James Bainbridge
Comments (0) It is formed of wood, and screws, and imagination. Gables burst weathervanes of frigates and dancing fish above sun terraces built entirely from old doors. Freed from many rigours of local planning law – these are only temporary structures (though some date from as early as 1920), they are transitory, they are built from wood – the village, should it be called such, is more the product of dreams than of architecture. Its houses are the visions of their occupants; constructed in the main by the instinct of what a building should look like, afforded by whatever materials were laid to hand.
They are holiday homes; they are intended to be fleeting. These are the nighttime ambitions of families from Sheffield, or Doncaster, or Leeds; who at weekends, or Whit, or maybe only in the summer make it across for a bit to find that sand has lodged itself in the teacups and grasshoppers are making merry in the hearth.
You are doing it now. You are imagining what the village might look like. You are building your home. Perhaps you have seen similar arrangements elsewhere, they’re often beside the sea, treading the ground between the shanty and the prefab. They grow from such imaginings. Your house in the village is how you picture it to be; it is the physical rendering of that dull cliché, a ‘dream home’. Single-storey dreams made real and painted, erupting from the gorse bushes to weather the winds from off the estuary.
Two hundred or so miles and years along the coast, a poet lays dreaming. He has at various points in his life suffered from uneasy sleep. His poetry abounds with people who have never seized their life’s opportunity, who become trapped in villages and parlours fearing the outside world. He is a clergyman. He is a mild-mannered botanist. He is made famous by a Village that people assume to be his own, but really has just grown from his imagination. One night in London, wracked with toothache and dining late, he will be confronted by a distressed woman who will demand to know of him how one so calm, so gentle as he, so benevolent, one almost too kind for this world, could think and utter such daring, strong and vivid thoughts. That night the dreaming will begin again. Awake, he will write, I had been with the high and the happy… Asleep, all was misery and degradation.
On 1st Main Road, gnomes and plastic squirrels quarrel on the ridge tiles. On 5th Avenue a cottage is painted black beams on white, like half-timber, only it is all timber. 9th Avenue dissolves into sand. They are memories of elsewhere, of other houses, incompletely rendered because they are half-forgotten before they are begun. I will walk here many times with no adequate purpose just to remind myself that it exists, this imaginary place of clapboard and wind-chimes. I will walk here along the coastal path and along St Anthony’s Bank. I will sometimes bring the poet with me to read in the sand dunes. Sometimes I will bring along some lunch.
Every Monday he makes his own journey to another village. He walks the coastal path to sit with his brother and to read. His dreams concern him. Dreams concern a lot of people at this time; they mark the battle lines in the defence of the Soul. He will read the Scottish metaphysician Andrew Baxter and he will suppose that his dreams, violent and awful, must be the visitation of external spirits on his sleeping mind. He will read John Locke, and he will worry that his dreams must be assembled from his waking ideas oddly put together. He will read Thomas Branch and think of himself asleep as God’s theatre; his dreaming, some necessary instruction he must learn. Yet despite all of this he will worry why one so gentle, so benevolent, would have such horrifying dreams.
Some days when I walk to the village I see people constructing their dreams. They are painting their gates or standing atop stepladders fixing new windows to offer fresh prospects onto the estuary. They have pictured these windows for months, maybe all through the winter, but it is only now that they have taken their saw to the facia and made a new opening into the world.
The world here is flat. It is comprised only of horizontal lines – sky, estuary, beach – it is a landscape of separation: sea from land, soul from man. This is what troubles the poet. If his thinking self is asleep, if his senses are shut off, then his dreams might be a product of his soul. If he should die, dreaming such degradation, how might he be saved?
The walk to the village follows these parallel lines. They are only broken by the skeletal limbs of the amusement park, and the dun concrete skull of a pillbox, nestled half–forgotten in the sand. His contemporaries are grappling with the notion that man might not always be conscious of his thoughts, and that some might form themselves unnoticed by the waking mind. It is a difficult fight, for it will one day call into question the very existence of the soul. He prefers to think of his dreams as visitations, as intruders, things separate from himself. It is a cruel irony that his critics claim he has no imagination when it is this one thing that troubles him so.
Before I reach the village, I will sometimes pause here, sit atop the concrete war defences and read for a while, the composite stones of the concrete dimpling the palms of my hands. The interior of this angular cranium is cool and damp. It smells of urine and its floor is deep with beer cans and broken glass. Torn carrier bags from Kwik-Save have been left here bundled in the furthest corners; red and white and spilling sand and mould-pocked magazines across the ground. Breasts burgeon like toadstools amid the Scotch bottles and discarded bin-liners. Pages with full-colour, glossy vulvae, blossom across the sacks in the confined gloom.
It seems both an act of repression and confession. Left here by someone, but also apparently taken away from time to time by someone else. He will struggle with his dreams, for it is central to his belief that he is vigilant for his own salvation. In his poetry salvation is never reached, people do not act; they do not make the journey for they cannot know it.
In the recesses of this darkened space, only yards from the pastel-shaded verandas of the next village, one day the body of a young child is found – an indeficient consequence of dreaming, of misery and degradation – the inability to make sense of the rendering of wood, and screws, and imagination.
_____
James Bainbridge lives in Liverpool where he is finishing off a PhD on the poet George Crabbe. He makes occasional contributions to a group project called White Hole.
