STARSHINE, THE OCEAN AND THE UNICORN
Chapter Six                                                                                                               Part Six


                               I am at the foot of a mountain.  I sit in the cool of a forest.  I am enclosed and safe in deep coniferous green.  I sit here blind to the rest of France, its cities and landscapes I have roamed, its wide, regal rivers and dusty summer roads.  I sit here to revisit them inwardly in my mind's clear visions and I sit here to write.
                             France's fields are once again sown with life and growing with tall, proud maize, yellow wheat and golden corn.  There are vineyards of succulent vines in neat ordered lines, there are crops of dark green tobacco and there are miles of sunflowers , giddy headed and laughing in the breeze.   
                            I remember walking down a lane.  It was long and winding and it rose over ridges, then fell again to rise over the next.  And as I climbed and reached the crest of each ridge, I could see another stretch of land before me, like a painting of colours growing from the ground.  Each painting was different and each one was beautiful.  Sometimes there were sleepy farmsteads, as old and timeless as the land, their ancient walls quietly tumbling while their rafters showed like ribs through the red tiled rooves.
                          I climbed a steep slope through a field of stubbled straw.  At first I did not see the grazing cows because they were straw coloured too.  Then I saw the lazy shake of the head and some large brown eyes.  I looked around at the hidden herd.  They were silent, unhurried and chewing.  They barely moved from their painting.  Sometimes an ear would flick or a slow, single step was taken towards another mouthful of straw.  Then the sun began to sink and the straw cows with their straw field were tinged with the palest pink.  I felt like a small boy in a world of enchantment where God is not a wrathful Lord but a kind magician.
                          I crossed other terrains that were dry and hostile, their land blistered by the sun.  I crossed the marshes of wild horses and there I had feelings of madness and death.  I tried to cross quickly to avoid them but my heart was nervous and oppressed, heavy and burning, like white hot lead, molten and running with fire.  I felt panic.  I felt there was an assailant behind me driving me forward too fast so that I would fall and drown in foul mud.  There was no escape.  Capture was imminent.  Running was futile and the more futile it became the more I ran.  These moods were feverish and tangled.  They wove darkness and unhappiness around me like a black shroud that kept out light.  There were no reasons.  The suffering was suffered but unexplained.
                        At last I came to a town.  The strength of the sun turned its pale stone to white so that its beauty stood clear and sharp beneath the sapphire sky.
                             I found the market place.  I stood amidst its bustle.  I felt the touch of humanity as its crowds brushed past me and I heard its voices, its shouts and its whispers close to my ears. My dark pain was eased and my loneliness withdrew.  I stayed all day and watched the colours. Canopied stalls and barrows of peppers, tomatoes and aubergines, ripe and shining.  Pale pinks and greys of shellfish.  Yellow cheese and dark red hams.  Chickens and hens scratched and flapped in their cages.  Pigs squealed.  There were rolls of bright cloth, rows of leather shoes, piles of pots and pans and pyramids of brown and white eggs.  It was a place of plenty.  It was a place of sweat and haste, frowning brows, and lips moving fast with the fury of barter and business.
                           At midday the church bells rang out.  A young woman came to me with wine, bread and cheese.  She was small and elfin, dark eyed and olive skinned.  She wore a cotton dress of red flowers on pale green, her arms were bare to the summer heat and her hair was in long black braids.  In the evening when the market disbanded and drifted away, leaving me alone in an empty square, she was still there.  She took my hand and led me to her home.  She nursed my weariness and she gave me her warm, unashamed love.  Her dark, lithe body was gentle and wild, silent and alive.  Her young girl's breasts, the sweet dew between her slender legs, she gave and I took.  I stayed with her too long.  I stayed with her until one day I saw her pretty eyes were seeing me forever, then I knew I had to go.
                         As I left the town I saw its broken bridge.  Half a bridge spanning half a river, as though its heart had broken half way across and it was never able to reach out and touch the other side.  She yearned so to give.  I could not give myself just so that I might take.  I left her with a child growing inside.  I hope she will not always be sad.
                       There is only one I search for.  Her eyes were filled with the fear of giving.  She stood before me in the woods knowing that her fate was to give herself and lose herself without knowing where or why.  And all I could do was give her an apricot stone.
                       Now that I sit in the quiet of this forest I realise that the apricot seed is my heart.  It is my heart that I put in the palm of her hand.  I am still compelled to search for her even though I do not know her name.  So I know that she has kept my heart and I will search until I have found her.
                      First I must sleep.  Then I must leave this verdant womb and climb the mountain.  I must climb high so that I can fall and climb again.
                      There is so much more to understand.    
                     


















                            

                                      STARSHINE, THE OCEAN AND THE UNICORN

Chapter Six                                                                                                           Part five



                              This morning I arrived in Southampton.  I went straight to he docks.  I helped load a cargo of fine walnut furniture and in return for my labour a kind captain has let me aboard to sail the channel.  
                               I was once before bound for the same shores, but they were the shores of a battle field not the shores of France.
                              The day is pale grey.  Gulls surround the ship with their ugly flapping and squawking.  In spite of their noise I feel peaceful, I feel free, no wishes, no purpose, no burden, no soldier's pack, no rich man's wallet, just a pocket knife and a lead pencil in the pockets of my leather jerkin and I carry my precious book of words already written and pages yet to be filled, in the deepest most secret pocket , close to my heart.
                              I look at the grey waters of the channel and I wonder at all the depths and all the secrets of all the seas and all the oceans.  On land I stand above the ground so that I have to stand and live as a man, but I cannot stand on the sea, it is not my home, it overpowers my existence, it humbles me, it drowns my confusion, it drowns my life and its meaning and makes me feel at peace.  The ocean is independent, unrepressed in storm or calm.
                             I watch the waves drawing and swelling.  I watch the ebb and the flow and I wonder what lies ahead, what will be given to me and what will be taken away.  I try to think but I cannot, my peace is such that there is no future, no past, just the ocean.
                            If ever I do not find the girl in the woods and cannot know her name, then I will let the sea bury me.  Like the unicorn, I will let the ocean swallow me and make me a part of it, another myth it will hold, another secret that is glorious and free.






















   

                                        STARSHINE, THE OCEAN AND THE UNICORN
Chapter Six                                                                                                              Part Four



                    I have returned to my tower.  The war is over.  My body is whole.  My life is mine.  I feared death so badly.  Every day I thought it would take my search from me so that I would never be found.  I saw the faces of the dead.  Wide, staring, rigid fear as the moment of their death showed them that they were lost forever.
                    The sky was light with no sun and dark with no moon.  Sun and moon had forsaken us.  Every day and every night there was mud.  Every day and every night there was blood.  Every day and every night there was screaming.  When the shells and the gunfire ceased, the silence was wretched, too long and too evil to bare. Our breaths and heartbeats were soundless as we listened to the black silence and while we waited for more gunfire the gas would seep in.
                    All of this we returned to the enemy.  We exchanged our deaths for theirs, our mutilations for theirs.  Our guns and their guns were made by women whose labour had been withdrawn from homes and fields.  Our gas and their gas were cruel, cunning chemicals produced by the minds of learning and science.  On both sides were men who dug ourselves into the ground and lived as rats.  If our flesh was not ripped and our blood not spilt then we waited for the gas to dissolve our lungs, and if not the gas, then we waited for the trench mud to rot us from the feet up and turn us into gangrene.  Why ?
                   One night the reaper showed himself to me.  Guns rattled.  Shells sang.  I ran crouching, ready to throw myself down.  My boots were caught in barbed wire and the ground exploded before my face.  No fire, no flash, just a wave of dark earth under which I lay suffocating.  It closed in around my face, around each limb, no part of me could move. Its weight pressed down on my ribs and chest and my breath began to empty from my body. I waited for the scythe to sweep low, for my search to end, for my life to escape me into sleep and death.  And as I lay waiting I could still hear the sergeant's commands.  Commands I had obeyed. Commands that had led me to my grave.  I heard hunger in his voice and although I was buried deep in the ground I saw madness in his eyes.  They were predator's eyes, they trembled with an intensity, a vile greed.  The sergeant had led us like a lion, no soldier had doubted him.  In our foot weary weakness his strength had made our dead limbs move.  He held his face in stiffened expressions of forthrightness, concern and even kindness.  I lay beneath my mound of earth and saw clearly that the masks his face had worn had mocked us.  It was not strength but fear he had sown and nurtured inside us.  He had disguised his devilry and confused our souls.  Our minds were inert.  Our hearts were pushed down beneath the bulk of a dark mountain that was ignorance and blindness.  The sergeant stood at its summit, wielding supremacy and power.  He gained our trust and summoned our deaths.  Our obedience was unsuspecting while he despatched his orders to the reaper, the most obedient and servile of all his subjects.              
                        I would not die for the sergeant.  My body surged up. The heavy mud flowed like the loose, caressing waters of the ocean and I rose from my burial to see that the black velvet sky was jewelled with many bright stars.  My search had not reached its end.  I had to find the girl in the woods.  I had to know her name.
                       The sergeant did not see my shadow return.  He was alone in the trench.  He looked out at all that was destroyed, his breath rasped hard and fast, his joy was insane.  I faced him.  My strength rose and burned like the sun.  I looked into his eyes.  I saw treachery, I saw malevolence. He was a soul of Satan, a purveyor of death.  I had never before seen these truths, I had never believed in these evils.  Anger pierced me like white fire.  I felt his darkness tremble, discovery was striking down his guise, his pretence was tumbling like walls, there was nowhere for him to hide.  I was killing him with white fire and black silence.  There was nowhere he could run.  Satan had turned his back on his servant.  The sergeant was alone.
                        Few returned.  Those who did had heard their misplaced deaths being called in the sergeant's command. They too had snatched at life and been reborn.  Behind their pale faced exhaustion their fires burned with the awfulness of the revelation and the terror of its truth.
                        Our small company retreated.  Days of marching followed.  The sergeant led us.  We killed him slowly.  We watched his madness writhe to our cold immunity.  The sergeant awaited our mutiny.  He tried to resume his insidious ways but his cruelty would not manifest itself in us.  We would not liken ourselves to him.  We would not blackmail, we would not persecute, we would not speak. Our anger was silent, our violence was enclosed in calm. 
                        We came to a wood one warm day.  We sat in dappled shade with our backs against the trees and we dozed.  There was birdsong high up in the branches.  I heard the snap of a twig underfoot.  I opened my eyes.  The sergeant had realised that he was a prisoner and was trying to escape his guards. I picked up my rifle and shot.  I shot him dead.  I shot him in the back.  I shot him in cold blood.  I shot him in hatred.
                        I have returned to my tower, yet I feel I have not returned.  I must leave again at dawn to continue my search.  I will not return until I am found.  May be I am the unicorn.  There is so much  I do not understand.






















                   

                          STARSHINE, THE OCEANAND THE UNICORN
Chapter Six                                                                                                   Part Three


                             I have returned to my tower.  I return to my house as I left, with nothing. 
                             I looked back to when I left here.  It was dawn.  I walked many miles through the early mists, then I climbed a hill.  I climbed up high out of the mists and into the sun. I stood on the hill top.  All that I had been was behind me, left in shadow.  I looked out over the world.  A mist lay over it but I knew that it was there.  It was there for me.  I was filled with ecstasy.  I walked its pathways and lanes, I worked its fields and seasons.
                             Colour, texture, sky and earth, summer heat and winter chill, they touched and clothed me and I lived within them.  I ate, I drank, I slept, I woke, I ploughed, I sowed, I harvested.  I made no judgements. My mind was silent.  I toiled, I let my body flow with land and season.  At harvest time and Midsummer's night, farmsteads revelled.  Folks feasted and the fiddler played.  I sang, I danced, I made love to bright eyed maidens whose kisses were warm and yielding, their caresses unhindered, their secrets unsealed and flowing.  All this time I was happy.
                            Then one day the sky was dark grey and a heavy rain fell, I was leading two sturdy shires while Sam guided the plough.  Sam was a man of the land and its creatures.  Sturdy and tall like his horses as he fought his bare chested battle with the soil.  He fought for his family's livelihood come drought or storm and he never lost.  Sweat on muscled shoulders, naked back and muddy arms as he struggled to guide the heavy plough.  Its blades were dragged through thick, wet earth, turning over the brown sticky mud and churning up stones and the dead white roots of the last crop, like scattered bones.  I felt a darkness and a fear.  It filled me.  I did not know whether it was a nightmare not remembered or one not yet seen.  Then I saw the gypsy at the side of the road.  We stopped the plough.  Sam walked over and offered the lonely traveller bread and cheese.  She thanked him for his kindness and she warned him to stay at home with his plough for there was another field of mud and another dark sky across the water from which he would not return.  Sam laughed, his heart did not head her.  She looked at me.  I stood with the horses.  I saw her tired, furrowed face and her deep sad eyes where secrets hide.  Her sorrow was my sorrow.  The darkness is yet to come.
                    So I put away pen and paper and go to war.  The moon is but a fingernail.  Time is still unwound and sleeping.  I am still lost.  I wish I knew her name.