Should we Meet at the Crossroads, Keep Walking
Kalio Church, front cover of The Perambulator’s forthcoming novel Should we Meet at the Crossroads, Keep Walking (Hesterglock Press). Cover artwork: John Holten. Cover art photo: Kevin Pollard.
They call me the Perambulator. Everything must have a name, and it fits, I can’t deny it, for each new dawn finds me trudging the cobbles, working the streams and pools. Nothing makes sense without movement; I’m cast and reconstructed in every hard-won step. My glorified walking stick beats the path as my feet, with no past or future, escape me. This story, before it was mine, was somebody else’s: weaver and woven, seer and seen, I’m bound to follow my shadow.
I was born here, so they tell me, in Kallio, Helsinki, Finland, on the 60th parallel. This corner of the map is my world, and I rarely stray from the sound of the old church bell. To live a whole life on the same patch of earth is a rare thing indeed these days, but I wouldn’t know another way. I can’t abandon my people when they need me most. Soul pools would form to such an extent that this land would be energetic quicksand.
These are the in-between times – summer gone and winter in the making – and the geese are feeding to leave. They start to appear at the end of August, their vast numbers swelling with their bellies. Great chevrons split the vacant sky until one day they’re gone with an absence so sudden it echoes. Many here would join them to avoid the murderous winter, but those who flee will only land elsewhere.
The cold days will come and pare everything back to the bone, erasing any meaningful line between rest, sleep and death. The snow they call a blanket is a shroud. The bitter sun rises like an ancient grudge, cradling its ghost like a new-born bound to die. It’s too long to speak of as a single season, and we lose all sense of direction as we spiral down through winters held within winters. Some years waxwings appear in the autumn and strip the rowans bare, foretelling heavy snow. I’ve no time for superstition, but watching them feed I’m loath to disagree.
People assume that working with energies allows me to predict the weather, or change the way the wind is blowing. Kids in the park stop and stare when they see me coming, and I hear their silent chant:
Perambulator,
sun out later.
Then again,
maybe rain
It’s only a children’s rhyme, but adults have their own versions too. Nobody will face the truth, and no one wants to know what I’m doing. As long as the toilet flushes, who cares about the workers in the sewers. If I retired tomorrow, the long-term forecast would be grim, to say the least – nothing worthwhile would survive. The corrosive power of abandoned soul pools would overwhelm the parish in total energetic collapse. This is true even in the best of times, but these dark days we’re living are like nothing I’ve seen before. A terrible din has infected the root harmonic, and I worry about the future. This year’s summer will be remembered as one of the worst, yet nothing will be done to clean up those stagnant pools that absorb so much heat and light. Disaster is looming, and nobody seems to care.
No morning has broken me yet, and every dawn without fail I force myself into the world. Soul loss never freezes, even in the dark heart of winter when it’s harder to move but easier to beat the sun. Pain is the burning filament that binds me and lets me shine; I drag my body behind me, ignoring its self-righteous protest and mindless chatter. I rise like fermenting dough, summoned by the pull of the tide.
My days are long but, like rust, I never sleep. The best time to work is the dead of night when everyone else is asleep. The streets are laid bare and I perambulate, the pigeons my only companions. They could migrate south with other birds, but they stay here all year round. That’s the price we pay. I till the energetic soil, ground-locked and ring-fenced by gravity, while they work the open skies. As above, so below, and so on. We deal with the same raw material, born of the same traditions. I look up and watch them wheel, tasting the air as it lifts my broken wings.
Here on the ground, soul loss sometimes manifests as heat or bitter chills, clashing colours or jarring, antagonistic tones, but generally as streams of ghostly water. Sometimes the poisonous blush of its mood is enough to bring on a fit. It pours through the streets, seeping from us all like anxious sweat. I perambulate these streams and the hollows where they gather. To rest is to invite disaster; to fail to move is to die. A day off is out of the question. In unworked pools, the soul loss starts to separate, the heavy mass congealing as its resonation slows, sinking down into the ground. This is what does the most damage. Soul loss on the surface is active and much more benign. It lifts up into the atmosphere, where it’s funnelled into airborne streams. That’s where the birds come in: they perambulate soul loss as they move across the sky so it won’t eddy back down to earth. Without pigeons we’d never survive.
Summer days are better for birds, and the difference is clear to see. In winter we’re much more lethargic, our minds top-heavy with unconscious weight. We teeter and often fall over. Geese are all around us, then they’re gone. The silence in their wake is the sound of one man walking and my love of empty skies is entirely at odds with their meaning. There’s nothing to do but work harder and wait for the wheel to turn. The geese will return when spring cracks the ice and coltsfoot starts to push through. The sun will rise and I’ll watch the flycatcher fly back and forth, a pendulum swinging like time itself between two branches of the same ancient tree.
This an excerpt from The Perambulator’s much anticipated novel: Should we Meet at the Crossroads, Keep Walking (Hesterglock Press), due for release 12.3.2021. To find out more, visit Hesterglock Press here.
To read an article written by Bill Drummond with further background information, click here.
To read more excerpt-articles from Project Jupiter, Mercurius’s ever-growing anthology of indie press titles, click here.