Hidden Cargoes

ALSO BY CHRIS ARTHUR

Irish Nocturnes

(The Davies Group, 1999)

Irish Willow

(The Davies Group, 2002)

Irish Haiku

(The Davies Group, 2005)

Irish Elegies

(Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)

Words of the Grey Wind

(Blackstaff Press, 2009)

On the Shoreline of Knowledge

(University of Iowa Press, 2012)

Reading Life

(Negative Capability Press, 2017)

Hummingbirds Between the Pages

(Ohio State University Press, 2018)

HIDDEN CARGOES

Chris Arthur

© 2022

isbn 978-1-958094-03-7

isbn 978-1-958094-15-0 (e-book)

ESSAYS

COVER & BOOK DESIGN—EK LARKEN

Versions of several of the essays in Hidden Cargoes have been previously published in the Antigonish Review, Dalhousie Review, Fourth Genre, Hotel Amerika, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Montreal Review, New Hibernia Review, Terrain.org, and Water~Stone Review.

Image accompanying Dedication is Albrecht Dürer’s Hare, 1502.

Image in Particle Metaphysics is from the author’s collection.

PUBLISHED IN THE UNITED STATES BY

www.EastOverPress.com

For Dorcas Sohn

Mad March Hare, artist, gardener, owl rescuer, fairy godmother, and so much more.

Your friendship, kindness, and courage-in-adversity would need another book to chronicle. They’ve been an inspiration in writing this one.

Hidden Cargoes is dedicated to you, with love.

To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.

—MARY OLIVER, OWLS AND OTHER FANTASIES

Contents

INTRODUCTION

A Kist o’ Whistles

Ear Piece

Voice Box

Leaf

Letters

Listening to the Music of a Vulture’s Egg

Particle Metaphysics

Blood Owls

Pulse

In the Stomach of a Termite

Still Life with Witch-hazel

Fitting In

NOTES

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Introduction

William Blake’s famous lines urge us

To see a world in a grain of sand

And a heaven in a wild flower,

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand

And eternity in an hour.

This book challenges those who dismiss Blake as a dreamer or a madman. For them, sand grains are just sand grains, wildflowers no more than simple blooms. They believe that our hands can enclose nothing greater than what fits neatly in our grip, and that an hour is always confined within the palisade of its temporal duration. I leave to visionary geniuses like Blake the task of seeing on a scale that reveals worlds, heavens, infinity, and eternity. My aim is more modest. My essays try to strip routine’s dulling insulation from the wires of experience so that the voltage of what’s there can touch us, make us aware of the hidden cargoes that are held in such abundance in the unlikeliest of places—a girl’s ear, a cigarette box, the letters of the alphabet, an owl’s skull, a sprig of witchhazel. However much we contrive not to notice it, the electricity of wonder runs through everything. The twelve exercises in paying attention that constitute this book try to make that electricity more evident.

At the start of Portrait Inside My Head, Phillip Lopate provides an introduction that’s subtitled In Defense of the Miscellaneous Essay Collection. Since Hidden Cargoes is such a collection, should I likewise start by defending it?

Perhaps.

But such a tactic risks undermining what it’s meant to support. Faced with an opening salvo of authorial defense, readers may suspect that what they’re about to embark on lacks legitimacy. Why would it need to be defended unless its status was dubious?

I can see why almost any book might be thought to require an opening apologia. In a world in which so many people live in terrible need, the time and resources claimed by writing and reading might be thought questionable—frivolous, uncaring, selfish, irrelevant—unless a link can be demonstrated between them and some practical remedial upshot, a contribution to the common good. That apart, I see no reason why a collection of essays needs any more justification than a novel or a play or a book of poems.

In an essay about essays, provocatively titled In Defense of Incoherence, E. J. Levy writes that the form doesn’t lend itself to mass market sales. But, she says, that is precisely its charm and our pleasure in reading it. In her view, part of the appeal of this genre lies in the fact that it provides a respite from the clamor of commerce. She urges essayists not to succumb to the pressure of making their work more palatable to the economic exigencies of publishing, particularly by presenting collections in a way that obscures the individual independence of each piece. To give the impression that essays can be subsumed beneath some organizing principle, to pretend there’s an overarching structure according to whose linear blueprint they unfold, is to betray their essential nature. The first impulse that brought us to the essay form, Levy reminds us, is art. And art is not about the market or clever formal conceits, or even publication, but about wonder.

I hope what I’ve said doesn’t swim against the current of Levy’s argument. The idea of paying attention and, by so doing, seeing the hidden cargoes carried in the things around us, offers a loose commonality that links the essays I’ve assembled. But I wouldn’t like it to be taken as a sign that I’ve surrendered to any kind of organizing principle. I join Levy in condemning such devices. The book’s title and epigraph, and what I’ve said in this introduction, provide only the most general orientation. I’ve no desire to disguise the essentially miscellaneous nature of Hidden Cargoes. To invent some organizing principle that forces things into line, that gives the impression of a single narrative running unbroken from beginning to end, would be dishonest. The pages that follow don’t dance to this tune. The essays are independently intelligible and can be read in any order—though I’ve tried to arrange them in a way that’s in harmony with the music of their unfolding.

Some readers find this kind of collection an alarming prospect. They’re suspicious of the absence of a point-by-point progression. They feel uneasy outside the safe anchorage provided by linearity, where everything conforms to a predictable pattern of unfolding. If such readers haven’t fled the scene already, let me offer three reassuring touchstones—without, I hope, introducing the artificiality of the kind of organizing principle that Levy rightly condemns, or mounting a preemptive defense that might simply undermine what it seeks to foster.

First, as Graham Good puts it, At heart, the essay is the voice of the individual. To the extent that an individual’s voice reflects one particular personality, history, and worldview, Hidden Cargoes can claim that degree of homogeneity. Second, I agree with Levy about the fundamental nature of art. All of my essays share a common origin. They are rooted in moments of wonder. Third, in a comment that nicely catches the way in which single essays relate to a collection, Richard Chadbourne suggests that the essay is both fragmentary and complete in itself, capable both of standing on its own and of forming a kind of ‘higher organism’ when assembled with other essays by its author. Hidden Cargoes is precisely such a beast. All of its constituent body parts contribute to what the higher organism is concerned with—namely, exploring the extraordinary nature of the ordinary.

A Kist o’ Whistles

It weighs almost nothing when I place it on my palm. Left there, it would soon become blood-warmed, almost to the temperature it had when it was alive. I’m holding an owl’s skull. Or, to be more exact, I’m holding the skull of a long-eared owl ( Asio otus ). The bird it was part of died fifty years ago, caught in a cull of crows in a small wood in Northern Ireland. The perpetrators fired indiscriminately into the trees after dark, when the crows were roosting. I found the owl’s body lying among the intended victims—the ground littered with telltale shotgun shells, their orange cases peppering with garish, unnatural color the dull scatter of feathered bodies lying among the leaves. I lifted the owl gently, cradling its limpness, and took it home.

I kept two of the primary wing feathers, their surface furred with velvety down, their leading edges delicately serrated, like fine-toothed combs. These adaptations channel and hush the passage of the air and allow the owl to fly with deadly silence, giving its prey no warning of a predator’s approach. Having put the feathers aside, I sheathed the owl’s corpse in a sarcophagus of wire netting and buried it in the garden. I marked the spot with a piece of slate, pushed into the ground like a miniature headstone, the date of burial scratched across it. After ten weeks I dug it up. The detritivores had done their work, little grave robbers of the flesh. Only the skeleton was left, safely immovable within its cage. I cleaned the skull with diluted bleach, rinsed it, then left it in the sun to dry and whiten. I’ve kept it ever since.

I realize this may seem macabre. Isn’t a sloughed-off body part a distasteful—even repulsive—souvenir? Those who see it thus would shy away from touching it. If their fingers brushed against it accidentally, it might spark enough disgust to make them want to scrub their hands, or even shower, rid themselves of a sense of dirt, pollution, death. To me, it is a treasured token of a time and place I remember with great fondness. Far from being revolted by its corporeality, I marvel at the skull’s fragile beauty, at what it once contained, at what it is.

I like to weigh it in my hand, rekindle in my imagination the story that’s invisibly imbued in it. Once, this husk-like remnant was the fortress behind whose walls a brain lay, protected, pulsing with the energy that vivified it. This was the bony cockpit from which a flood of sensations was savored and controlled as life’s currents thrummed through the assembled cells, their pulse and voltage aligned in precisely the patterns needed to fit the niche of existence the bird occupied, carved out with exquisite particularity over the millennia. Although this relic is so light it feels like almost nothing, it carries a heavy cargo. I hope the reliquary of words I’m making for it here can contain and convey the electricity of wonder that I still feel crackling around it.

Thornybrook Wood, County Antrim.

I’ve changed the name, of course, disguised the location, wary of leaving a trail for egg collectors—or the merely careless curious. Once comparatively wild and rarely visited, as the Belfast-Lisburn conurbation continued its advance, engulfing countryside with a spread of roads and houses, the proximity and density of people increased. Soon it came to constitute a threat. Places like Thornybrook Wood are vulnerable. When I went there as a teenager it was rare to encounter anybody else—except an occasional, solitary angler fishing for brown trout in the nearby lake. Part of what made the shooting of the owl so shocking was its testimony of human incursion into this unfrequented place. The litter of spent ammunition was unwelcome evidence of other people’s presence in what I considered, I know unreasonably, to be my wood.

This was somewhere I got to know with the intimacy of spending unhurried hours there, just being in the place, listening to its sounds, attentive to its sights and smells, savoring its tastes, feeling the sun upon my skin, and the smooth, warm suck and tug of mud as I waded through the marshy ground around the lake, searching for orchids, or to reach a moorhen’s nest. I can remember, as if yesterday, the wind shushing through the bulrushes, rippling the water with its breath. I remember, too, the sense of expectant wariness I felt the moment I stepped into the wood itself, knowing that the trees enclosed a little kingdom set apart from the adjoining fields and populated with its own watchful denizens.

It took an hour to cycle to Thornybrook from where we lived. In those days, traffic was infrequent. I’d see a dozen vehicles at most once I’d left the town. The wood covered an area of several acres, cladding with its mix of deciduous trees and conifers a small rise of land that was bordered on one side by a lake and on the other by a river and marshy fields. Standing at the edge of the wood and looking across the rural panorama stretching toward the distant summits of the hills above Belfast, there were only a few scattered farmhouses; most of the outlook was the green of fields and trees and hedges. The area was rich in plant and animal life. It had a profusion of wildflowers, many species of bird; hares were a frequent sight. There was always evidence of foxes and badgers in the wood; and hedgehogs, weasels, stoats, and otters were often glimpsed. Summer brought an abundance of insects. The dragonflies were particularly striking, and I saw butterflies and moths there that I’ve not seen anywhere else. For me, it was a special place.

In fact, when I think about it now, I’m tempted to delete special and write magical, or even sacred. Thornybrook generated a sense of being part of a fabric of life that was woven with a richer, brighter mix of thread than anything the town could offer. I felt more alive there. Though I know it had no grandeur, wasn’t anywhere of note, possessed no special features that would warrant mention in a tourist guidebook, to me these rough acres of the County Antrim countryside possessed a rare beauty that touched me far more deeply than any of the world’s famous picturesque places. The reputation of such places drew me to visit in the years ahead, but they always left me feeling disappointed, curiously empty, let down by the somehow run-of-the-mill splendor of their vaunted sce-nic-ness.

I’m not sure if I can explain Thornybrook’s impact on me; it’s something I don’t fully understand myself. But a key factor was surely that my own psychophysical season made me susceptible to what I think of as the spirit of this place. It felt like the isobars that controlled my inner climate swirled their way outwards and became comfortably entangled with Thornybrook’s, inner and outer weathers falling snugly into step. I explored the area in my early teens, when the fluctuating energies of adolescence were at their peak. Enthusiasms, interests, passionate attachments and dislikes surged through me with disorientating strength. Being in the wood I felt anchored, grounded, as if this was somewhere the voltage of my youth could safely earth. And, as it did, a reciprocal but calming current seemed to flow into me from the place itself. There was a strong sense of connection, even entanglement—of land answering flesh, water and blood singing together, pulse beating synchronously with pulse.

I hope this image of reciprocity at least hints at what I felt. It was as if I became benignly sutured to the place, my sense of self running its tendrils on into the trees and field and hedges, and they in turn giving something of their nature back to me. Watching sticklebacks and minnows in the sunwarmed lakeside shallows; climbing a spruce tree to find a sparrowhawk’s nest; watching a heron hunting frogs; listening to a cuckoo calling; being startled by a snipe taking off at my feet; encountering a family of foxes at dusk; hearing bats and seeing their shapes flitting wraithlike through the dark; and, yes, lifting a dead owl from amidst the crows and leaves and cartridge cases—these and countless other interactions with what happened there kindled a sense of communion, of something flowing from the land to me and back again. One of the reasons the owl’s skull has become such a potent talisman is that it’s a token of this sense of intimate melding—an unlicensed, outlaw Eucharist.

Though the skull is empty now, the shape of this fantastical container holds in its curves and hollows sufficient prompts to nudge into mind a picture of what once was here, held securely in its place, cradled in this little crucible. Sometimes I think of it as a kind of haunted house, its tiny chambers still ghosted with the presences that used to occupy it. Chief among them are the eyes—possessing, in life, striking orange-yellow coronas rimming the black irises. All that remains to suggest them now are the two massive hollows on either side of the skull. These, and the large ear cavities behind them, are testimony to the exquisitely acute sensory array brought to bear in hunting. The long-eared owl, as John Burton notes in Owls of the World: Their Evolution, Structure and Ecology, is one of the most nocturnal owls in the world. Accordingly, their eyes are designed to operate in near total darkness, their ears calibrated to detect with pinpoint accuracy the rustle of tiny movements in the dark. The left ear opening is set slightly higher in the