A Dreaming of Ditches (1977) & Splendor Solstice (1975)

Not drainage ditches - rather ancient earthworks, vestigial lines of whatever purpose in the landscape, betokening a continuity and enduring sense of lingering strangeness. I think I've been at my most joyful walking in the English countryside, looking for ancient things marked on various maps of various counties. In my walking I took the pictures which I later responded to with music, using the images as means to a richer communion which then imprints itself on the music, as is the case here. The ditch in question was an earthwork in deepest darkest Norfolk. A special time for me, with friends, striking out on my own as was my habit back when I was young enough to do so. There is no greater joy than just to sit a while and enjoy the silent mystery of the fields that even moved my pen to poetry...

Norfolk Field, March 1977

the robin flits
from ditch to thorn
deepest dark touched
in there
where I can not follow

spring is waiting
for ash to bloom
whilst the sun scowls
low from
cold clouds dark with bright rain.

a scatter of
feathers but no
skull. A fox calls
into
silences redefined.

HH.

In June 1975 I was staying with a dear friend in his cottage that was blessed by distant views of the medieval city of Durham to the south along the Wear Valley. The Summer Solstice fell on the 22nd that year - a Sunday - which found us lazing in the garden with red wine, Greek salad, home made bread and the finest gold seal Charas, and all to the accompaniment of the cathedral bells drifting in the still warm morning air.

Impressions are, perhaps understandably, vague. I was staying with Jolyon following the death of his cat, Pluto, which resulted in an emotional crisis compounded by his prodigious drug intake as other issues left unresolved since childhood came to the fore. So it wasn't the easiest of times, nor yet the happiest, but when the clouds parted we found ourselves blessed, as we were on that Solstice Sunday.

I remember the muted sound of the bells, and the position of the noon-day sun over the city, and how this reminded us of the famous illustration from Splendor Solis that Jolyon had as a poster on his kitchen wall above the Aga. It was he who renamed it Splendor Solstice in a state of great excitement, however so manic and short-lived as, in young Jolyon's mind, the solstice marked the beginning of Sol's great decline. The Solar Wheel was in recession and with it his state of mind.

Come the Equinox he would be in The County Hospital following a complete nervous breakdown, Come the Winter Solstice, he would be dead, haven taken his own life by driving his car off the cliffs at South Shields. I made this piece for his funeral, as a memory of almost-happier times in the life of one of my dearest friends, Jolyon James Deacon, poet, alchemist and theologian, 1952-1975.

On a musical note, I have returned to the sound of church bells on several occasions over the years, including the piece 'Illa Viridis Visio Compello Mihi Tantum Meus Nex' I composed for Sabrina Eden's short film of the various foliate grotesques in Tewkesbury Abbey in 2005. In that case I used an actual sample of the Tewkesbury bells and realised the organ part using a computer, which was a novelty.

Hermione Harvestman. October 2005.