside while the infants pounded me with their wetness.

I have my reasons even if they aren't very good ones. I must admit I feel slightly light-headed with an overwhelming feeling of sadness, almost on the cusp of crying. I haven't felt this way for a while now. I can't quite place it.

Later, while I was in the bath I tried to think of ten reasons why not to take Prozac. I could only think of three.

At night I didn't sleep, but who could with a headache like a brain tumour and a fever to match? It was a pretty hellish night; staring through deformed eyes at cold blue digital numbers counting the night away. First light usually seems sanctified, but for me it was just more daggers to twist in my skull. Eventually I yielded to chemical warfare and called in the paracetomols augmented with a cold wet flannel. So I went semi comatose from nine a.m. till three.
Later I staggered around the world on the Discovery channel, cupping a hot mug of Darjeeling in my clammy hands, and feeling supremely ill, almost to the point of decadence.

The colder climate

Looking back it's probably just as well I didn't go, because I was in one of those emotional states which take the whole day to build up. A bit like a cold front gradually edging it's way in.

I've noticed recently how season sensitive I am becoming. The evenings are already noticeably darker earlier. I don't think I've ever noticed the premature onset of Autumn so soon before. It makes me think of winter, when everything seems so much more slow-motion; so much more intense. I think I'm already looking forward too it.

It's getting towards that time of heart again.

Is it possible to build dry stone walls in the rain?

The day the sky fell in.

Once the fog was so thick that I could see no more than about ten metres. My horizons shrunk and my only point of reference was the wall which had become an extension of myself. I was so used to a vast territory stretching off to the west below me, that when it all disappeared I found myself lost once more, just as I had wanted to be.
I could no longer see the un-repaired wall which stretched of into my future nor the completed section of my life in the form of the boundary that I had already built.

Occasionally a flock of Rooks darkened an otherwise milky white expanse of sky and then dissolved as quickly as they materialised. Traffic noise transmitted from an indistinguishable distance, and as evening fell, the fading light only shrank my world even more. Two days in the mist and I was working in an imaginary landscape based on memories of where things were supposed to be.

At night there was a hard frost and everything was different. Something had changed and I hadn't a clue what.
I couldn't remember where I had been or where I was going or why… I only noticed that it was colder.

I count my past in numbers on a negative bank balance.

© 2000 Paul Anders Johnson