Elemental:
fire, earth,
water, air,
words
But the chimney has been stopped up in the living room. To start a fire in the normal way would cause choking black smoke to swirl around the rooms upstairs and downstairs, entering crevices and lungs, accompanied by the dark luxurious smell of wood burning.
In this room Alison Scott reads the poem Flames by Margaret Tait from her iPhone on a Tuesday evening before dinner, while in preparation, Rena Johnston warms a pan in the kitchen and, melting a knob of butter, fries slices of red onion. ‘Flame, Is a thing I, Always wonder about. It seems to be made of colour only. I don’t know what else it’s made of.’ Tait’s simple way of speaking sparks a childish delight in me.
Another day, Rosie Cunningham tells a story about fires which destroyed art near her home in Glasgow. And it is only now, writing, that I have begun to understand that there are both a fire that consumes, and one which creates. As we all gather round, Jean Fleming retells the story of Moses and the burning bush and how it was unextinguishable, yet never devoured. And it is only now, writing, that I think, ‘How appropriate.’ And smile.
Each evening while I’m eating, my face burns with wine or menopause or shame, it’s all the same. A fire still burns in Linkshouse, Birsay.
So in the mornings, fleeing from the heat, I get out of the kitchen after breakfast, slipping on my Nikes and walk down over the titular links from the house to the sea. I am searching for rocks, to offer me a connection point to the earth, an anchored outcrop to steady the tide of continual change, looking for time, deeper than mine. A place to find balance, a negotiation of the even and the uneven, regular and irregular contours and lines.
Rock, ground, rock, ground. Repeat. Write.
Granite, slate, flagstone, I don’t care. It’s the shapes and colours I love. And first I am a schoolchild, learning conceptually: square, circle, triangle, rhombus, orange, blue, black, grey. Simple enough. But soon I crave increasing detail, and can distinguish ash grey, smoke grey, blackish grey, greenish grey, yellowish grey and it makes me smile, to find these little words of difference, thanks to Werner. Maybe I’m growing up.
Rocks, places of return, are touched by the tide, swept by the currents. Hard, yet malleable they wait for me to come back. But solidity is not impenetrable. With enough time there is movement of one kind or another, smoothing or smashing. And although I can’t shape a stone with my bare fingers, I can sense the power of the waves breaking my bones to pieces against the cliffs even when I am not in the water.
Nearby, seals swim and sleep, suspiciously. Sand, shifted by the wind, fills the traces of my footfall as I return along the beach.
In the afternoons, lunch may be followed by a baptism because there’s a choin for pure submersion when the tide is in. Swimming in water surrounded by rocks and air, a triumvirate of nature can be a portal to renewal, a cold shock back to life. If it was ever warm enough, I might enter, a return to the amniotic. Maybe it’s too much to ask but I’m looking to be washed on the inside not the outside, some days longing for the fire to be extinguished. I wait here for water to come, and if I wait long enough it will return. Water outside and inside seeps out eventually.
Light, extinguish, relight, submerge. Repeat. Write.
Sometimes before dinner if grey clouds sweep in from the horizon bringing weather, I taste trouble, and anticipate it hungrily from behind the glass. Now starlings murmur upwards in unison, searching seagulls are buffeted by currents and a deep sweet smell of rotting seaweed is carried on the wind. I think of Greta losing herself in an Edinburgh downpour in Tait’s Blue Black Permanent. It’s touching. And here in the quiet of Linkshouse, as the air expands outwards as far as it can go, carrying invisible life-giving molecules I breathe in, absorbing the oxygen, letting go of the carbon dioxide, and I don’t know what happens to the rest; it’s simply respiration.
Inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale. Repeat. Write.
And they’re all inside me now, the elements, and it’s all outside me now, the story.
Fire, earth, water, air, words.