And now the thymes in bloom but where is pleasure gone
This is a very silly short story I wrote about the poet John Clare
It wasn’t time travel as such, but, all things being equal, the universe and everything in it being made up of matter of which you, me and the distant moons of Jupiter all share some commonality, and time itself, past and future, all being eternally present, with footfalls echoing in the memory etc. etc., it happened that, on the cusp of sleep, in one of those rare hypnagogic states where the mind entertains hallucinatory visions and the father to a sister of a thought becomes a waking dream of feverish clarity – in which, for example, one paints a single horizontal black line across a rusting steamship, or eats a panna cotta from a coarse earthenware jar, or removes the drawers from a sideboard in a hotel room (which also happens to be the spare room in your Grandmother’s house) and fills them with boiling water – I found myself between states, asleep but conscious, dead to the world but alive to all things, connected to all elements of the past and future universe and able to navigate to whichever point in time and space I desired, which is how, to cut a long story short, one night, while tucked up in bed, I also ended up spending an evening in a small inn in Northamptonshire in the early 19th century.
The hum of the pub was audible from miles around and walking in out of the cool summer night into the din and close heat made my head spin. The sweating walls and the press of people. The pink, taut-looking sunburnt skin of men who’d been working in the fields up until the blue dusk, coming home through motes of swirling hay dust. The stench of sour clothes and sweet lemony sweat. Beneath that a darker, groiny smell. Though they were short with bad teeth, some people looked surprisingly healthy, with rich leonine features. Some looked ill, seriously ill – and had a puffy, haunted look.
The air was alive with jigs and reels and at the centre of it all was a diminutive figure. He had tow-coloured hair and a wild look in his eye, and was drinking himself into something like a mystical state. I came back from the bar with two tankards, one for me and one for him. He introduced himself as John Clare. I realised that he had got to the stage of drunkenness where he was no longer drinking by lifting his tankard to his mouth, but by slumping his head down to the tankard. The ale was thin, cloudy and bitter; despite this there was a freshness to it – a cool, refreshing quality that seemed to cleanse the mind. The musicians around us worked their way through ‘Ploughboy Lads’ and ‘The Bonny Moorhen’, and the crowd lost themselves in the music.
The fiddle came to Clare and, despite his drunkenness, he wrestled a lilting tune out of it, his eyes screwed shut in concentration. The melody looped round in a curious way and rose in intensity. The dancers around me circled in rising ecstasy – ecstasy upon ecstasy – and the whole room seemed to gather momentum, while the thin mercury sound of Clare’s fiddle filled the air.
At the very peak of the jig my phone went off. I had forgotten it was in the pocket of my jerkin. For some reason I had recently set my ringtone to ‘Sandstorm’ by Darude. Clare’s tune and the accompanying dance slowed, people stopped talking and singing – and every single person turned to look at me with their eyes wide open in a kind of terror.
And then it was like an explosion had ripped through the building. Everyone started to dance with crazed abandon. Fights broke out. People pounded the walls. Crowd surfing occurred. One man picked up a barstool and threw it through the window, shards of glass sparkling uniquely in the firelight. One couple who hadn’t shared a bed in years began to copulate on the stone floor. An old man set fire to his beard with a candle.
As soon as the song finished playing they screamed – they pleaded with me – to play it again. Just one more time. And each time I played it the devastation would occur again. Throughout the night, the pub shook with ‘Sandstorm’ by Darude. People took up the melody and wordlessly chanted it, and beat their barstools on the floor in rhythm. The firkins were drunk dry and bottles of barley wine were sourced from behind the bar.
I decided it was time to say farewell to the pub goers – who no longer relied on me and my phone for their fix of ‘Sandstorm’, the song having been successfully transmitted to them as befits an oral culture – and I walked out into the cool night air with John Clare. There was a minerality in the wind and the stars were extraordinarily bright. Clare recited his new poem to me:
I heard a song that spoke of future years
An angels choir and booming army drum
All of a speed that moved my soul to tears
With songs of countless birds that struck me dumb
I heard the thrushes in their rapture cry
The nightingale, the wrynecks in the dell—
Moved out of knowledge by the song was I
And strange I found the woods I know so well
The song was made of melancholly dreams
And yet poured forth its noise in pure delight
With sounds of craiking birds and plashing streams
That shook the merry alehouse through the night
And still I hear the sweetly swelling chords
Ring through the fields and shadowed bluebell swards
And we stayed outside the pub until red rays of sun spilled over the wooded hills, and the sky bloomed into the grey glass of summer.
Superb.