[NetBehaviour] The cricket in the heart - furthur on down the time coast

[Simon Mclennan]

Link to drawing https://www.instagram.com/p/CGN2O5zncMp/?igshid=5ba6vbgyiveq

Up by Garda lake, Bronwen de La Haye, Knight Templar and Lady of Lakeland, lifted a small hatchet and seeming not to aim at all, bent a knee and raised her arm up behind her head and with a deft flick sent the small axe sailing across the small gully and into a pine tree trunk where it thudded and stuck in a most satisfying way.

She addressed Leonardo who was leaning against a stone wall.

‘And furthermore and as I already mentioned, I know certainly that you are so good at inventing these machines, these clever chariots and great carts and carriages that make us all gape in wonderment. But frankly, can’t you do more paintings? I love ‘em, they’re so atmospheric and... weirdly appealing. They’re definitely more you! All this great - benefit to mankind - lark, these flippin’ freeons, these tiny speckle spit bits of dust and the gluey ones, those little invisible imps you reckon stick everything together in the universe in great long strings. Well, it may be true but.. does it actually get us anywhere apart from yet another slug sledge chariot to travel to the islands or in fact up here to Garda?”

She Picked her somewhat craggy teeth with her smallest, sharpest dagger. She glanced at L who was squatting down by now, using his gauntleted hand to lift some odd looking mushrooms growing by the roots of the great resinous pine that towered over them. The mushies were red with white flecks.

Leo chuckled and held a great toadstool up to B’s tanned and slanting cheek. ‘This’n will let you see these specks of dust I discovered, ha ha, don’t you know’.

B carefully took the toadstool from L’s hand and sniffed it suspiciously.

‘Mmmm, fair play to that brother. Ok...’ she looked up at the hundred foot tree branches and needles and pondered a few seconds,  ‘Right you be then old Leo my lad, I’m game!’

After eating the agaric they settled down in a shady spot by the mossy wall and  beside the little crackling fire of twigs and fir cones. 

After a good while the resinous smell of the cones began to take on an extra dimension, a deep intoxicating undertow of mysterious and smoky currents. Like a river. The two of them felt warmly lifted by the simple smoke as it rose. Cracking sounds from the fire echoed across the ravine, bouncing around the trunks of the birch and alder and creating a music like none they had ever heard. Except for old Gesualdo and his melancholy advanced melodies of chromatic complexity, this was the best! 

Bron felt like a root, so one with the place, the earth and stones upon which they sat. Leo too felt like a stream of cool volcanic lava flowing minutely across the mountain. He saw visions of topaz caverns and afterwards swam in shallow flickering amber streams with simple minnows and bullheads among the crayfish and caddisfly larvae.

B grew stone roots and felt her head empty of everything almost, except for a feeling of being right there and then. Pure consciousness. She felt like a furry moth flying in a warm wood of damp mossy trees. The trees were thudding waterfalls of atoms cycling water droplets up the trunks and oxygen in rotation like mills on rivers in paintings all glowing dark brown and gold. She drank the woody air and floated through the gnarly spinney like a great cricket of green and yellow. Beautiful and complicated wings of gauze allowed her to float on the sunlight. She realised she was in a cloud of crickets like her and she was merely a manifestation of the same thing as the wood, the ferns, the clouds, the sunlight and the other crickets.

Later on they slept then drank a lot of stream water and ate some bread rolls heated in the fire with butter and cinnamon and honey.

They said nothing but walked slowly back to the main camp by the lake. And then began to titter and laugh and laugh until they cried. Actually they felt good to be back to normal. Nothing like feeling normal they mused. It’s the best. But especially after such a journey of the mind and inner sense.

‘So that’s how you figure out the stuff with the engines and the gluey gluons, the old speckley dust and scratches?!’

‘Yeah, course. And it helps I’m such a brain box. That’s what they called me at the monastery school in Napoli - old brain box Leo! Ha ha’

Bron threw a grass stalk she’d been chewing at L, and then rolled on the turf and arched her back and made a whooping sound, then flicked up onto her feet  and mock punched Leo. L countered with a half spin and a kick and made strange barking sounds, then proceeded to walk on his hands while B clapped and sang ‘hulla hulla hulla balooo balloo I’m finished with you with you I’m happy with you with you with you!’

Bear with me ;-),

S


Sent from my spyphone 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.netbehaviour.org/pipermail/netbehaviour/attachments/20201012/49bfac5e/attachment.htm>