Hello friends – another story from the fireside up in our vigil forest. I’m back from the woods after another extraordinary and tiring sit (I may have nodded off in the above photo). I took myself down to London for the night – a change of view can be just the tonic after such deep sea diving. The smokey old river, chats and dipping into bookshops on Charing Cross Road.
It’s September! I may have prematurely got the winter logs in and stocked the whisky cabinet, but I always have my eye on the crisper season. After a summer intensively writing, I’m keen to get out and about. As I look out the window on this first of the month I can see a light drizzle on my line of washing. Ah well, can’t have it all.
I have evenings in London, Canterbury and Dartington this October/November to celebrate the paperback edition of Smokehole, and The Skinboat & The Star begins this Friday, gadzooks. I may or may not have revived the art of the Mummers Play for the Saturday evenings of the course. If they prove to be at least partially serviceable they may be revealed here. I have some solid plans for new adventures at House of Beasts & Vines that I’ll reveal over the coming weeks.
Anyway, enough of that. Come back with me a few weeks, to where we’d ended up after Babel and the flood. This is a story I really love.
I wish I could tell you everything changed after Babel. A restoration. But stories aren’t quite like that. In fact we soon lose interest if they are. We look for the pebble in the shoe, the grit in the oyster that actually tells us something about our own lives, down here in the rubble. For a time, Israel seems tidal in its relationship to Maker. Like the sea they surge toward him then pull further back, the sky darkening.
In all cultures and times a wild wind sometimes blows – cards fly random from the deck and the captain is mad on the ship. There is smoke in every eye and slander on every tongue. Chaos. This is not just a Jewish thing, this is a human condition.
Israel had forgotten the dream of what it could be, had even forgotten the character of its own Maker. Its leaders were adrift in squalor and bone-breaking. Their aggression was so huge its only shape was mythological; when there was slaughter, eighteen thousand, twenty-two thousand, twenty-five thousand would die. Butchery and sorcery had dominion and shook Eden’s dream savage, almost broken by the neck. Maker’s love was offered to people that did not want it and could make nothing from it. If he was walking in the cool of the day few were noticing.
For a long time a starvation came to the people. A hungering, a thirsting, a humbling. When there’s no rain in the middle-east it starts to feel you may have made a wrong turn with God.