Gospelbook

An epic poem on my own philistinism

I

It looked a lot of stones left out in the rain.

On a hill, on an island,

a symbol of the affront of failure,

less architecture than the ongoing defiance of conquered rebellion.

Aldhelm had that sort of heroic personality you come across rarely in the character of real people: heroism that joined a willingness for self-sacrifice

with an incredulity at the thought of surrender (supplication) being a human act at all. This could be seen in heights of frenzied passion,

as when someone proposes and undertakes and fulfils a scheme or plan

that in its madness seems beyond the bounds of your normal conception of life's limits. When faced with the confluence of desires and necessities,

he would bear the harshest asceticism –

denial accepted, inconceivable until you saw it in him – with buoyant optimism,

the endless fearless happiness that showed him to you as someone utterly remarkable. Sleeplessness for the sake of some higher purpose never dispirited him –

didn't seem to affect him at all.

Aldhelm could be conceived as purely strong, in moral and emotional terms,

and you might include in that nature of ongoing indomitableness bodily strength also. It was a supple grace of character,

not a sourceless clumsy blunt rocklike power of will, but gave you instead a sense of his ease in the world,

existence seeming not some accident he had fallen into and had had to come to terms with, but a space for him bespoke. Whether through fate or divine error, his tailored life fit well.

Being made abbot young (few around now could remember it) had granted him a shaping force,

it truer to say he used the monastery for his purpose than that his purpose was the monastery. The perfect animalism of his instinct from then drove the wills of eighty men,

they not subservient but irresistibly amalgamated under him,

as though now one organism that supported a series of vital functions like the rhythm of blood and cycle of breathing.

But they were not suffering him vain arrogance or bowing from an allegiance to hierarchy –

they were caught up genuinely in his boundless persuasive optimism

and could suddenly not endure abandonment by the charisma of his design. Aldhelm was blithely uncomprehending of his effect,

though having lived always his unique, charmed life,

he may never have realised that there was a quality in him that others saw as sacred.

If he could tap into the rawness of the world – indeed he had a sensitive genius for it –

others were magnetised to him. They let something be induced in them,

as though he were not a priest of Christ but of an unrelenting Mesoamerican bloodgod, with them knelt willing before him in seductive trance.

It wasn't that the people who entered into his life wanted him to use them, make offerings of them – no one could turn someone wholly selfless.

But we were drawn to Aldhelm, whether to the rhetoric of his way of living and being, or his charismatic spirit: drawn to him without condition and on our own terms.

He did not beguile us but we nonetheless found ourselves giving up everything to him. I doubt any of us believed it was in the hope to be like him;

we knew he could not be emulated.

No, not emulation – yet not sacrifice either.

It could, put simply, not have been avoided, that desire of ours to be with and to please his gravitylike soul.

Aldhelm truly mastered us, as no lord or king could ever.

Those foreign and native alike had heard word of him, somehow.

Our monastery swelled with types, like the mercenary army of a distant campaign: swelled, drawn in by Aldhelm's endless lure,

both with vastness of character, and a cosmopolitan breadth of men. Scholars, hermits, nobles; Greek, Byzantine, Frank; old, young; wise, foolish. He seemed only to fail in attracting the dead –

or so we joked, before he was called on to undertake funeral rites

and consecrate new graveyards. This was done with all the fervour of his nature. In the early days when Aldhelm was still in his youth,

all the volume of passion he could summon up was directed at doctrine and ritual.

This sacred expression, and complete religious courage – which we thought would remain forever –

gave us each something of his strength,

by which we might submerge ourselves in devotion. In prayer, in genuine holiness, we were unrivalled. Some produced great works in ink or stone.

Such rarefied means to glorify were beyond most, but Aldhelm made our humbleness real humility,

and allayed the sense of inequality we saw in our forms of worship.

“Look that in whatever shape thou takest thy works, they are done to their fullness.”

“But I have nothing lasting to show – I cannot carve – I cannot sing.”

“Enjoy then carving and singing; see how they might beautify thy soul: such things ease, as oil, thy way to the heavens.”

These words from any other man we would have taken as little more than reassuring platitudes.

Though platitudes can reassure when we have reason to believe in them, or want to believe in them; and you wanted to believe in Aldhelm,

not that it was a hard task to do so. We were,

after a year perhaps, so invested in the progress of his life – the ongoing creation of his grand biography –

that anything said by him, or words of others that touched on him, were newly lyrical, invigorating,

and put in you the calm of relief combined with newfound immortal hope. We seemed to beatify the living man, so much we admired him.

It fell barely short of worship.

I wondered then when I saw my brothers praying if their fidelity was only to heaven, and if they had not found a new divinity on earth long before Christ had risen again. I know how I would fare if our guilt were weighed.

Aldhelm was not a man whose life invited to be documented with any sense of need. It would, remaining unwritten, have gone reverberate down the ages,

so complete an effect did it have on reality.

Events all along the course of history might trace their ancestry to him – a fine genealogy to have;

and all the chronology of his heroic impact on the world would be a grand series, like the aftermath of the greatness of a civilised peak,

or that which would follow a republic's fall. For he could touch your being –

you felt it, how he ran you through to the soul. He seemed a movement, an era.

Not to embody it; not a symbol;

but in himself, in his six feet and his dark eyes, in him, his character, spirit – a quintessence.

He worked on you as a Caesar might, made you feel, consumed you. Without willing it you were devoted to him; thrived in his presence; celebrated the memory in his absence. It was as essential as food or fire – a vitality, the marrow of existence, art, religion.

You loved him for it.

His voice rang dancing through you and sustained you when apart from him. There was no display – of knowledge, of virtue –

no acts to speak of that could be written of as extraordinary. But he himself was act in a man –

was an epoch, unquenchable, undying, a force. Something – though what you could not say –

was grasped, and in the seizing of it you felt yourself perfected.

Did we love him? As we loved Christ.

We didn't know where he had come from – not – we knew that – his home:

he had been a minor noble, it was said;

rather, from where his aristocratic spirit had come,

letting him tower by birthright over others in the pure terms of character. I didn't care how he was born into the world, only how he bore it.

His lot was the rejection of rejection,

not to be frustrated ever in failure but to frustrate failure always:

to decline not to be without flaw.

To be carried along on his constant reverie made you feel you would never question again – for here was the incomprehensible before you;

living with you; eating by your side;

listening, with caring, fatherly patience, to your doubts and your hopes. You were made to drift into an expansion.

He made you larger, somehow – more yourself, even.

There were some old ones among us who resisted alteration – it is in our nature to grow illiberal.

When we harden ourselves there is often some fear at the wellspring. A monk who had thought he had some supremacy,

having been at the monastery since its foundation, was tasked by Aldhelm to work the gardens.

He protested: his age, and the newly-lain snows;

it became bitter – the man did not approach Aldhelm, but stood idly as if to try and spite him.

He was both unjust and uncaring to give an old man that work:

lacked humanity, dignity;

seemed not to notice, or even to relish the difficulties of others; brought misery.

How should a man with such a character as Aldhelm's feel anything but pain from this? not pain in insult, but pain in empathy

with the cowering old man who detested him.

It hurt him that he should make another person fearful. The gardens were tended to, while the old man looked on.

Only when the monk taking up the work came back in the evening was it known that Aldhelm had done it, leaving aside his scholarship and prayer.

Rather than be doubly insulted, this humble act enjoyed the old man. They sat and talked together that night,

and said their thanks to God, each praising the other. I knew, alone, that Aldhelm,

so disturbed by the idea of having hurt his brother, did the work in the snow that day with bare feet, seeking penance for what he had done to him.

Yet he had not known the weather before asking the old man; and, to avoid making him feel ashamed,

had hidden the blue flesh of his feet when back in near the fire.

And he quelled other dissent with the generosity of his spirit, the warm expansive quality that knew you so well,

was so personal to you – and was yet universal.

As when Denewulf finally raised his concerns over our islandlike culture and literal insularity,

coming before Aldhelm with a certain terror

at voicing dissatisfaction – criticism – fear (he loved him so) –

and had built up and dwelt on it, worrying and concern commingled,

bringing it like a thing he had created and seemed to hold in his hands and offer to Aldhelm, trembling; and Aldhelm's magnanimity and loveliness brushing over him as if the relieving wave

of a hand,

commanding that he be calmed,

as he said he agreed and that Denewulf's courage to tell him commended him, so much so that he wished Denewulf would lead

as an ambassador of sorts

a grand tour of fraternity between the other houses –

and even to foreign lands afar perhaps, to Rome or to Byzantium. These he might go to proffering love,

and to undertake spiritual research into their ways of the path of the Lord. So dissent melted in the charismatic authority –

that seemed not authority – of Aldhelm,

and he turned its beliefs and approaches to the good.

Denewulf chose four young men to join him

and readied for a journey of many months – years. They would go first to the great houses in the north, bringing with them beautiful works and singing, the young monks having fine voices.

Denewulf then as an ambassador of our purpose, yet latent, of spoken passion, of hushed beauty.

Irenaeus Aurelianus had not entered the monastery long (he always being drawn to the intellectual,

even back when of the nobility and the fresh lord of much land) before he began a course of contrariwise sincere and petulant (youth's eager ardour) questioning of Aldhelm.

He wanted to go after some greatness (being young; seeking validation) and he could not harbour his ambition without unrest.

He was just passing the age when he had begun to care that the seasons change –

not yet mortally conscious, though starting to see the foreshadowing of decline in his body. That this became tacitly, perhaps passively, noticed, still made him frenzied –

not outwardly, nor recognised in himself,

but definitely, inexorably forcing his hand in its momentum.

The age of aspiration, of poetry; the unease that heralds achievement – the newness of coming love.

His questioning always followed similar lines –

he wanted to know about direction, purposes, ends. Was there a design?

Could Aldhelm promise him that what they undertook was worthwhile?

The habit of prayer, he noted and felt in himself with a certain guilt, was now fusty: routine.

Enlivened by the fullness of a proper perception of time

(the very young perceiving only rationally, without emotion), he felt the uniting urge common to us all.

Something needed to be done – they were wasting their lives – all this was vanity –

taking orders had been a mistake – taking orders was his calling –

they had to act before some ill-defined existential force came crashing down about them – he was missing out on so much by being here –

this was the world and contained everything ringed roundabout in stone – the moment was the keynote – act-urge.

Aldhelm took it all with his smiles and his benevolence. Yet (for private dissent could not be challenged)

Irenaeus Aurelianus held that

(with the gentle narcissism of undangerous ego, most present in youth (no, in inexperience – no,

in keenness))

he (Aldhelm) could not understand.

The constant heroic urging of Aldhelm's life was a different sort of impulse. He had felt it forever; but this, this was new –

Irenaeus felt it so much more for the contrast it made with its absence, or, what he came to learn was the first stage of his life.

Great change brought about the largest emotions –

if immutable (as he seemed) Aldhelm could never feel it.

And by not sharing the experience, all reasoning was wasted on him.

So the kind smiles seemed only blind (gesture is the punctuation of utterance); his words meaninglessly affirmative.

Such kindliness was comment only on Aldhelm's own ignorance. Such ignorance signalled what was stale and lifeless.

As if in answer to Irenaeus's passionate impatience,

there was a significant change in the life at the monastery. It happened because Denewulf returned.

All of their brothers were pleased to see the five men back

(since the four boyish companions of Denewulf were adult men now); yet it was not them or their presence that made any real difference, whatever our temporary joy at seeing them might have suggested.

Contradicting his vows to penury, his willingness to become an ascetic,

his fondness for people and general outlook, Aldhelm fell in love with an object.

Silverspray & goldflint as of waves, as of sunlight in waves – encroaching warmness of joy – life heretical.

And as of brickwork laid well, smooth pilastering hope of eternal. Wrapped up and discreet, of the gifts with Denewulf returning, among tributes of plate and fabric, goblets, scrolls, and jewellery, was a book of special beauty.

I saw how it acted on Aldhelm from his first glance at it,

knew how it would recur as almost the real fact of his desire and purpose in his mind, the agent of a serious commencement of some new reality for him,

towards which he might direct in his heroic way the untapped limitless potential that we believed he had.

I heard a choir once, long before that day, whose singing returns to me still,

haunting as I believed Aldhelm was to become haunted – haunted beautifully. It was in another monastery,

and there lived a man there who had music drip from him. I can no longer remember his face.

But even now, the voices come to me,

just as, from then, the book would endlessly speak to Aldhelm. They seemed to want to ravage you; and at once to protect you.

It was like walking in frost, with cold sunlight as if just another star, and leaves a fire more like the sun.

No, it was more – beyond images, it was the feeling of the walk, your body amazing you at its ceaseless work,

and yet easy, comfortable, pleasurable.

In the singing you felt your breath differently,

as if it were hope; you were really aware of rhythm in yourself,

as you never else were. And brought up, stronger than your memory could,

were all the shades of your past back to their full freshness, and wherever time had blurred them into wistful half-dreams, their colour returned and you saw them anew.

The simple and the grand came back, huge pain and great love.

Yet there was the protection: the voices, rich somehow to the point of inhalation, could penetrate you so yet not leave you exposed.

They were raw, yet in some harmony. These voices were not as notes –

you had to even will your thought to realise they were music at all. More like architecture, you relied on their space;

and, in commanding space, in dictating to you the way you moved in the world, they placed you in a hierarchy and were able to exert power –

though without coercion, and yet unable to be avoided.

So you lost your liberty and had to have your emotions work on,

but there was, in the control, a perverse sense of a newfound freedom: limitation giving up strength to you: making more of you.

I believe the same happened to Aldhelm then.

The book came before him like the music of voices and grasped at his soul. I may be mistaken. It may be that it was later,

and the moment seems more poignant than it really was –

for we all try to make our experiences as massive as they will allow. If it wasn't love on first seeing (the unheeded seizing),

I call myself a poor judge.

But I have seen eyes enough to have learned how you are, by them, betrayed. And, for just a moment, I lost sight of the indomitable Aldhelm,

no longer saw his optimism as if it would last forever, and felt a brief check to my awe.

What I have been describing emerges now, in remembering. I cannot tell now how it was.

Maybe another raw recurring force was the act of my watching him see the book for the first time.

It seems I felt it as despair for Aldhelm to become assailable – to see him be affected as he was so affecting.

I felt we needed him purer than that, impossibly pure.

Inhuman, almost. He had drawn all the love of the world to him, and now something in the world drew him through his loving it.

Never think I moralise – I was not disappointed he coveted the book. I do not think he wanted it as a physical thing.

But the power it had over him as of a smoke – within and about him, the medium of his life –

it could finally do to him that which no thing or person ever had, changing him then. It changed him in the world, and it changed my way of seeing him.

I wanted him as the abstract and the divine, and found only another man.

We understood his rapture. The book contained the gospels – but, and we all sinned in thinking it,

it was not the beauty of the words of Christ and his friendships by which we were taken. It seemed beyond beauty. The imagery – the words themselves were imagery, pure form – was a cadence of feeling we had never known.

Drama: that was its greatness.

Dramatic action, like the fury of conversion,

the despair of true piety, all remade for us

(for it seemed for us alone) in brushstrokes and ink.

Pages in themselves were piteous as they spoke of sacrifice human and universal. All feeling, all memory – the book seemed to draw it all out of you.

It was madness, I thought, that the curl of a letter could make thoughts of so many things, could stir up what you wanted suppressed and forgotten.

But looking over one precise word,

I was made to feel as I did at the death of my infant brother; another reacquainted with all the lost fears of youth; another with the exhaustion of the oncoming end.

The miracle was of transmission.

That some connection between us and the book might connect us to a part of our covered self. The grace of design – the lyricism of remembering.

Satisfactions of structure; composition as fire, as the pleasure of making flame; taking on as audience the fulfilment of creation.

Aldhelm's robust nature, his implacable physical body, were shaken –

danced with their torment, sought obliteration in the augmenting as cloud in sun.

It was apotheosis, emerald ruby sapphire, the immortal diamond of a thing achieved. At once he seemed aged by it and by it enlivened, brought to full readied youth.

Perhaps this was the first time I really witnessed desire.

And yet, I could not tell if the desire was one of having or one of experiencing – the bringing about and doing, and the summation therein of all attempt.

He was left on a brink, and his soul flexed resplendent,

and it needed to cross over to see if it might find fulfilment or failure. The book, I believed, was an idealism corporeal.

We were only tasked with having the softest of moralities – the weak limitation of our devotion,

which was believed to be strong in thought but never made real, beyond the day to day goings-on, the kindness of one man for another: easy tests; stunted goodness.

Never were we to deal with true sacrifice,

or grand issues of pride and hope, or glory and honour;

that is to say, blood and rank were not the objects of contrast, and nor was the soul or right adulation of God really questioned,

or discussed. Only, we might take up an hour's more labour in the garden,

or share our food more willingly. But domesticated harmony seems to distort the meanings and import of such things,

so while we had no empire to build,

feeling was to expand to match the vaster emotions of heroism and valour.

Where lives could not be staked, as much was considered and felt in the minor petty squabbles of chores and duties –

each man's life is a world unto its own, and in the relativity of the arrangements of existence, who should say what is grand is what is worthy?

Still, in the unheeded and anyway unspeaking mindparts

that hold a small allowance of belief in phrenology and superstition from our intelligence apart and our willed, learned rationality,

there was room enough for vast moral systems we did not ordinarily bother to compass.

It was this same yet-fathomed region that enabled act contrary to the limitations we set ourselves, such as the inability to rise early when we desire to.

It couldn't be as simple as animal instinct or the primal wish of man for ease – since so often we skirted round the path of least resistance

and sought instead the ecstasies of prolonged effort with no sight of an outcome, or sacrifice as a desire running contrariwise to all else,

exactly converse to the inelegant burning urge on the brink of eruption always.

How could a life build towards so much and then willingly allow itself to be overruled? The answer must lie in those unplumbed perhaps depthless regions:

for how else might we think in all our greatness near-divine, and be such limitless creators and philosophers,

whilst heeding the presence of magpies as some augur of our emotion, prophesying to us (our scepticism without) on the condition of our very selves?

The truest thing there ever seemed was the endless giving-way of one thing for another. And the animals were brought out and before them a pit,

though their nonmortal innocence did not allow them even the luxuriant final fear of families at the epicentre of an imminent war crime,

they merely bleating dumbly without even echo to consider them. The monk above them stood, a fist in fist clasped,

each hand with the power to shut heaven.

Yet though unknowing of the waste which was to come,

and incapable of pleading even if they had known what their fate was to be, all their souls seemed in mourning. So he, figure anonymous,

agent only of command and necessity,

in those regions just higher than subconscious, thought or felt mercy in a certain wrongness,

a draw of the compassion against his and our onward striving to the art we were now part of. But he had dominion and dealt thunder.

But he saw only goodness in their incomprehension, placid gentle children that they now seemed.

Why did he not go on as he must?

Yet why was it against his soul's pure truth that he laboured?

These animals appeared now sky-aspiring and to entreat the heavens – paradise even – for some brief fragile sanctuary,

to beg, prostrate, not for a day or an hour longer, but just a moment,

as though all they needed to fulfil their purpose and ultimate designs was exactly that which he was to deny them,

as though their destinies had become inextricable like a choking umbilical cord round a neck, he seeming then, to himself only,

to be predestined like a fated ball of shot to shipwreck meaning, an iron tear in the fabric of what was eventual,

doing work as the self-unbeknownst agent of nihilism.

One then another the candles started to be lit in the monastery. They were almost burning before the animals' faces,

fiery bloodlit soaked despairing, for the rain had been coming down,

easing contact, like sweat, dark and damp,

and the fires and rain and the dark animal faces;

the falling fire and lit rain in the dark of blood and sweat, the animal faces like gold inlaid or illumination,

the purple and gold, blood and gilt of Byzantine churches.

And the monk before them remaining steadfast in his blood,

and some of his horror at it and – and the damned necessity of it for art, with his knife catching the light of the drifting moon,

gold like lettering in the light, and he sweating in the rain yet hot, so hot – the warmth unlike fire, more internal, the heat of urging and willpower – the hot of sudden bodily readiness and the sweat –

the blood now the heat – he before them lording over with dominion, complete with all the power the control of artist,

ready to lay his gold on its blood backdrops,

to harvest from the ineffable depths at such cost his willingness to obey, in the rain the candles

his towering strength finding only the despair of his weakness.

He learned it was easy: found that to lay the gold in harvest with its cataclysming blood was no effort at all,

and made no difference at all,

as if he had done nothing and four dozen slaughtered lives did not lay massacred before him. They were animals. The gold the rain the sweat the faces the pit the blood. Animals only.

What ruins were there before him that by him were not ruined?

The horror of it was the ease – the immutable ghastly gold of the world – the animals slain and he feeling nothing.

There was no change for him and still it rained and the candles continued to be lit and the moon drifted still.

The frenzy had left two animals and to his horror again they cried not but kept at nosing in the stubs of grass, heedless, eating literally the grass bloodied by their family's blood and stepping amongst the gold-smote corpses of their sweating kin that lay ruined and decaying in the still ongoing rain.

The smell was the thing, coppersweet;

earthy, mortal, and great, like volumes of handfuls of sod and loam, wet fistsized clumps of earth, dripping mud squeezed;

the smell of the mortal innocence of them, virginlike somehow,

the blood and the moon; horrorsmell, and worse still the plash of those two yet left treading up clods in the blood;

and their cutting teeth going at it, wrenching the grass,

with the sound of scissors and tearing hair,

seeming even to scythe away the slick bloodied grass, wetly.

One by one the horror ongoing he had to pull those slumped wet bodies from the pit, and they sodden and heavy like towels pushed under the sea,

soaking drenched he dragged them one by one over the slick of wet grass. He did not know it but in those regions of the mind as he pulled them,

the huge wet fabric mass of them, he said a prayer for them each by each in the not subconscious yet disregarded and not considered spaces between thought where workings go on despite our not knowing.

Because in their innocence before the blood and the Byzantine gold something in him recognised itself.

With a quality like sun going down he meted out the last deaths. He could not help but feel something graceful in it, some truth in it.

Working with life, honest by letting-in elegance in the hands, in bodies. No sport of the intellect. Not a detached guilt,

or the far-off measure and countermeasure to adapt.

Only the wood, baring itself before him, and other concerns extinguished.

The nightscent all but obscured now,

the hot heat of the dying the stampede that demanded recognition.

How could heat smell? yet he found in this virginal experience that sense might be more than its reckoning by scholars and books.

What he knew before from reading and learned talk paled by the sweat, its copper, the lifeblood.

Heat and smell were all the reality a man could need. The newest thing he felt – more emotion than sense – was a persuasive, grand indifference.

It said: so it matters nothing now if they have died because they are but of the past and go on only now in me –

if my remembering deigns to treat of them.

What they were now was what function they were to become.

Really it was like destroying books then if the skin would become pages, if they were what they would be,

if we are as much what we are as what we will be and more than what we ever were. He didn't dare consider it openly, not with thought:

but he felt anyway that the watery abysm he created down there was a biblioclasm of sorts. Though he was unsure even in feeling for there was creation to be sure to come of it –

so in his libricide there might be nascency as if his minor cataclysm now

were somehow akin to the christenings brought about by the subsidence of ageing stars. He might relinquish his guilt then for some level of pride –

because he was a progenitor, his seed as the rain and he the father of sons. This greatness expressed itself all in a not-understood moment,

its range conveyed only in a slight, unheeded feeling.

The work of it was toil, simple toil. No ideal love of it kept us going –

our labour was never meditative, nor was it inspired.

It was hard, and tiring, as farming or mining are hard and tiring. Thus it was necessary that it was to be worked at,

throughout the endless months of that first winter,

with the persistence of the cold that shook our hands and chapped us to bleeding. Only effort sustained us through our pious will.

Some quietly believed this was a slow martyrdom, though would never say it:

they gave up their lives to this vain perhaps and thankless task, seemingly endless, and unconvincing in its purposed good of adulation.

Better – surer reverences were much more possible, easier, though that was not the point of it –

more hopeful at the least, less alike to leaving a certain, tried path and stumbling out

into darkness and snow for the sake of the exploration itself.

At the blackest moments many were convinced it would come to nothing – were convinced that there was no other path,

and that they had let themselves succumb to the blind passions of a leader in whom they could not trust.

But these were too placid to consider mutiny.

Aldhelm was so exacting that there seemed no progress at all. This a quality always elsewhere,

this perfectionism,

justified in prayers and services –

it could be holy; we had seen that before.

It added an air of the dramatic to ritual and rite

and made both more real and charged them with tense emotion. But few could see how it was an aid in some task as this.

Nothing was good enough.

So many pages were discarded for the sake of imperceptible faults. Two months of a man's work might be rent in halves before him.

Did he not see it was dispiriting,

enraging even, to those who had the strength left for rage,

to demand the greater part of every day's waking hours and consider those hours as nothing, and litter men's rooms with their efforts? As if in some quiet rebellion,

no man moved the detritus from the floors of his cell,

and each had to go about his halting shuffle through the build-up in the manner one might kick about bones in a ruined catacomb. Wrecks past hope were man and his work.

Little profit and great labour: those days reigned when Aldhelm first had us start on these ideas.

Spring promised greater ease and there was a blind optimism at its approach,

which was to prove a vain hope, as everything grew yet more difficult when it grew warmer.

It is never as bad to toil at something as when there is a beckoning behind it always from some potentiality much preferred.

For us to sacrifice everything on passion's altar was what the abbot demanded, but it seemed just the fuel for his private ego.

The hours of men there subsumed;

the dreams broken down constituent to be joined with spirit and hope in the crucible's heat; and whatever desire of worldview found contrary thereby cast off,

discarded as repellent and superfluous.

We could not take Aldhelm's reasoning for the making of this gospelbook as he gave it, ladled out to us blankly. It was possible to accept for a while –

he was so very pious – but labours change a man's opinion of honesty in men.

Vanity was the impetus we now knew, arguing it out with one another in a spare moment (an uncommon thing) – and not, as we had thought, his purposed reverence.

Spring engendered no rebellion,

yet the winning charisma of our grand patriarch faded in its effective strength. He could command bodies then but no longer minds.

Monks are men in robes, and no more suffer their wills to be dictated against than they can abide arthritic joints and frostbite.

Through it all there was Centwine.

Since they were boys, they had been at the monastery together. Byrhthelm had never spoken to him – they rarely ever crossed. But now, as sun seeps through clouds,

he began to be more present in the world, shining almost like light, always visible,

always at least there in thought if not in fact, his presence beginning to make itself known.

Several impressions of him came to Byrhthelm though he could not say which was the dominant or order their appearance,

like faint memories that seem hardly a part of time but experience merely, known for their touch or smell or visionary power, but not their place,

their effects being more a reality and certainly more meaningful than the precise inconsequential aspects of their being.

Of these was the dreamy vague clumsy grace of Centwine, eyes half-closed and always smiling as though half-asleep

and in an imagined realm of joy beyond discomforts and displeasures,

a grace with subtle ongoing energy of one substance with yet contrary to the vast fierce energy of Byrhthelm,

that determination so like fire or the cascading of a waterfall. Further (though not superseding or subservient)

there was the impression of the broad warmth and ease of Centwine's character, and his broad warm intellectualism that seemed encompassing

and never shut-off nor myopic,

a part of that graceful physical energy but rarefied and mental, and never elite nor unapproachable;

then there was his beauty, more than grace,

more like harmony, as though he moved and appeared always without effort, never forced nor conscious,

with a quality of overwhelming uniqueness and yet familiarity, some comforting zest that seemed solely for you,

as if you had been favoured

and your quiet thoughts of solipsism or your own significance had been confirmed – Centwine coming across as always and entirely yours,

not servantlike but as devoted and caring as a friend of decades. This could be conveyed even without words,

in a look or a gesture you knew he didn't even consider

but which to you could mean everything and would be the basis of some powerful eternal memory

remembered maybe on your deathbed even

as one of the moments of beautiful inconsequence that define life, as a kiss or a smile forgotten till then might also.

Perhaps as soon as he began to feel the impression of Centwine's presence in his life,

Byrhthelm was aware that, owing to the beautiful truth, and grace, and warmth, he had fallen in love with him.

The feeling was new, like the first time you ever approach the sea, yet shared with that feeling the sense, whether primal or instinctive,

or unconscious merely, that it wasn't new at all but the discovery of some old fact (and in this similar to relearning something you once knew).

And as with what the felt sublime or religious fervour were said to do, and where those two neatly overlapped, it consumed him directly.

How to approach this freshness?

As with all the grander emotions it took him up heedless of all else

and without regard for what he might desire. In that, love was like pain, though a step removed: it acted on you,

and beyond ephemeral, unaffecting decisions, you had no say, though maintained a great stake in its progression.

It placed you on your knees before its beautiful mercy, almost seeming to have intelligence in this control of you,

seeming to be a separate eternal force (some said spirit) all-powerful,

demanding and able to demand. Yet it differed from pain in that you would have it no other way, even when it hurt you, wishing for the experience for its own sake

and allowing it to (succumbing rather) transcend and impose itself above all your other concerns.

So it might be asked instead: how to bear it? since it approached him,

came to him, though left him feeling as if he were the one who had come begging.

He knew suddenly what it was to have all his desires subsumed to the purpose of bringing about the continued happiness of someone else,

all of his experience of church and religion failing to do what an hour in the presence of Centwine had done with ease.

Meaning as he did to give himself up to God,

he was urged by conscience and the deep supraemotional pull to give himself up to another man.

This was the prostrating of one's self before humanity. We who have loved know what this comprises:

the early wish to see them happy and the late blind devotion unworked on by thought or even feeling sometimes,

which allows you to want to please after a fiery row

and abandon all bitter recriminations or thoughts of reparation (or even stops their occurrence altogether).

It became clear that to be in love amplified you, morally, wholly, raised you somehow from a state you didn't know was fragile

to a greatness nevertheless supplicant,

a fulfilment and apotheosis of desire and purpose and reason, greater than any passion and greater still than need,

not by yoking but with a willingness in you unusual and unknown till then, and this fulfilment sanctifying you and making the gentle bond consecrate – as though to love were art. As though you met head-on with all

that experience could offer you and found more still,

it being such a raw encounter with the fullness of life that you were overcome even to think you were a part of it,

and it confirming mysticism and faith by bringing you literally in contact with the ineffable: finally you understood the tears of saints, and courage of martyrs, and the ecstasies of the artist, being allowed now any inexplicable prejudiced belief because you had seen beyond

the normal fields of vision and seemed to have tasted of paradise, and to have let it change you. It was madness – madness almost,

for you were at once convinced that this was the closest you had come to reality and that it was all an intangible dream of illusion.

It satisfied contradiction and seemed to extradite logic and your clung-to reason with ease, like the wafting elegance of a gestured hand –

reason overwhelming as to be more than understanding, letting you forego thought, letting you succumb.

How simple it was to give in to feeling, to take on faith, to ride along barechested to the elements of the world,

raised aloft as though above such basic poor conclusions about anything; to seem to be, yourself, the keynote of the complexity of existing at all – yet how easy – yet how purely joyous, graceful –

the coming to terms with it all – the necessity of your body –

the perfection of your mind – the democracy of all experience, and quality of all feeling. The divinity of everything became the deepest heresy of Byrhthelm's heart.

There is no flaw for the lover – he felt perfection. Centwine, not half-divine, fully godlike –

a god, in terms of what his presence could do, had done.

Did he dare engage in this full-tempting dream?

Its passion had two means by which it might be fatal. Seeking guidance was impossible – he was perhaps, for the first time, reliant on the limits of his soul only.

There was no remembered experience to call on, and no one he could hope to ask; none of the old church writers even:

nothing in the past was there to aid his understanding or give him for even a moment some solace.

Yet the painful liberty of it was exhilarating. Hadn't he sought freedom like this for so long? – his life till now always moved by other hands.

Had he chosen to go into the monastery –

did he even choose now when to wake up, or the worth of his time?

No – never consulted with, let alone granted any aspect of decision over his life.

So in his anxiety now, his fears were tempered with excitement at the broadness of possibility.

He knew – he knew and he was free:

the feelings were all laid out.

Above all else he was to put his faith in this newness,

to give ascendant trust to himself. What did it matter if there were no one to consult – why should he consult them, rely on their experience?

When had they the courtesy to ask him? He was defiant in his ego now.

This was no administrative decision to filter through the values and perception of someone else – this was love, and having a stake in it he cast off doubts

which said he should answer to others, should act as they might urge him to act.

It was shortly to become an obsession.

He didn't eat; he couldn't work – not from self-sacrifice,

but the neglect of everything that comes when one's thoughts are consumed. Circumstance did not allow him literally to stalk at the threshold of Centwine's room – under Aldhelm's madness they had to suffer seclusion for the greater part of each day – but his mind was as good as with him.

Rarely did he get anything done,

letting hours pass with slow vague daydreams of dreamy vague eyes. When he worked now it was all towards the idea of Centwine –

everything he painted seemed to aspire somehow to the condition of his lover's image. He had portraits of the evangelists before him, and torn up on the floor,

whose calmly wild eyes did not belie their inspiration. Aldhelm rallied against it –

Saint John lacked dignity, clarity of expression.

Byrhthelm took the criticisms in silence, made immune by love.

Centwine was no less in this rapture, but he laboured fervently. His real love seemed to work on his latent interest in the art:

not so much providing an outlet, physicalising it –

rather as his spirit was made buoyant on the easy joy he was feeling, effort and then beauty came almost inevitably.

It couldn't be said to have been conscious,

but he did guess at the reason for the implacable freshness of creation he now experienced.

No image of Byrhthelm was perceptible in his work,

yet lacking this formal debt to his lover did not mean nothing of his influence could be traced in his newfound ability.

His aptitude was formed from his passion and had to be, owing to their separation, manifested in his art. For the first time, it was art.

Weeks, seasons passed, all the men remaining for most of their time secluded. That the two met only briefly each day made everything somehow quicker.

They were in love quicker; pain came quicker when apart. They thought it would get easier – they told each other so. The quiet belief was that the heart had limits – peaks of joy, and depths with fathomable bottoms. Yet it grew unbearable. Each meeting was frantic with urgency,

both of them shaking with nervous energy, smiling, frenetic, unpredictable.

They spoke unguardedly, rapidly,

knowing their closeness made all this so easily possible and endlessly happy.

They seemed to get through in an hour what old friends might in a day,

for each knew the other on instinct. Everything fell together.

There was nothing they didn't discuss, no topic the other didn't anticipate;

their passion for Aldhelm's project was consuming, mirroring somehow their love. Byrhthelm grew more interested –

not merely so he might grow closer still to Centwine by aligning their pleasures, though that was part of it – working harder, genuinely absorbed by,

no, wholly taken with, the gospelbook.

His work showed fury, the accumulation of that nervous energy and total passion. He seemed to be adapting attributes from Centwine,

large aspects of character. This was mutual –

the reserve the latter naturally struggled with was lost entirely in Byrhthelm's presence. His calm became excitability, and he too began to know the fury of obsession.

Yet to be apart was as crippling as to be together was uplifting. Often neither could work as their love grew stronger.

Each paced his cell, all the frantic energy there

but directed into sullenness. They appeared like addicts suffering withdrawal, constantly on the verge of being pushed to insanity by uncontrollable desire. Seeming akin in almost every act, their lives ran on parallel tracks,

separate at these times yet converging, and of the same spirit, like text and accompanying translation –

though what was original and what was derived, none could say. Such was the visible similarity that without discussion,

both destroyed in cold rage their proudest work.

The greatest part of the frenzy was frustration. It felt as though their love – and therefore as far as they could see the real matter of their lives –

was being hindered. Though model brothers in their piety and submission,

the newness of this emotion's force would not allow them to easily succumb to authority, or to let their wills be moulded. Their joint independence found its source in twin needs: to be together, and not to be apart.

So to suppress them now would be to strip them of happiness, and take from them their means to overcome despair.

As it was, their love was ferocious by causing a bond between the desire to experience joy,

and the desire to not be miserable. Most often they were miserable –

and the time together by which the forced sufferance of this emotion might atone was too brief. Byrhthelm and Centwine were tempted and unfulfilled.

Their thoughts ranged over exciting yet ludicrous futures,

and at once left no prospect of depressing forecast unconsidered. They would be together forever, and forever happy;

it was better they had never met, to save themselves of the heartache. The gospelbook would be soon completed and they would be free.

It never progressed: they would be apart always. The obsessive love, like a caressing parasite,

broke down all their beliefs, destructed all morality. At the lowest, they wished Aldhelm dead,

if only to see his vanity crushed and their lives restored to them;

they would destroy everything, burn the pages, sunder the monastery if they had to; they would flee, renounce God, go forth in sin to be together.

Soon subsiding, theses ideas gave way to blank woe.

Could it have been easier if their periods of presence and absence were arranged another way? They were together briefly and apart briefly.

This was almost impossible.

They supposed they might be happier with vast stretches of time together and vast stretches apart. It seemed a more human rhythm somehow.

What made their time together now unbearable was the knowledge it was always about to end;

yet this made the isolation easier, as they could watch the sun arc by, knowing its onward course brought them ever closer.

But the opposite was also true: sunset heralded anxiety – there were still hours to go – a whole night,

a whole pale course following the sunlight's. Separation grew harder the later in the day it became. So would longer periods be worse still?

Not hours to go but days and weeks?

They felt that even with their love, such sorrow could not be sustained for so long. And the impossible mad frenzied joy of being together for huge lengths of time – that was what they bought with their pain.

Each was to find that even this joy came costly.

As though shadows growing darker in intenser light,

the passions which soared highest were matched in the just balance of shades, a composition weighed fair to which their emotions conformed.

The revelation was that they had to conform.

They could not have their rapture without their despair.

Byrhthelm and Centwine soon came to know that there is this essential always behind love. As they were so sensitive,

bared to the world to see if it might reply,

yielding as a hand to the touch, they likewise made themselves receptive, opened themselves. This was sensitivity reversed,

and it needed a strong heart and hard feeling to survive it.

Byrhthelm was the weaker; it followed that he was to be broken with greater ease. Or, not weaker – more strong; and in being more strong, more liberal,

being openly naked to whatever force would find him,

the equal reciprocal strength acted back on him. The vitality of his love, then, limitless almost,

meant he would meet all its consequences more fully.

What came of this was that, any possible, potential,

or actual pain or anxiety of Centwine's was taken on by Byrhthelm, as his pain and anxiety also. Because Byrhthelm's generous care (though not generous since unavoidable – capacious

(as true morality is not in responding to empathy but overcoming a lack thereof)) took in every aspect of his lover's life,

any strong emotion could come to hurt him.

So, when apart, Byrhthelm began to add to his own longing an estimated perception of Centwine's as augmentation.

Then the stride of his empathy, always overreaching his rational mind, thought of Centwine's distress at him taking on this extra burden – and thus added this distress to the double-longing.

Down to the infinitesimals of feeling this back and forth went questioning on, until Byrhthelm had worn out the bounds of his sensitivity's imagination, exhausting all emotions both created and uncreate.

He could bear it – was willing to bear it all. For if you were to weigh everything up,

what he had invested and lost would come up infinitely lighter than the gain –

the vast overpowering gain of love, for which anything might be sacrificed and abandoned. All the toil of love and everything he gave up for it were as nothing –

complete nothing, and never missed, for what he got was Centwine,

and to share some small part of his life, for a moment even,

just a moment,

reduced all else to nought,

as the old books said the sun made you lose sight of the stars and not care for their loss.

Certain quiet gentleness; zeniths of loveblindness;

the thrilling awe of thinking fully not alone in desires for yourself but in selfishness for the wants of another –

of needs (hunger satisfaction sleep) grafted onto another – or moved from another, taken-on, adopted.

And the moments the everlasting moments the very stuff of living and what is to be – how well a hand fits in a hand or rests on a hip,

how a smile and generous ring of laughter are the culmination of all endeavouring; and when alone together the excitements the desire the nervous frenzied joy,

the pre-emptive knowing of love. Much had they felt and seen, their hearts so attuned to feeling, and this more than anything that had come before or anything they could predict or augur of, read auspiciously at – this triumph of more.

The greatness the expansive epic lyric of their joining. Reverie rapture enthralment.

The romance of it as of being the ship's artist aboard a South Sea expedition, face to the seaspray and etching out the divinity of image;

the romance of it as the hurrah of completion when concluding finally a desert voyage of many months,

and the isolation of those many months concluding,

and relief and success alive as to be beauty in themselves,

only by contrast, reality remaining hunger and thirst and exhaustion but deified by their former, by their comparison; and of exploration and of music and of beginning anew and refreshing in

happiness.

The: I would do all for you (Byrhthelm) and the knowing of it and the pleasure of belief in trust; and the: My wants desires aims I place beneath yours (Centwine) –

that creation of a new self in love, in terms of the subject of existence,

the dissolving of ego in that coming to share, moralities achieves heartenings.

If a facet of tragedy, it that the necessity of impermanence,

and inconclusive always-potential, spawned from the dance of togetherness and separation, as thus: complete consummation of fulfilment of actualisation of;

its antonym, the descending dissonant cadence of being apart, of being moved from this new other you,

of being reminded of your own distinctness and individuality (killing when invested in else, when the elsewhere ascendant).

Matters of perspective and lodestone relativising merely, not with content, distinct from, in the abstract, any substance –

yet this tempering augmenting the marrow of perceiving, it peppering and salting all rawness of data of living

(how to speak in terms of a feeling without its permutations). It was the smothering of all heretofore and yet its extension – your own nullified by the new self's made magnificent,

enlargened, so that any past unknown becomes urgency unbounded –

it now essential to know to forecast how to be, to apprehend here requiring a different then, a kingly up-till-now. And so the conflicts inhering as fundamentals inseparable.

It impossible to be satisfied with such eagerness heroic, such thirst. Insatiable erudition of transcendent feeling and felt, there it was! since to know was prefigured emotion. And this the hunt beatific,

the longed-for striving – that the nature of man: the want to never be fulfilled.

And Centwine's thought if transmuted to the dullness of word: You are inhabited by divinity and in spirit and person are perfect and the exaltation of you has become the task of my life;

and Byrhthelm's thought if transmuted to the dullness of word: We look to God for the fullness of experience for the apogee of what we can conceive but I have found that the sin of my being is its belief in the futility of all reverence beyond that of you, that all aspects and conditions should aspire to you, to emulate or to please you, nothing else or additional.

Byrhthelm and Centwine in expressing alike their complete prejudice in favour of the other showed the earliness of love, its brief first manifestation of unbearable totality.

Its rhythm if stuck hard could never be fully diminished, and its pulse never ignored.

Irenaeus was, at first, excited by the change in Aldhelm,

and by what what was heralded by his newcome plans. But the best of excitements are refuted or wane; there is ease in anticipating what remains yet shapeless – nebulousness allowing our own modes to be fitted to any object.

Desire lasts, if formless.

Irenaeus found that when the definite became imposed –

when his will no longer controlled his wants – there was a loss of eagerness. Striving, as a general concept, an unformulated ideal:

that was what he wanted. It flattered his ego in its potential.

But to strive after a reality, no mere concept but the black and white certainty of target, was unromantic and deadening. It was not that no real goal

could conform to the extent of his idealistic imagination; Aldhelm's plans surely did. But there was constraint,

he felt it, in what was physicalised –

a limiting of him somehow in any materialisation – for the book dreamed of is never that written.

As a response, this disappointment produced no effect of act. Irenaeus Aurelianus was only changed in feeling –

and yet feeling is ever so much more than blunt action. Because of this he did not propose anything,

set forth anything he might wish or make occur.

There was no alternative proffered that could better match his idealism. Her became altered, though, in character.

Unnoticeably, perhaps, but as he so despised, definitely. Not an arbitrary prefigured imaginary now,

but the actual claspable shift,

with all its spawn of varied hues and effects.

We could not have noticed the difference (the show is the subtle) but to stand together Irenaeus at twenty and Irenaeus at fifty

would be to bring into contact two men separated by more than age and circumstance. I thought that, to those inclined,

a monastery might be the perfect backdrop for testing –

an environment so constant and controlled as to be surgically

(or piously) regular. We ate the same food (subject to seasons: variations on a theme thereof) and spoke the same prayers. Even the project of the gospelbook

was to be of regimented precision, with us as the eighty tinker's components to fit the clockwork's plan.

With the definite, I believe Irenaeus felt the loss of the personal, owing roundly to suffering his place in Aldhelm's schematic.

There is a half-violence of passion wherever the self is played on externally; and it seemed that though he might not have raised his fists in defiance,

his spirit was not so easily quelled. He was not so much a pawn –

for we all still had influence: opinion and say; but he could not quite bear this dancing a life of predestined choreography (rather writing to another's dictation).

Since he could not fully determine

(as he had done abandoning his titles and taking on our habit), whatever was granted him seemed insultingly little.

It might appear as a basic rebellion of youth and wilfulness,

but there was a greater clash as of two ships drifting slowly to collision.

Yet it could hardly be discerned which reared its prow

in the manner of an animal's tusk, and which bulk lay amidships immovable. One might assume the brash attack was the work of the younger –

but so often the defiance of children is buried head and stamped foot only.

He was to work on the gospelbook

and contribute to its great scheme of progress

without engaging with it. Art for him was as the data-entry of the office clerk. Yet where we found romantic ritual in the mundanities of habit,

he could not. What was wrong with the mundane? it was as worthy a fact of life as passion and fear. Some have chosen death over boredom –

they could not let their imaginations be wasted so – yet they seem to be the least imaginative among us.

To stimulate the bleak hours with will alone was more commendable, surely? Bucking against it like an unbroken stallion was the weaker passion.

The heroic strength (Aldhelm's) was to glorify anything, not only where you might have found wonder.

It was not toil at first. How could the vast plans of our hero-abbot be hard, or dull? We were swept up by his madness,

and loved it, loved to be in the midst of the scheming of the world and in the midst of the grand.

We all knew of art and artists but had not been invoked as artists ourselves – never involved, merely the passive actors on which others' agency worked.

Now it was a shift as abrupt as looking from a train's window at the gathering clouds to having the storm centre on you naked and external.

We loved the madness as the bewildering longing and excitement of infatuation. It was almost a step into that reality – almost the ardour of an affair in its ecstasy. This was for the first few weeks – the period of anything's beginning,

when you still muster the love of it.

When any new plan is done to fullness, willingly.

But as imposed exercise regimes are soon made to be forgotten, and optimistic early-rising creeps into the hours neighbouring noon, excitement waned. Though not habit, Aldhelm kept us to it,

and none could consciously wish to disappoint him.

Irenaeus and Byrhthelm, the opposite faces of a coin representing uninterest dispassion indifference,

worked on too, though with both his parallel loss, antithetic yet converging. Their contrast of approach was the loop formed by polar ends of a scales –

where red and orange rejoin indigo and violet, or contrary politics merge in oppression.

The procession came. They moved as slow as cloud.

Men passed through landscape. Shroud-white the sky stood.

It seemed to be a breathing. Like the confluence of airs over candleflame.

Relic-cargoed carts rolled their shuddering way. And the wander of sunlight remembered in darkness.

As barnacles stuccoed on cloister walls the spray-battered firmness of monastery in arrogance remains.

Cenotaph of man, monumental and absent,

whom they came to call Wulfrið, appeared in rain in the courtyard,

sunburnt, torsional, sculpted. You wanted to feel along the surface of the pietra dura soul of him, its warp and rub, the grain of it running nadir to zenith;

lathed wood; plate flint. His stance, his atmosphere exuded, spoke of a body at ease in the fluctuations of the world,

a spirit for whom difficulties were always to be perceived as oblique – really a keystone being,

able to bear what others might term hardship without experiencing it as such.

It was heralded in those six feet of height and that bark-thick beard that there would be great alteration and movement,

that despite his statuelike immensity of stillness, Wulfrið was a harbinger of motion,

whose will was to drag with it all that his presence compassed.

His personal ease and humour then, failed to dispel the sense of foreboding his character necessitated in others.

The powerful optimism was nevertheless enthralling. By evening he was at work under moonlight,

his massive hands kneading a stone pillar

which was the microcosm of his indomitable self.

“How do you find the place? to your liking?” Byrhthelm asked.

“It's not at issue. What's important is that I can work. I have everything I need.” Wulfrið did not pause from his task.

“What is it?”

“This? This and those like it are to be the Magi.” He ran fingers over promontory on stone. “Is it to go outside?”

“I don't know. I can never see the larger way things fit together. I have to work at the stone and the image comes.”

Like an outcrop, he was plated, stone-ascendant:

the continuation of rock-infiniteness of the ground.

Yet something told of separation in him, as though he were mountain-hewn, one of these vast antesmoothings in quarries of Greek marble;

rough-formed and unfinessed, he was an oak dead ere half-grown, or some unperfected womby product, foetus expelled.

He was not unhandsome: merely ill-made. But the vastness of his imperfections suggested either that his character consented to the foretellings of his mortal form, or that in resistance, to scorn the audacity of fate for having his body so made,

the spirit had grown implacable and the man as a whole indomitable,

as those with lost legs find, like reversing atrophy, great strength uncovered in arms.

Rising at predawn Byrhthelm would come outside

and see Wulfrið already at work, the constant knap of his chisel

as churchbells in regularity. He seemed a necessary part of the morning; a facet of sunrise inextricable, perhaps of embodied light.

Such a fastidious martyrlike routine – first up and last to bed – would have been, were it any other brother, overwhelming.

Byrhthelm instead found it enlivening, not dispiriting. It was not an affront which forced one down;

rather, it was as if he were a well in which waters were drawn up by Wulfrið's efforts.

While the ceaseless unreward of their toil marched its heedless march, Wulfrið too laboured. Though it was of a different form –

hard, honest work, never seeming toil. He had told Byrhthelm it was the physical act that mattered, the habit of it.

No feeling or analysis should be of concern, and only what needed to be done ought be done.

Words and thought, he said, were postponement merely: prelude and foreshadow moving in anxiety and inertia.

And Byrhthelm's spirit, attuned to thinking

about things and about how and what those things made him feel, recoiled from this seeing of the world, so contrary to his outlook, built dearly from the facts of his experience;

though as he was about to dismiss it, the sheer reality faced him – the reality that Wulfrið was justified in object,

by the two of three dozen statues and carvings his accompaniers.

What did Byrhthelm have to show for all his worry and theory but an unfinished page of an incomplete book,

and a love whose pain seemed equal to its ecstasy?

And was Aldhelm's will, fervent and complete as it seemed, only a thing of theatre? – for here was silent Wulfrið, not sleeping not eating

but working endlessly at his supreme sublime unnerving expression, and making piety of unrelenting stone, honouring God

simply with honest humble act, and no hesitancy of quantifying.

You could grasp his devotion, since he had succeeded in physicalising it; and the rock angels and interlaced serpentry were hewn prayer.

Sculpting, craft – the poetry of the tangible – that was humility.

Not the specious impalpable eloquence of Byrhthelm's continuous metaphysical dithering, his supposed rarefied feeling and thought bringing worry only, fear only.

Better to go out and seize the fruits of life and enjoy them fully,

unthinkingly, than to let dawns and dusks pass by as you decided the relative merits of apples and grapes.

Centwine would understand him.

He understood Byrhthelm to the edges of completion, to perceiving's brink; but then there was understanding and there was feeling. He could be made to sympathise, would, freely, but fell short of true empathy.

If you were to draft a letter or make a phonecall in a lavatory would it influence or be a part of somehow, inextricable,

the character whether moral or aesthetic of that act?

As they used to dress in evening-wear to speak to you from the radio, believing audio, your hearing, might be affected by what you could not see and what had no stake in sound. So the character of art –

if made or thought of in certain strains of certain feelings, ambiguities, moralities, might that be a part too of the art? even if not affecting it. Even if the outhouse letters

were the same as they would be composed in bed (was that not reductive too even hypothetical?),

even if the psychology of wearing the ball gown or dinner jacket did not affect your neck's vibrations or tongue's flapping.

There was in there the archaeological record of the creation of the act, even if the audience the receiver didn't receive the record

(since the text or picture does not convey the means of its production (generally)). So with the feeling and the art –

you might train eighty men to write or draw in the same manner but beyond style there were the circumstances of begetting

(as perhaps crudely the mother and father revelled in the memory of conception if they loved their daughter).

But who was it for? Since if clothing it wasn't transmitted

and since if memory it wasn't inherited.

(avoiding the minutiae of physics like hopeful coincidences of particle which have no bearing on living and matter as studies only, as still life only).

But beyond creation if you stepped back from art

you might find that unknowable particles as these did mean something to some, even if only they could experience them and had to let them remain incommunicate. We all acted on them or acted by them through feeling –

see when a lover dreaming wakes assuming the same knowledge of their dream is in their lover (or that the lover meant what they had done in the dream).

So events beyond us cause feelings about us. So prejudices are.

And the eighty of us with myriad knowings and rememberings were to make coherency – were asked (desired) to bring about what would be consistent.

(yet you could not make a white scarf from varicoloured wools (yet even if our wools were, of hue, the same,

it was inherited memory of mutton or ewe that stopped coherence from being)).

And so it was with that of our use, and all that went into the toil:

for if to grind the broken-down sky to write the truths (of baptism of firmament), to illuminate the deeps not even gospel but remembered (Jonah's fathoms)

if this then beyond us, the appliers only,

the stuff actual needed be found and mined from Afghan caves, carried (in a basket on a forehead), sorted,

sifted from one to each or next,

thence to the endless trains of camel (of horse?) (remembered again – even nostalgic now? though never felt),

across the stretch of longitude, so easy to compass-sketch on map yet travail arduous and calloused for those within it,

through months (not so hard a place) and camps and raids (a place considerable) and conditions and circumstances, of passions and wants and lives and desires (why caravan? the hardest place),

all the convincings of family and love, thence to cities eastern and new (western to them – central we might agree),

languages unspoke as yet unheard unimagined;

thence given for spices or other rocks from other mines so alike in meaningless as those brought a quarter about the world.

Thence to those like us, and in our trades, grand tours (as Denewulf's) hithered,

till the small pouch of it like pouched-up watery heavens ground as if nutmeg only as if diced chives only, to go to our firmaments and baptisms and births afresh – yet with, in them, all that history of travail

like the raising of standards and empires forced prostrate, and the yet greater tale of person and feeling,

grander to those of us who care, all in that pouch ground and clumped like sands merely, like endless sands reaching as the arms of lovers over the face of everything.

And that thus the pestle and mortar might be willed to feel all the matter of the world.

There was image and word and non-image to contend with,

though the platitude being that word was image and image was word (and non-image was both and they both non-image).

But, though as one they were distinct, consubstantiate, not like oil and water with a submarine meniscus

or water and wine which really was just dilute wine;

no, more like marmalade. Because a character could be a lion and the word leo shaped as one. That was what Aldhelm required, and more:

that each should connect with all, and no part be superfluous. More than not-superfluity, all and each ought be perfection.

That was what the camel caravans and the passions necessitated –

that we should strive to his ideal. The truth might have been that it was ours also.

How might you trace the individual triumph and despair with the imposed external plan ever-present?

It seemed to grind down the personal. I do not know how it could be distinguished. You couldn't sift zest and peel into separate piles.

The lives of each must be considered when you try to feel

and understand the product of their works. It is not enough to know

the carved pillar without attempting to feel all the matter built in inextricable from its biography. But I struggled with this heresy. I do not know if the others struggled also.

How could an object have life?

I tried to believe that it was good to consider all,

to think (it seemed so pious then) of the hand behind the chisel and the cares behind the hand. I prayed for all the lost known only through speculation on their works;

or works not even theirs, but that their phantom touch had reached out to unknowingly, as the gentle ripples of all things play off all the others.

I could not see life as a matter of concentricity,

but overlapping necessary connections like fishscales folded back on themselves, infinitely.

And all would touch and nothing be totally contained. My vision of humankind was thus,

and my profane thought of the inner experience of objects was but an additional layer to the sight. So the world seemed pearl-hued.

In spite of it all it granted him liberty, in a sense – or made him free. This meant the opening out of so much –

instead of reason it imbued his faculties, his soul, with the missing element of feeling.

So poetry and music changed in their effect; were greater; truer, even. Solomon's song – it touched him now.

This joy of it was no longer feigned as it had been – or if not feigned, at least falsely, unknowingly weak:

admiration which had never been consummation. Yes, he no longer admired – he felt.

All this was far beyond what he had ever known, but he knew now, he knew and he had experienced,

so he was forever changed, and could not again know what it was like before the threshold. Then, he could not have spoken of what he did not feel,

though was uncomprehending of his own emptiness – did not know how shallow he really was.

It gave him the measure of his former self by making him now a different vessel entirely.

With the newness came anxieties.

That they should be found out was chief among them, though it was one of the least penetrating.

Centwine and Byrhthelm shared the unspoken fear

that it was not possible for anyone else to love with their individual intensity, believing themselves alone in their perfect adoration.

Tragically beautiful it may seem that one never told this to the other.

Both thought themselves unworthy of the depth

of the love they had for their lover. They were therefore resigned forever, in silence, to an inequality that did not exist,

their passions being more or less balanced, always. Another concern was a variant of this –

that they did not express to a great enough degree, for fear of over-expressing, the fervour.

(He would think me false, if my devotion's extent were worded). Fresh in the thrill of it, and tentative, they understated, hesitant.

But they felt – they finally, really, felt.

Even if they had to undergo such things it was no matter,

since difficulties can seem so easily prerequisite accompaniments to joy.

Byrhthelm found it at first a parallel passion to his interest in Aldhelm's gospelbook,

and he was comparable in his zeal.

But a material artistic thing – high as it was in its achievement poised to become – lost its supremacy shortly before his love.

The project seemed on its knees before him,

forced prostrate by his new, unlikely, consuming circumstance.

What did it mean now if it should fail, when he and Centwine had their love?

The generous energies of devotion his character had always been afforded were now to be redistributed

(with no will behind the change, perhaps) allotted in their fullness to a higher cause.

The second passion – ever in life it was rarely the lesser.

Byrhthelm never consciously interrogated the similarity this bore with the relegation of Aldhelm's first passion,

piety, religious completeness, at the feet of his obsessive labouring to catch at the beauty of his imagined gospelbook.

It might have been felt, this similarity, but he never reckoned with it intellectually.

His distrust of, or failure to, formalise things by thought,

as though thinking of them gave physical presence to them,

mirrored the shift in his passion. The love of the book had been all theory, made manifest by the object itself. But this love was made of feeling,

and that remained its substance, even if his mind gave up many hours redescribing it; even if it might have been mental to a degree,

it was never intellectualised in the way art had been eked out into existence by his intelligence. Despite the anxieties, the simplicity of it for him made its wonder.

Brother Adriaticon passes us; we grapplehook onto his direction in the moment.

He does not repel – he magnetises, we are attracted to each tension and sinew in his old body; this grace inheres in us by our perceiving him. He walks the woods –

how strange and necessary it seems for him to be there.

His robes are the same as all others' but his motion imbues them with light. Only him do they become. They become nobody else.

They are not dull on his body; they seem sculpted;

they seem inseparable. What his movement speaks of is that nothing he does is unnatural –

his stride is predestined – the ball of his sole is predestined. He cannot engender envy in us he is so perfect.

The trees lean in to him as confidants. He makes us want to change:

he takes our hand and places it into the hand of the world and we feel him say to us

remain not on the shore – swim out.

Adriaticon contrasts us – he is constant –

he is already there – we are humbled and made impassionate by him. His thoughts, we feel, are poetry; he never errs.

The stars in his presence symbolise more; the sea symbolises more; he causes focus; he makes effort effortless;

we grow great under his eye though it does not critique.

We forget our self, he filters into us as through stained glass; he is personal and universal as music or warmth;

his character is the openness of the greatest friend.

What we saw when Aldhelm showed us the progress of the gospelbook didn't seem to be something we had created.

Even working collectively, it astounded us

by seeming so unlike what we would ever imagine.

Vastly unfinished, those pages which had been brought together were remarkable nonetheless. But there was a complex strangeness. Somehow it was eerie –

elegant, yet that charm contributing to some ungraspable oddity. Or eloquent even, since it spoke to us in word and image –

and even in form and in structure.

The sheets were unconnected, perhaps fifty of them spread along the dining tables. Each was like a modest headstone – only in size were they uniform.

The hand changed on every page – within each page, too –

and the script changed, both in approach to style and style itself. Variations on themes, and themes various.

But it was perfection; we were in awe. Many of us grew teary.

This – our work? Partly it was a reaction to the toil, justification, vindication.

Some pages had systems of geometry acting as image, in colours of a balanced palette – pastels; primaries – or seemingly outside the concepts of composition and order.

It was never design – it was our hope embodied, ideal to the last,

and these arabesques and grids each a promise made and oath upheld in Aldhelm's honour. Many of them looked impossible – impossible in their construction,

and more impossible still in their execution – like living forms trapped in art, as if sunlight had been made subservient to the pen,

or amber with life held in it by lightning flattened and applied to the page.

This work exceeded the richness of the tools – the lapis and gold, the clever pairs of compasses. And it exceeded us, not merely a whole greater than the sum of its parts but perfectly beyond us, as though divine inspiration had taken us, and unaware of what we were creating we toiled on, the endless unknowing human endeavour that builds up civilisations and can never be caught in

the act of it,

and can never have its process isolated.

It was architecture and light and prayer distilled into ink – bottled clouds, the blood of life – empire, religion. Yet greater still – it was emotion.

The gospelbook seemed not to depict or describe but to be.

It was feeling; it was existence. The words, effortlessly, part of the design – not text even but image. You could read without reading,

like a statue telling well the deeds and passions of its subject,

like telepathy, like love. But though it was living emotion, and beautiful intelligence of communication,

the personal, the subjective, the universal – everything – it was image also. It had a dual existence, as embodiment and symbol on the one hand,

and as art and rawness on the other. Emotion, history; nature, design.

So you gasped, literally lost your breath as you did standing before a mountain or an ocean; or as you did when simultaneously made insignificant and magnified experiencing a sunset. You were unimportant and at once the culmination of everything,

of years, of hopes, of love. This challenged you, intellectually,

and was, at the same time, so comforting, the satisfaction of all desire. Sublime and never sentimental; rigorous and never straining.

How could you believe it? Even now I am made to question whether it was real – real as we knew it then.

Aldhelm didn't show that he knew we were affected –

if he did know. As for himself, he appeared calmly stoic, and with the determined fire of ambition about him.

For once I could read real human feeling in him.

Yet he didn't look satisfied. This was no success for him – and we all saw it as such – since as a good beginning

it only made him more conscious still of a grand path that had to be followed.

To be satisfied now was to be defeated. Indefatigable idealism kept Aldhelm stalking, constantly on the brink. His quest for perfection went on unbounded.

And you could not help but be drawn in again.

Aldhelm looked out at the sky, then.

A bristle of thunder had passed – had he noticed it? –

and baroque watery clouds suffuse with light were giving way to that light itself. He believed his gospelbook (for it was definitely his, that was the heresy of it), played on contradiction. That gave it strength, and beauty.

It was so subtle, each page the minimum of brushstrokes, every word written with the lyricism of superfluity eschewed; and yet – and yet its art was dense beyond compare,

brimming in passions, seen almost to be actually striving for the utmost. This was far more than the work of those island-monks we had heard from, or the book of Denewulf's diplomacy. Nothing in these pages was overdone, no lapse of taste could ever be discerned in the briefest expression,

and while running this scheme of humble artistry to fullness, Aldhelm had managed grandeur. Grace, then, and elegance –

not visual only but with an effort of the body like music or dancing. Yes, this seemed music made solid, or dance, though not reduced for it; sculpture, but greater still – language – feeling – life.

Each of us was able to draw from the gospelbook whatever confirmation he most needed. This unfinished grouping of pages, of pigmented animalskin at the base of it,

said each to each whatever he'd like to have heard. To you,

for you directly it spoke, giving a sense of complete individuality in the midst of the universal. Like the clouds, then, so personal at that moment to Aldhelm,

but miles off and over seas still as lone a revelation for other men,

ongoing lives he'd never know but linked unaware with that bond of having found feelings similar to his regardless of place or time in the same source,

the same gentle, brief thrill of sense and knowledge.

“I want it done. We must have the book finished.” That was what Aldhelm said, looking, still, on the sky, but no longer thinking of it.

Finished? If, in its imperfect form here it had already proven its power, there was fear in the ardour with which we so readily accepted his demand. Aldhelm as he was, it was not demanded, nor a rallying cry –

more like a suggestion from someone you deeply respect, who has your wellbeing as their aim.

We must do it – of course we must,

for there was now no other way to go on.

Response to anything, though perhaps running so similar

to others' as to be essentially the same, is unique to us always.

And the beauty of the gospelbook for Byrhthelm

was its now ever-present voice in the matter of his love.

He knew, as lovers know, how it in an instant and of a sudden overwhelmed Centwine. He was changed, less ephemeral than obsession, less frivolous –

for Centwine, he saw, it now became purpose,

as though the designs or paths of his life had discovered the truth and root. So Byrhthelm had to love it. I believe that among all of us,

the eighty or so devout, frenzied men,

he had been the least impassioned by the gospelbook before.

But Centwine's change preluded his, for their existences followed a parallel now. So, as his love loved it, he loved it.

He was unconditional in this love: gave it with careless extravagance, because a good for that he held as most good was a further good.

Cause cannot generally be traced in these moments.

We don't know that our passions are merely adopted, mirrored forms of our lover's. It is for them we care – but we convince ourselves;

so that, for all the outside, and anyone else, the passion seems ours. Byrhthelm's passion, then, was sincere.

But therefores don't explain, blithe and listless and floating merely on the surface.

Unpenetrating facts might give the simple view of two men in love, and fondly enthralled by a book –

but the coldness of considering happenings is not the analysis of reckoning.

What Centwine loved in it, he loved also.

That the experiences, lives, of eighty men might be crushed down,

in a pestle and mortar or crucible which extracted from them the vital quintessence of being of perception of viewpoint,

and reshape it, so that where it had been personal it might be raised to grandeur and be the life of the world.

That it could exalt petty hopes and the harshness of jealousies – make us see them and feel them as sublimity itself.

And in a book – pages only – and beneath it all the Gospels, magnified in themselves to higher beauty still by the art, the life.

There were thoughts, touches of emotion in great old books that seemed so personal as to have been made by them, Byrhthelm or Centwine, when maybe a thousand years spanned their separateness from the thought's first birth

(and still then it had belonged to unwritten ages with all its intensity and truth). I doubt that any word never owed something to another –

yet each refreshed the last. This was the stuff of the gospelbook,

its encyclopaedic beauty, which encompassed all the worn-out paths of feeling and repaved them – even made you see Christ's own words anew.

Literally transcendent, beyond anything,

and yet made of what we knew, and had known. That was beauty: everything, nothing left.

The flaw seemed only that it was unfinished, perfect in all but its imperfection.

It was to then remain dissatisfying until nothings of order and form were made as nothing.

O but what was flaw when faced with this?

The opal and agate of it, the woods and milking seas; memories of rockpooling, of the coldstart day;

of sickness and wellness, disappointments, frustrated love; of fulfilling and ecstatic;

of all quintessence and grasping and taking and knowing;

of the lone stretch of sand far off endless of quiet and personal joy of contemplating;

of wordlike harmony, of the universal, of the reaching back and forward, the seesaw of time, the feeling and noticing of yourself as axis;

of being a pivot in lives; of cloud;

of heartburn, this, this –

the sum of what you had forever knowingly or unknowingly been striving for, the brilliance of it as of moving light, tender like voice, gaze of your lover –

ah, the bursting fragrant approach of reality, the apprehension, the comprehension. What was this swirl that sent me back to infanthood,

of baked bread and milksmell,

of playings muddy grazed in woods by trees moss grass-stained, of lovely dissonance of parting say and crabs and woods.

The milk bread of it! The coming to terms with the wild, the slow and willing acceptance of failing, all, all –

A black spark spurted in Aldhelm's eye and he gathered together the pages and clutched them to his chest with greed.

He looked like a schoolboy, hugely hugging reams and reams.

What could be said of each day? They lacked any matter befitting grand histories. Still, the contents of their feelings might fill a hundred chronicles.

Centwine and Byrhthelm did little but experienced much,

never themes of mighty deeds but the quiet revelations of the day and the day. It continued and continued, letting time blur into insignificance –

for what were dates without events? hours without doings?

But with the pain ever-constant and the repetition endless, it was never dull.

The whispered vagueness of Centwine's dreamy gaze was enough to anticipate to keep all thought in tumult. So to put-off was to live;

or, to be just before, to predate and expect. The largest joy seemed to come in that waiting. It was the old tale of the journey and the destination, but told afresh –

since the journey was the destination when you were in love – even the pain when without was the climax.

To be was to wait, and to wait was to be: it was loving even in absence.

Though they might be apart, that was no less the matter of their lives than being together. And, too, the matter of their love –

the crests needing the waves, and love needing stasis then as a triangle its triplicity.

Only Byrhthelm made it bearable for him, the endless repetition of days. There was the toil: the dull, hard edge to the world,

which if it were not the labour of broken backs and split thumbnails, defined and calloused and bloody, was still cold, exhausting.

With this came a loss of freedom – certainly no heed was paid to self-determination or desire. But their curtailed liberty was only difficult to bear – still he bore it.

The exasperating finality of it all was the knowing it would always be so:

that there was no capacity for change. The stone would always be blank stone, and the men the same, and their food and their talk and their lives –

each the same, forever. The gospelbook did not bring newness but reformed oldness – things were always going on but seemed to have no chronology,

no beginnings or endings. He could give up his will and his comforts for hardship; but it was inhuman to go through that treading-water existence,

with no future foreseeable and no heeding the past – no triumphs, no objects, no failings –

seemingly no emotion, no humanity.

Centwine began to feel the sudden impulse of the lover to want to change.

Things minor he saw out of proportion, looming up like grand symbols of his shortcomings – he hated his appearance now, and tried to change his hair;

his pale skin that Byrhthelm so loved appalled him, and he wanted it covered. His piety too felt feeble now, and he devoted himself fearsomely.

He had wished to be good to be seen to be good, and yet now wanted it for its own sake, being inspired by the goodness he perceived in Byrhthelm.

Of course with the special silence of anxious lovers

Byrhthelm loved these traits for what they were, as they were –

though as this fact remained incommunicate, one changed uncomfortably and the other was bemused but dared not question it.

Indeed, Byrhthelm began to guess at the change's reasoning –

Centwine must be unhappy, must have come to realise all this was a mistake. So he was altered to match the alteration –

thought that becoming a new person he might keep his lover, and please him as he had once.

The contrary motion of their worries' effects left them apart,

but no less in love. For they had both given up selves for the sake of the other, making themselves suffer so that the other might not have to see their sacrifice:

this the self-denial they had been practised in and now effected with all their sincerity.

Aldhelm, as abbot, had necessary functions to perform – there were prayers, masses to give,

the daily bureaucracy of the running of an institution (the soft nightmare of organisation and responsibility).

His sermons now, carrying the bare minimum in anticipation (existing only) were not expected to be made up of any particularised content.

Before the passion of his project, they had been lyrical and esoteric,

but friendly in their esotericism as though the approachable face of the elite, like the private diary or erotic letters of an admired luminary.

But while holily inspired in some indefinable way,

there was always a languid lack of focus about them: like unending music, without architecture or structure – graceful, yes, perhaps beautiful,

but hollow somehow, and if satisfying immediately, soon forgotten;

not lifeless, far from it: only convincingly insipid.

That he delivered them with all the force of his heroic spirit,

his great charming will, augmented words which seen written would not persuade so readily.

But now, with his true, full passion bared and exposed,

like a latent love revealed, he could speak with meaning in addition to beauty. This was an uncovered, or discovered, strength,

granting some sense of the honest and truthful to his words.

Where formerly the sermons were stylised, it was decoration only – clothing – jewellery. With the gospelbook as impetus, it was the poetry of a man newly in love,

and fully conversant with his own soul,

no longer immediate superficial charm but the moving character of knowing friendship.

Though Aldhelm did not speak of the gospelbook – he never mentioned it in a single sermon.

Yet you knew hearing him that whatever he dwelled on

or raised with conviction was a stand-in, or an emotion transmuted, as a place or person might figure for another in our descriptions,

our passion's neat dull facts easy to mask but its force not willingly suppressed.

He evoked lovers and designs for the sake of the madness of ardour and exquisite hurt of obsession.

We knew the sincerity with which he spoke, for we had seen his own sprint after his ideal. But pearls and lilies and silk were his images,

though we took their essence to be pages of skin and ink. Communicating a felt perfection can only be struggled at by providing counter-references like mirrors,

it seeming so hard to behold the original, or present it as we behold it. Roses, fire; snow, skin; eyes, gems. You felt still he spoke only for you, only to you; you felt whatever he spoke of, the matter and stuff

behind the harmony and grace of his perfect speech was ephemeral, and that he passed on to you, as though literally grasping your hand, tradition and universal truth, in the way a parent imparts to a child.

As fears or passions are inherited, Aldhelm gave you, by speaking only, his cherished ideal, and you found that that sincere ardour was now

your sincere ardour too, since his grand hopeful dream could convince with its beauty alone. That he ranged over all the exploits of martyrs and kings was insignificant,

and even the lessons which could be extracted from the history of each life were close to meaningless,

for you cared only that the fire that pushed him ever onwards was now part of you. Inspiring he had been – but this was something more,

as you seemed to come to realise that he didn't give you anything, bringing to the fore merely that which in you had lain dormant.

Though acting on you, he changed you (you changed yourself) from within, rather than without. Passion ravaged us,

as it might the blood-mad berserker put on the inexorable charge by the fire and pulse and din born of the chaos of other men's fury, the fury of the blind herd.

And as that warrior seems to abandon even the self in the love of the fury,

we shed our worldly concerns and personal hopes for the frenzied bloody love of the single ideal goal. He stirred us by drumbeat clothed in elegance,

the plain rhythm the more intoxicating than its melody.

There was an irresistible quality to him during these high reveries,

in the manner of an explorer of distant seas or hero-artist.

The cold damp stone in the wastes we knew could be exoticised

by his gesture or look. It was uplifting expression, burning away the dulling mundanities of life. Aldhelm took you into his sightline as though taking you into his arms –

embraced you with swaddling warmth.

The work was as Aldhelm had wanted it – composite, comprehensive. The other monasteries had done great, beautiful labour –

Denewulf's book was a thing to be marvelled at –

but we could do more. We need not limit ourselves as they had done – in scope, style; in tradition or complexity or subtlety.

He saw that where there was often skill there was no aesthetic sense, and sometimes taste inhibited technique: it was not to be so with us. Why one geometry when we might have the world?

Why the limits of formula when we meant to encompass everything that could ever mean anything?

It was not right in his thinking to leave sculpture bounded in stone or music in voices.

Would we let architecture (fulfilment through structured space) exist only in columns and windows,

when it might be captured for our work? when the essence of anything was really extricable and willing for division –

when voice was stone as ink dance or word grace?

And he a man with apparent lacunae of the spirit (yet the paucity of such thought when held up to the limitless variants:

its sheer arrogance in assumed pre-eminence of judgement), shortfalls lacking misgivings I believed,

rather not gaps but a shifted consciousness a touch further than the bounds of how I sought always to comprehend.

Really moralities just learned and relying on habit and teacher

(saints martyrs as bad often as the worst, known only for zenith in that exalting of a single deed) and therefore rote and determined, as whether you perceive

Monday or Sunday to start the week (and so hard to unlearn, few trying). The greater overcoming was the saintlier repelling of the natural,

of the conscience or lack thereof,

said to be given by our Lord yet allowing so many into evil –

to go against it greater if reasoned out and applied to with all logics, to go so far against the heartpull and trust only yourself,

not even the transmitters or radiators or receptors, but the cold still sterile mind (even its feelings discounted, the feltless ores so minute even,

for only its vacuum of considering). There was difficulty; there was striving. So few examples could be found of that –

greatness of good done so often when fulfilling,

and so rarely when considerations of feeling or society are removed. Where might you find such an instance? not in poems not in chronicles. (The heresy: Christ even felt and thus knew good –

but be made aware of: the dearth of His acts against His conscience.

See even He on the feeble swift path of knowing good or bad through levels of hurting).

Irenaeus was not what a man would call not good but might be perceived so, as we take against the ill-mannered and the self-pitying

(not that these were he); not not good yet following perhaps a different system by which he judged himself and the world ought judge him.

Such is rare: but note it in iron exteriors with richer alloys subterranean – or as those to whom gold has no value but are not lacking for it.

He was wilful and suffered from bearing a lot in life he believed at odds with his ability and desires

(but such cases rarely fail to see these shortcomings, anywhere).

If ever it were possible to perceive smothered

(very curated very choreographed ongoing) sparks or smoulders of anger in the near-saintly (yet more than, for greater than the single zenith, a constant higher aspirant sunbeam) Aldhelm, it was in his dealings with Irenaeus Aurelianus:

since two wills alike struggle when coming together,

and even the pious and the good see from the limits of their own opinion, knowing but not understanding (to comprehend a whole world from to know)

that there were as many people stood upside-down about the planet and functioning and doing and living.

Thus their interviews, where tempers were heightened but little was divulged – “Thou oughtst take care, and love thy works.”

“Why must a border of leafage take up all the wealth of my possibilities? Why toil for little when I might apply to better things?”

“For little?” Here Aldhelm's uncomprehending unheeding love of the work of the gospelbook was as a handful of clumped sand thrown to his eyes. “Thy dozens of brothers work on without plaint. We mean to strive to glorify. This labour and its produce is the peak in the calling of many men.”

“I am not as they.”

“Thou art with us at our monastery. Thou wearst robes with us. Thou eatst food with us.”

“Those are superfluities.”

“Those are the matter of our lives.”

This might have been one of any fifty such meetings.

It was the slow and quietly stubborn push of water on dam.

Irenaeus went on working, his will never mastered (nor yet convinced). Aldhelm said a prayer for him each night, pityingly blind.

I dared to think it was the blinkered sight of many fellow churchmen

that led them to patronise – not through fault, but inevitable through inexposure. Their gentle conflicts caused no change in physical terms.

And yet emotions are the cause of causes, and are easier bent and shaped.

In the fullness of summer one year

we learned Centwine was to be among three brothers to be sent away (dispersed like through dilution) to another monastery.

He found that it did not matter where he was going, his life having a sole direction: with and towards and by Byrhthelm, always. Anything else was away.

If Byrhthelm were to go, too, it wouldn't be an away.

Only the particulars of here like inconsequential storms and seas would change, then,

but he would be present with what he wanted.

Yet Aldhelm or whoever had commanded the move would not consider anything else, it was said. So Centwine and Byrhthelm were to live lives that were no longer living, all purpose meaning fulfilment separate from them,

in a cloying reality like having the face smothered or existing underwater.

The clinging passions that took them then wavered as vibration wavers,

passing from the resigned, grief, horror, to flurries of maddened doglike insensible rage, violent bloody,

perhaps a response similar to the reaction of adrenaline's pain-suppression the anger of the witness to violence towards their loved ones –

as a father seeing his daughter run down, the physical realness of it stopping a response aligned to sadness: the blood, the crack of her bones,

meaning that all we can reply with is that early urge of our kind to want to smash things and see suffering as payment for affront.

But they were too placid by nature – ideal churchmen in other lives – and thus the surging violence of riposte was held back

like the wife's hand on the father's wrist,

placating it merely into a seething less consequential but as felt – perhaps more felt.

In their restraint neither Byrhthelm nor Centwine acted ever in a brash way on this violence of impotency.

But the grief would come then and no bloodhaze would be felt any longer, their sweats dropping some ten degrees

from the slick lubricating efforts of anger to the halting cold wet slime of fever that restricts and annuls.

What this did for Centwine was, for others only,

to seem to disrupt his grace and ease, he appearing from then

(the announcement; and the dual long-term and short-term rumination thereon)

to be more akin to an ill young dog than a man, whimpering in movement and inconsolable. He tried not to justify his move by crying.

That would be to accept that it was a reality;

and besides he preferred this illusory world he was now inhabiting like the bereaved where realities were different to what our rationality

normally wanted them to be – now superstition and myth and metaphysics. No, he didn't cry like Byrhthelm. For whom the grief was like a crushing, actually being placed under boulders,

with a sharp rock in particular on his neck weighting the windpipe, its fibres springing apart with stress and permanently warped flat as damaged wood as splintering glass,

so that while he continued to work physically he could never breathe and had the terror of mankind when its basic need for air is impeded.

To know it was Centwine who had to bear the pendant grief was the placing of yet a second rock central on the throat, larger still.

Byrhthelm did not know till then that woe sorrow grief as this could be the same as actual pain as of teeth stamped out against a pavement as of fingerbones snapped.

Now it was the howling anguish that united the mourning and the tortured, the barrier entirely permeable between thought and deed,

which allowed a child's death to bring back in a twisted phantasm the pain of the childbirth and let you imagine forever the child coming out deadborn;

and let being subjected to the extremes of pain, so exquisite in how unbelievable

they had been before experiencing them, pass over to the space you assumed was reserved only for feelings, and let you grieve

for yourself with as much emotional pain or more even than the physical pain you felt. This was what killed bereaved mothers and widows, not stress nor shock,

but the welling up into everything of a pain physical that came from the feeling.

It was something like a gut cancer, this knowledge of separation indefinite to come. Something bearing similarities not inconsiderable to an eyeball bursting when punctured. Something black and total –

demanding all from you and the stuff of all your life and all you would be from then, from its appearance.

They knew with the irrational accurate empiricism of surmise

that they would never see each other again. Perhaps hope had been dried by the close pounding realness. But knowing was granted them

as it somehow is without logic, as you know if you've placed a true bet at the roulette wheel, or when you are so clearly aware this lottery is not yours

but you still buy the ticket and check the numbers. They were granted this knowing which was to be more anguishing for being definite.

What of the time left? it was under, then, a month. Fewer days than you might waste listlessly in a year, doing nothing in particular with no purpose or drive.

And of each, an hour only a day, or two at most, only twenty or forty hours in all. To be together for less time than it took for sunrise to turn back into sunrise.

What affronted them to the soul as being spat on would was the uncontrol, the unknowable bondsman that yoked hope and will to his side,

dragging destiny along in the dust and creating all of that fury at thieved liberty like a boy feels when he realises his father's weaknesses and limits

and yet is asked – told – to obey him.

Having their fate – the fate of their love – grooved to fit another's mould. How could they respond but with this commixture of grief and rage,

always yet unique like oil and water? but it was wrong to say always unique

for they came together like water and blood, this angry mourning and grieving anger. For once the gospelbook was a nonentity to them,

even as the focus of the most part of each day.

Centwine's passion for it, always more real than Byrhthelm's,

was for now suppressed (though his letters from exile to Byrhthelm

would slowly move in key from minor to major as he less and less talked of their love and more and more asked of the gospelbook, its progress,

Byrhthelm finally coming to see how much Centwine was in its thrall and had been since the beginning.

He stopped longing for the man and started to long for the work of the man – the man's accoutrements and associations,

just as spouses soon grow to care only for the materials of the marriage and not the marriage for itself). For now as a nonentity Centwine sincerely (or delicately acted a sincere image) felt only for Byrhthelm,

the gospelbook again briefly its materials only.

But even if he could only ever love the gospelbook

(as he might indeed conclude later), Byrhthelm could still love him.

Love to him came as something with no stipulations and even if he hated it he would give it. And he could not decide on matters of his love, even when he was not loved back –

only able to act as he was acted on, from within rather than from without.

In a gentle rebellion they avoided a meal to go outside together and walk. This was the limit to which they were willing to rebel:

not to claim an extra hour but at least to determine where they should have the one they were given.

As two people in love they could not speak of the nature of that love with ease. So the walk was mostly a sad cataloguing of the things they saw,

feelings not talked of. They hardly talked at all. It was summer ascendant, the June July flush; rocks even seemed raised to high heat like fever,

like they were volcanic and not sat on a cold dead island in a sea summercold yet.

The trees were turned up to fullness, green as they might go

and fleshly and living as they might ever be in all their centuries.

That the brittle cry of gulls went on let honesty and openness seem muffled almost. It was somehow being overheard, by not a presence but a sound.

The difficulty searched for excuse anyway. Wanted its way out.

They had almost got to the far side of the island when it was time to turn back,

heartbeat clockwork knowing the timings as it does when it chooses to wake you in the suspended moment before the alarm.

An anxiety of being together in the face of this impending made lateness an exile too anyway. It wasn't till,

their time nearly gone, that the high fevered flushing necessity surged and made speech possible, Byrhthelm saying:

“I can't see you go – I will love you even if you go – are gone forever – even if you forget me.”

“I need you to know I will think of you. I'll write.”

“I'll come with you – there must be a way – I'll speak to them.”

“There is no way.”

“We must try – I can't – to be separate for so long.”

“We know it will be forever.”

“Then will writing making it unbearable? – better you forget me entirely.”

“There will be no way I can forget.”

“Nor I – I know I'll die still thinking of you.”

“So I you.”

Centwine spoke with the real felt passion of the moment, but real felt passions are not permanent truths.

He was to find it easier to forget.

Because loving is only real when it is present

and plans and intent can be laid and be honest and sincere and still fail – not reneged on, but undergoing different veracity.

So a lover can say they will love forever and it be true even if forever is a year –

it was still meant and true. Byrhthelm, more rational and correct maybe,

the less dreamy the analytical one, said he would never forget and would never forget. The matter was more of character than action.

It was not a promise that could be broken if it was a promise made to your own real truth.

The summer sun went faint

as though it had stood up too quickly.

It was a sunset then that seemed borne along with heft by passion,

made inevitable like the precluded dark initiated in the lighting of a candle. Inside, they had used that hour, and continued to live as they had before the walk. The only change that came was the fierce blazed silhouette on sunshine,

that infected the mind like a look at bright light,

of the image of Centwine for Byrhthelm and Byrhthelm for Centwine, an image which was to be suffuse with emotions also,

and to remain for one almost as briefly as a glimpse of the sun remains on the eyelid, and for the other as long as a glaucoma –

or really, since it was a joyous staining, more the curing of a glaucoma, a clearness lasting and unavoidably seen when in relief.

It wouldn't be the book itself that was interesting – he didn't care at all for the physical thing –

only the emotion it could create and convey.

Objects were only important, he thought, as the backdrops to perception. They were measures, foremost; as with a relic of grand age,

he believed they only mattered for what they signified, and were nothing in themselves.

And that grand age passed on knowledge only through feeling, because to be ancient was an attribute superseded by some other end, the quality of being old only meaning anything

if that unbroken undergoing of time were the highlight

to something else. For there were rocks older than mankind by many factors, but the age of a Mesopotamian ruin had greater claims to feeling,

and by right of its purpose, could say more.

What was a thousand years of stone solitude measured against just a week as a coin the in trade across Phoenician seas?

You were led to believe he supposed the art needed only be true to you, your conditions and idiosyncrasies, to be worthy.

The act of loving it was enough; it couldn't matter who judged it good or bad if you were prejudiced to it,

and it prejudiced to you. But then, why try? Another hour in pursuit of better – was it even able to be noticed? So it was the striving, then, that was the heart of it. Not competition, nor the loss or catch of the prey: merely the hunt itself.

That you were trying was as good as perfection.

That trees pointlessly bloomed and animals pointlessly fed, and slept, and grew, was the beautiful purpose –

not meaningless, the doing the reason for doing at all.

That the ice blew over brittle as glass, that the circulation of stars and moonlight went on, that children each anew learned and did what children had learned and done anew before.

So too the gospelbook – divorced from its flashing beauty

the purpose was that such a thing could be done – had to be done.

Besides the opalescent, blossoming learning,

the milkfeeding spindrift of fresh calves on mothercow dairyweb wind float lactation, the rage of it, passions dark, red and deep – lusts murders jealous agonies –

the transparency, delicacy, diaphanous lightweight floating grace of light, volcano exoticoes, the hierarchies ribaldry heraldry chivalry;

harlequin-mosaiced check chessboard geometries and arabesques skylike, cloudy, fusion, lifeblood; sound hardened and echo too crystallised,

the revelatory personal silent sound,

the highnoon sun overhead birdseye encompassing dominance of scope, the practical historiography in pigment and nib and ink,

the trade-route tale and caryatid chronicling of pursuit and struggle;

the bending subdued reverence to mankind its such humanity as to admire, the beauty in gesture and thoughtful considering,

the elapsecrossing scaffolds of realise and understand;

ours alone imprint yet of worlds, all-human, the spanning cry and wail of joy and each into the marsh known for progress,

the striving for, the utterance the confirmed like stone ironroot placable palpable yearning. Question execution. The file and whimper.

The ah! the zenith! the zenithless strive! it – o – it –

This besides he meant, the strive yet additional.

Yet there it was, the beauty divorced from the striving but contained within. Divorced therefrom yet quintessent. Aldhelm struggled with that all of his days. Some things were essential despite what people might want to think and voice so firmly and ardent. Some things everlasting changeless

even if not neatly compartmented into rationalities and logics.

The old wives' tales the joy and sorrow, silver and gold of magpies.

They weren't told if nothing was communicate, if nought reckoned or weighed.

To him it was true and that was thus. To him the worthy was explained, to him, to him. What matter if other scales – to him!

There the gospelbook, thus wherefored, that wherefrom! Whosoever might else – but nought. All external all else.

Palpable – tactile, those words used so often

as if to show that closeness was the prime strength of sculpture, that it was satisfying and affecting foremost on a physical level – not emotionally physical, like love, like heartbeat of desire,

like palmsweat and rushing breathlessness (manifestations only, the thing mental entire) –

physical, touch, sense purely for itself. Yet it could not always be so. Stone twenty foot up, raised into its dwelling on a capital, was the source.

Was somehow tactile in the same way, somehow personal physical though distant. As thought of physicality engenders physicality.

So at armslength the stillness of skin made permanent caused it in you. And its dishonesty – depicting but of one substance and so meaningless – drapery – lips – hair – all merged and none true.

That was its majesty though – that grace might be transmuted into an unforgiving form (grace of clothefolds still grand and graceful in rock).

And the limit of material and colour – pigment unmixable, infinity of hue impossible. The divinity then of limitation. That perfect flaw –

the women the men all marble the colours all red sandstone.

This was the beauty of being resisted. Of having to strive and to suffer.

It came not with ease – in fabric of itself even.

Hard dense unyielding. That it should be among the strongest least supplicant of all things; harder than some thoughts some convictions even.

Only to stylised metals of alloys various prostrate. And the old easy transient delighting beauty of impermanent permanence – so hard so strong yet withered by rain only,

by the gentle accumulation of touches only

(the toes worn smooth to shining the manes of marble lions the limestone martyrs' tears fatigued by the palpable, by the subtle fleeting presence only

of figures touching precious what they held an instant only for each

and together the passage of years) as if it spoke to you of your weaknesses and allowed for them; or as if in the contradiction in the fragility of hardness (diamonds etc. youth etc.). Wulfrið would have told you it was because

he liked to be outdoors and you couldn't illuminate in a garden.

He never followed the too-worn paths known by most in each passing generation about the transience the daisychain of accumulated minutiae;

he was not one to theorise and overtheorise. Stone meant to him his work,

and by his work he made things others admired and he believed God would admire also.

It was not the nobility of humble craft or a transcendent touching fervour

for the divinity of hewn and polished rock. A tomb was a tomb and a column a column; and you needed the former for skeletons to lie down

and you needed the latter for roofs to be held up.

But Wulfrið did embellish and decorate

which seem the natural impulses of the simplest of us.

He spoke laconic; but tirelessly he charted on walks the inways and outways of the island. You could see how animals affected him,

how flowers and the stuff of the sky affected him. Moon – wool – petal. He might preserve reticence and not be forthcoming

as Centwine might overwhelm you with dreamy talk of books,

but the stone was the diary for him, and where no words came out, the piled-up inspirations were soon raised in monument.

So the sensuous swell of fluorescences;

so the tender lyrical strain of the minimal in the line.

So the graceful and the heartache (in chisel the striving).

So the avenues of trees stuccoed in relief on Portland stone or cameoed negative gave veinage and lymph to systems of living, of wandering,

and seemed to pulsate though intelligibly still as the ringworm beach sand piles on the temples of the face seem to beat with hearts,

they too in their dry and cold of lip-chapping

and sole on slush give something living as the friezes of the world –

he worked for this also. He worked for the inexplicable pointless angers of the day, of waiting and sighing, of the perceived selfishness external.

And for the quiet and moments of sweetness and grace,

as of the care of and for old women, and the gaiety of youth,

and the satisfaction of age (again in the accumulation of generations

a certain permanence in impermanence, as of genealogies and inheritance (as of the baffling systems that put us where we are at current)).

Of the stunnings and the ripostes – the nearly the knowing of all – the realisation of the knowing of nothing – the ongoing –

the again the again: as of: my library must contain all the books of import –

two thousand books of a billion is a few and is arrogance – I have my friends of the billions and they are enough – aren't there ever more to be had. Reduction, expansion –

both sculptural, both with that beautiful tireless fragility that is permanent nonetheless.

And Byrhthelm believing he could compass

all modes of thought and see them from without – really only another vantage within, as limited also. And Centwine's often vast dream as bounded too,

as each system of perceiving's wonder is in its flaw. As the sculpture succeeds where stone fails.

Where flesh cannot be cold except nullified, void. When drapery is affected forever by minds.

Wulfrið did not see but felt these as triumphs – knew it intrinsically.

And he as beautifully limited too, there a certain arrogance

in his aloofness from thought, as arrogance is begotten as frequently by engagement with it fully. Of the sculpture in the endless convolutions and permutations of throbbing life –

the forever of mankind – the ongoing even when striveless.

Somehow this could speak of difference beyond worldview – beyond thought politic or moral, the full fabric of stuff in its richness, as of what empathy meant for you or the purpose of gesture, as of the fulfilment or not therein of comparisons,

as of the supremacy to themselves of everyone's own way of going about the business of existing. And how curious and difficult to be when others are alternatively.

Wulfrið alone then divorced from the encompassing of us all else – alone not taken and akin with the gospelbook, entirely willing own. It made carving seem revolt, a radical act,

and to a degree in this passive rebellion of his (as of not voting; as of not helping the needy –

acts still even if viewed in negative like the snowslate prints of mountain ridges) a sort of quiet weak humble plea – so unlike him, the outcrop, ascendant, masterful in dominance of everything in nothing,

expressing with the descent of a brow

the steel adamantine titanium alloy of his impervious

(or stubborn) inexorable brutal ego, self-regarding yet failing to be self-aware – a plea that made you view him newly (even if not an act of his

but a planted perception of him willed by you), that edited

and realigned prejudices and the built-up blocks of evidence of character,

beliefs untested yet held so, and which formed the basis of everything in human relations: replacing or shifting those subtle sometimes silent sometimes untacit formations

like the sludgy drift of volcano detritus, unmovable and so liable to freeze, just as the brain literally furrows itself, tending to routes of ease,

tending to the immutable (in all belief and experience) –

yes, you saw something pitiful in the defiance of the gospelbook –

saw the frailty of sculpture next to a page (pages seeming so fragile yet outlasting, stone and rock prone to rot, pages infinite, reproducible,

transmittable, pliant and asking for movement as the grace of limb of a dance asks for movement in the plush-hard tendonlike shift and ripple of its fabric – its drapery (and skin so alike paper)).

Page was free to wanderings. In this spontaneous. And sculpture so heeded,

so committee'd and thought-out and townplanned, the statue built often for the square rather than as it should be, place shaping about art. So it was pliant then –

accommodating. And for Centwine this was not pliant in the open joyful sense of not-stubborn, but in the sense of the unprincipled and the impressionable,

or the weak and passive who allow dominion.

Not as Byrhthelm who was like the paper, or Aldhelm who was like the paper. But Wulfrið was like sculpture, and Irenaeus was like it,

with the lack of strength which inheres in over-expressed will – wilfulness, the stubborn, borne forth whence insecurity sat,

and that borne forth whence inferiority fails to perceive itself – paradoxically.

As it might seem that the insecure was the realisation, but so often Centwine at least saw it (in his dreamy quiet noticing way) that the insecure did not see itself –

felt itself surely, but could not perceive itself, and therefore inhibited growth – development only possible when things can be connected –

and this perhaps the fountainhead the keystone the lodestar of intelligence, the quality and quantity and pace of the ability to connect,

not just cause but the sprinklings of miscellany, to relate and to compare

and thereby to succeed whether by analogy or image or parallel of feeling to process; Wulfrið seemed to lack that if you had really wrung out Centwine's perceiving.

The eternal issue remained that lacking it meant you never knew you lacked it, never could know – and thus were engendered:

jealousy cruelty stubbornness pride arrogance the unfeeling the unthinking; the blankness of failing to apprehend and then to comprehend,

so noticeable if you knew how it flags itself; the strange supremacy of the inferior; selfishness and barren or listless feeling (towards others):

the commingling of love and hate in extremes (of yourself);

and most other traits or displays variously termed unbecoming by those who can perceive and parallel.

Sculpture was somehow this done wrong –

no matter depiction no matter style no matter skill of craft –

the feeling the key, the import then in the creation and the passive in the creation (wherever that passive fell on axes hot or cold or strong or weak).

So writing drawing the page were benevolent and encompassed; yet craft seemed of this type, of the unbecoming when in the wrong hands –

merely learned and done without the eagle-eye of self-observance

and beyond shades of critique. That was it – anyone could play the pious after enough hours after expensive instruction,

but what made a priest? sensibility they called it in a redundant self-defeating closed sort of way

–

really feeling and knowing, with justified self-love and justified confidence and empathy always empathy,

reasoned and known as well as felt –

no reaction only no instinct as animals respond in blindness to pain to temperature to outcries: real evaluated understood grand empathetic knowledge,

lyrical and light, playing on the surface of the world and feeling to its depths –

as sunlight (evident in systems and felt in moments; warming sustaining and shining, making water glow leaves glow, sharing),

as songs, as the beauty of comparisons and as the parallel of understanding –

without contradiction without paradox, suffuse only, embracing only (that being loving)).

Centwine was of those that knew; Byrhthelm was of those that knew.

Aldhelm knew and felt to a limited extent, projecting that he knew in a facade and believing he knew like everyone believes –

belief really scrutinised to know it to an extent is as good as not knowing it.

People who cannot dress not knowing; those who do not queue in cultures that queue not knowing;

women knowing more often than men –

knowing in a smile, knowing in a multitudinous encompassing gesture; most in professions not knowing, it seeming to help in some to not know.

He wondered if the prophets and evangelists knew and in one moment of bursting dark energy of sin and forthing repression upsurged Centwine entertained the idea not even nascent pearl even pre- sand as yet then but enough of an embryo growth to be classified a thought that Christ did not know fully.

O that I have thought this that I should O that to my God I have been so, acted so, Yet a thought ignored is a thought thought –

and the image and seed suppressed as they were were there nonetheless. Christ did not know? He spoke of theory of those that know –

knew of them – but seemed uncomprehending – uncommon as most seem, not-uniquely inhuman –

laboriously frequent in radiated attitude and expressed character. Centwine had never met Christ had not felt His presence really ever, yet believed – but he was one who knew,

and he could not hide that this made him perceive Christ as one who did not. He worked the speech and acted as those that know do – yet He did not.

For He had the grand poverty of distance about him,

the aloofness common to those of His kind – caring perhaps, moral perhaps, loving perhaps yes all goods about him, but not knowing – so, as such, diffident,

separate, isolate from you even in loving, never aware (He who knew all, unaware!). What maddened Centwine was that others could never understand this,

the separation and dry blank disconnect. Because to even be able to consider and comprehend his objection to your way of being you had to be like him,

like Centwine – which, if the case, meant he would have no cause for objection. So it caused separation, as though two hands locked in ice approaching touch, but remaining forever in process, never fulfilling act commensurate,

never consummate, always at a distance from the palpable electric thrill. Even Christ not knowing – the idea he slipped into for a falling second, a thousandth thereof, his ultimate final heretical blaspheming apostasy, so he could never again believe in others than those that know –

so he, in this, deified Byrhthelm as Byrhthelm deified him,

knowing together, thawing endlessly ice to release the humanity of contact.

Wulfrið had Christ and Aldhelm had Christ or himself

because they failed in realising by being as one substance by being in the image of their failure – God, their perfected miracle of divinity that felt flaw (or was flawed because did not feel)

in the quintessence of character, the only feature of import in people and the font of empathy and living and art:

the knowing and the realising.

Byrhthelm and Centwine had it each, and both and together were thus justified in being as one. (The Adam and his Eve were not knowers – Job knew and Lucifer did know).

Knowing was spiritual analysis – it was illimitable perceiving, connection, awareness – not of some force or invisible feeling but of real rational hardness and the matter of women and men. (Aunts and grandmothers were the most liable to know).

It did not effect the growth in revolutions of life,

and yet was part of every facet and aspect of the ongoing.

To be absent from knowing was to be divorced from real divinity. Wulfrið's sculpture then might be beautiful and worked in elevated ways,

but it lacked the refinement (refinement – substance: being) of knowing.

And the gospelbook, its motley creation as of mosaic

could take and synthesise what was felt by those that knew and those that couldn't, and formed a mixture not diluted to either extreme of the binary,

but from its adherence to polar ends of scaling drew fortitude and esotericism,

all positive eclectic, all improving meltingpot, not diluting but expressing concentrate as sauces reduce in passion-heat, as grow denser, richer, fuller;

as thus quintessence might be got from myriad parts unequal. It went on with indifference and passion,

and gained from the distant and the aware a roundness,

an ecstatic onrushing completion – not yet finished however,

hardly possible to be done with however, yet in its progress growing full.

Mountains distilled and – the bottling of hopes, the surface-shifting of waveform and cloud – scapes (plains) of habit, feeling, lunarlike somehow,

vast ringing windy brimming – facts aspects shapes ingredients, each as flakes and grinds, extracts, – and the presence of nearness – with brass-rubbings of analysis, of knowing of character,

of indelible imprint of tattooing permanence in expression of moment – in conjuring image in mood and tone as from words,

as Centwine took and conjured from Christ's words and those spoken of Him – not impression but cuttings as of branch from tree or article from newspaper –

taken grafted known the weightless substanceless being and character of another being and merging in your weightless substance –

quintessence broken right down not powder or fibre or dust

but ungraspable non-electric image and feel and passion – nostalgia weighing how much? it offensive to you to have emotions valued –

to consider them even categorisable or valueable or to be denied or extolled. Why shouldn't my love be enough? And Byrhthelm.

Why ought anything be considered superior or inferior or undeserving or deserving? and what are greatness and smallness? Pity could be in all; nostalgia felt for all; passion for any. Give me only of the knowing – I will not taste whereof feels not.

And have you even considered the place and reasoning and patterning and spirit behind every brick in the canyon of street upon which you every day need traverse to reach some habit of inconsequence? This made white for a reason –

this left red to satisfy some way of perceiving. And the steps taken to make and leave! The ecstasy for Byrhthelm for Centwine of any and all part –

It was worse for being gradual.

Centwine had a known number of weeks, and they passed. Nothing was sudden – he hated that –

give him brash madness and the shock of surprise sooner.

But their knowing each other at all dwindled in diminuendo to the day he was to leave, and then he left. Faded, seemingly, without a defined end –

you asked if the music stopped or went on unperceptibly infinitesimally hushed, the horror in your failure to compass and hold before you any sense of finality. When the day came Byrhthelm was in his cell, so was granted no goodbye,

no handkerchief wave or blown kiss at harbour or station – he was to find that when he came out in silence to their meal

Centwine was no longer there, and would never be again. Not sudden drama, but the frustrating unfinished end, not an end at all really,

with no closure nor tragedy, only the complete quiet, everywhere, for ever.

Without even the one hour of brief pained happiness each day, he was driven into a corner of melancholy and despair.

This, too, came gradually. Mirroring its cause, it could never have been immediate. The realisation dripping in filled him eventually. Yes, it had a quality like water – its power, its necessity, the fear of it consuming you.

Byrhthelm was smothered to drowning, with the terror

of being sustained above a large body like a lake or the sea,

caught in suspension above – and in – the gulf, the fathoms – their darkness and majesty. It was to be suspended over the precipice, and worse than looking,

the sheer death of not being able to see. This lasted over a year.

A letter came from Centwine after some months. I

t was to be read several times before Byrhthelm could see it – by his new abbot, by the three couriers, and by Aldhelm.

You could not tell if it had been censored (and by whom)

or if there was nothing to say. Much of it was functional, necessary: the new monastery was like this – these men had been kind to him – they made no gospelbook – the weather – the food – his cell –

the journey, the roads – general news – what they had in the library – the prayers he had been saying. But he signed it

I miss you. I really do. You are a true friend, Byrhthelm. You have been.

Affectionately,

Centwine

Was there no love, now (had there ever been?), or was Centwine limited in what he could say?

The letter was torment only. Were they now friends or lovers?

The only person who could give him solace was the source and cause of his disquiet.

He had no one to talk to about it – no friends.

In his drowning horror he wavered by the second between the small hopeful fingers that seemed to reach out for him,

and the isolation of all ending, and being final, the love over and he alone.

For Byrhthelm could not decode the letter's words (or he understood them too well); and so, in his fidelity, his rational fidelity to truth,

he let himself entertain the option that would save him, and its black opposite. He had to, having no choice.

The letter came and brought Centwine's company, yet he had never been more alone. Easier to not ever love than to undergo its loss. But better to suffer –

there was the perverse fact. Better to experience only the bad than nothing. He had that in him: that he would rather be cool or warm than their average. Illness or the fullness of health – but never neither.

Yet how he could no longer bear it, now he had no one to bear it with.

He didn't know; he couldn't know; the struggle was the stasis of not knowing. Plunge him to a height or depth, but don't leave him to succumb to the mediocre.

He was never to know again if he was in love – for so much of it seemed to wait on Centwine. Had he moved on, or did he struggle too?

Love seemed preserved dead – amber – cryogenics.

It was that it was not a firm absence, in which they would be cut off and gone and never hear but never mishear, but a separation almost complete,

yet connected endlessly by a thread down which

they might whisper not the truth and matter of their lives but their hearts' subdued and muffled pourings

filtered, reserved, quiet, quieted. The horror terror hopeless despair were as much the separation as they were the unknowing –

the inability to ever know. The hopelessness was in the retained hope –

as with the family of the soldier missing in action never learning of his death or life. Could Byrhthelm ever know if he was loved –

it was all he wanted, the reality, the fact –

his animal lust after confirmation of material things – even this, the confirming of the immaterial.

Just to know was to live. And ignorance,

why ever bear it – how – to settle, to be placated – victory or suffering:

never the unconsecrate pallid inelegant purgatorial dullness of inbetween beige, cream, and grey. Heights, depths, passions – no lowlands content with life dead or still –

failings, strivings, the black the red the white; heat, fervency, tragedy; living, real living! Now Byrhthelm was as if with crushed ice, and semi-alone.

Since all that remained of Centwine was the memory of his passion, the memory of his passion was to be his fuel.

To be made ardent from the ardour of another – that was love. So Byrhthelm, the most dispassionate of eighty men,

took up the gospelbook as his theme. Whatever he felt (had felt) for Centwine,

was transmuted with all its force, if not all its sincerity, into his work and his attitude. He had not cared before, but if it mattered to Centwine it now mattered to him.

Byrhthelm's love, now so abundantly contained in him, found its new outlet.

He did not love the labour, but realised that it was the effort that meant something, the ideal of care. He might not bring back Centwine

by dedicating himself, but he needed something to which he could dedicate himself. What was never important was that Centwine should not know:

he treated it like a ritual of mourning, or prayer.

Faith, in its brilliance. And this his counterfeit passion.

To the gospelbook he contributed the ekphrasis of his soul.

There was something of separation in it, in Byrhthelm's seeking refuge in work, and what was to be from then art. It caused a change in him,

though whether it was one of a general spiritual maturity or brought about owing, and in relief to, his loss,

you would not be able to tell from result.

Who can trace the history of emotion in a line drawing? It could not become a document of biography,

but biography gave it something of its power. It seemed to him anyway that what went into the thing, and what you could – someone else could – draw from it, were equal. It was just like society and talk –

what was there meant as much as what was seen, creation and reception really as one flesh.

Aldhelm had till then Irenaeus Aurelianus as his pupil, protégé, favoured – this meant only that he executed such designs with more fidelity

to an imagined ideal than seventy-eight other men.

Yet Byrhthelm now in renewed (or new, having not distinguished himself before) unconscious necessary reveries of effort became unwillingly, accidentally,

the usurper of interest. For him this altered grace of patronage

only owed to what he saw as secondary, incomparable to a permanent loss.

You could hardly say that Aldhelm had been young, once.

When he first had his stage entrance at the monastery

he had the physical qualities of youth. But even with that

and his energetic spirit you would never mistakenly have termed him young – your mind not giving-in to want to categorise him so, and something about him greater still than an ageless aspect. It was eternity –

we seemed to have reached up into the stream of all existence, the timeless being a place more than a catalogue of eras,

and plucked him down to us. So though only twenty or thirty years a man, ageing steadily and noticeably like weathered rock with its lichen

or sootblack staining or rain-erosion, he did not lose ever or vary from our first perception of him as everlasting.

Even if the heroic raging rush of his life came to slow, you could not wake up one morning and say yes he is mortal and so not timeless but timeful. For, we knew,

he was not immortal but was not of time, just as a hope is a thing but could not be dated.

So he was like us enough for us to need him but unlike us enough for us to justify that need, as removed as a pun needs to be in order to be funny –

too similar and mere echo of sound, a failing – too unlike and just another word only.

It was a cult or a religion, and as with the most lasting of those

we were willing to entertain the contradiction aroused by recognising both his flaws and his perfection.

The gospelbook struggled on its slow progress with halts and pauses but was nevertheless ultimately ceaseless, similar to a camel caravan ascending dunetops in its march through and

across a desert.

Some might fall away and wither to death dehydrated

but these were interchangeable to the core as you might also replace all a ship's planks and still be sailing the same ship. Pages came and went, and monks,

but the gospelbook still swelled in its pregnancy, teetering ever towards labour.

We thought it might be a generation's length before but we knew somehow it would be finished.

Or Aldhelm persuaded us that we knew.

Byrhthelm was the only one that seemed to never believe in our unflagging ongoing endless idealism.

It was difficult to say that he sensed some failure before the end, and he committed himself like the rest of us,

but you could see that pursuit and progress to him were terms now unconvincing. Unconvincing now in particular because he had believed, and the unproved progress he had envisioned for his love worked against his faith

in any other progress or faith generally. He found that to commit so fully to anything again was as hard as to be impossible,

his misused faith still stinging as if a friend had told him a pan wasn't hot and in his blithe and childlike trust he had grasped it and been burned.

For he had so wanted for the pan to be cool, even to the extent of convincing himself it was,

worsening the burn. That the blistering and puckered skin was not on his hand but some intangible region not even a definable place made it worse still,

for you couldn't run cool water over your soul.

He wasn't a rebel, not even in thought alone.

It wasn't that the gospelbook, their grand project and end of all ends,

was to him now distasteful and ludicrous. Instead he wanted to have faith in it as you might wish yourself less sensitive to save yourself from hurt, trying to commit but knowing his belief now was gone.

There was no sense of a plan to go against their unheeding ideals –

he only grew more and more alone at each moment as the steady dropping realisations came to him that the one man who understood him was now gone, likely forever,

and he was almost quarantined in his feeling, surrounded by worlds contrary to his. They were not bad people and their gospelbook was not unadmirable –

only it was no longer Byrhthelm's. It is as easy to be alone among friends

or even easier than it is to be alone when alone, because you did not entertain any hopes of true company when by yourself,

but with others your desires were always and endlessly defeated. Some gave him water.

“It froths too much with ether,” he said.

Aldhelm was torsional, rigid like sinew or stonework. When he raised an arm and his sheets fell to his waist,

we could see the fanvault of his ribs beneath his bedclothes.

The unspoken desire that pervaded all the monastery at this time

was that no-one should admit to themselves that Aldhelm was dying – as it was a wish almost universal, it took a form of some strength.

So, in the early days, in wishing it were not so, the deathbed and its old man were practically ignored. Things went on,

with a touch of the artificial, even more habitually than they had before. Thoughts of the actual fled to a past actual,

and so memory was constructed and sought as a refuge from the present. This self-blinding and this fear was born of love;

and had too an effect of creating premature mourners of many of us. He was, yet, thoroughly alive.

Men passed through that room with expectation, believing it a prism of wisdom, and they some innocent, unadulterated light. Seeking too much from him,

he disappointed many. Irenaeus Aurelianus did not want advice or empty words, going to him instead to be named, knowing with such certainty he would be

as to disallow doubt from his mind's potential, the succeeding and future overseer of the creation of the gospelbook. Supreme in his confidence,

he said nothing to Aldhelm, taking a place uninvited in the chair by his bedside. He leaned almost over the old man, almost mounting him.

But eyes have speech, and he gave his demand in silence. For Aldhelm, it was received, of course, as a question –

a question the answer to which was blank no. The parley in those eyes was as bitter fire: loving, protective, knowing fire. He raged his reply. This was not accepted.

“Speak it,” said Aurelianus.

“I never knew you,” was all Aldhelm had to say: was, conclusively, all he could say, for Irenaeus, shamed and rebuked, left him in his quiet room.

Others came, and said some words, or said none. Byrhthelm was among these.

“I am dying, child, dying – wouldst thou know it? It is there. Heed me thus: these works were – are – more than me.”

“Works?”

“The gospelbook alone. Nought else here matters. To strive for that of which we dream – to compass our dreams, and make them rugs to stand on, and shrouds to bury us – is this not why we work?”

“I cannot discount all else in your strivings to make art. What of faith, of brotherhood – of love?”

“My heart rejoiced alone and sole in all my labour. Yet now it is though I hated rather all my

labour which I had taken – because I should leave it unto that man that shall be after me.”

“You mean Aurelianus.”

“I mean he.”

His eyes closed, either in tiredness or thought. The sun, ashamed to survive their light, departed with its light too.

“Yesterday night, with eyes closed like these, I thought I saw it done. These hands I held out to it and it receded, but mine eyes could see it still. O it could make all beautiful – thy faith and brotherhood and love – could augment these, enlarge them, not restrictive in concentricity but empowering – as the pebble of the ripples. When I awoke I cried to dream again.”

“This was an illusion in your dying. You were deceived.” Aldhelm next spoke with eyes unshut from fury.

“How long till thou makest an end of idle words? What knowest thou, that we know not? What understandest thou, which is not in us?”

There drifted between them in silence the meaning of their talk. “Give up control to Irenaeus Aurelianus: not to me.”

“He hath such senses as we have such; but he has such purposes as which I cannot discern. Till now I could say it goes on as my soul prompts it. Thy soul shall prompt it too – know it. Thinkst thou that he is as us? That he cares, as us? The book means nought to him – he centres himself.”

“You teach me what I have not seen.”

“Thou knowest it. Hast not thou eyes? Then it is clear.”

They paused in an air potent with decision. It weighed heavy about them,

all they had not said, all they knew the other to be thinking. The old eyes of fire were first moved to speak.

“Remember it when I am earthed. The book is all. It is our faith; it is our prayer: thou seest so.” He paused again, turning his whole self in a single heave to face Byrhthelm. “I will not be defied. Must we part on such terms? Do it – do it. I have said what I mean to say. The book is thine.” Like the twist of a laden shovel, he rolled back to his place.

A quality of silence welled up in the room. It was a moment of reverent and terrible quiet that felt like it brought, in its gentleness, so much change,

as though it were some muffled epiphany, unasked for and unheeded.

We wanted it to be more real, not so hushed and solemn

like everything we could have imagined. All was consecrate, literally holy;

and everyone wished it were not so. Everyone wished for humanity, not perfection. Not for a fitting memory, but for a living moment. Then tides of flush, and grief, and anger at the unreality of it – as if the sea, formerly so hot and impassioned, rageful, were not lapping peacefully outside, but indoors.

Awful was that ring of men about the bed, all their powers quenched and their silence everywhere,

borne in the air like disease or light. All of them, stood serried in pious ranks like sharksteeth, were made orphans that evening.

Complete night came with swift devastation. It fell round us as quick as dropped fabric. There was murmured talk and unsaid prayers. Some held each other;

some smiled. But that impassable wall of men stayed motionless, and none dared step forward, and none dared not look.

The savage beauty of the scene was somehow restful. No candles were lit

because movement seemed a dangerous heresy then; so many figures grew darker, as blankets of moonlight were drawn over the great old body

lying still in the bed. He was helpless. He was not brave. Tears and whimpers were the sudden and only sound.

There was no pain but much fear – on his part and ours. So much staring; staring and no understanding; stillness,

cold light, yet no peace. The sheets on the bed seemed to lie flat,

seemed as though no one were under them. We were there for hours. It was not fast.

His great, austere, white-bearded head, so large and pale, breathed its light out in slow terror.

We longed for it to end,

for him to be holy, cold, and still. Life struggled in him, prolonged by fear: he seemed a hunter's wounded prey, refusing to succumb to the dark, staring onwards

afeared and uncomprehending; in this too it was as standing round a sick child, gone deaf or just too young to know. Days and days passed and he clung on.

People grew bored and tired, which was not inhuman, but necessary – inevitable.

Gradually those gathered there went away, and there were fewer and there were fewer, leaving that mute, great old man, reverting to infancy, alone, and confused and scared, to die.

Early one morning with no person stood by him or hand for him to hold, Aldhelm died. None were there to fetch up the cinders of his spirits –

none to hear some final word, if there were any to be spoken. The first to wake and go back to the room found him,

and left quietly as he had come.

For each of us it was a mercy, as it was for old Aldhelm; yet though it was expected, and to a degree wanted,

an actual desire of many, we did not know we should cry so much. Ærconberht found him, saying,

“O I am a fool to weep at what I am glad of.”

A good life, and venerable, yet he lasted not the tenth of an oak. With the ancient is wisdom; and in the length of days understanding; but his labour was left for those after him;

and there was no longer hope or control over his work,

and those plans which had been made had come to nothing. All done with might, yet in vain.

The lands heaved and sweated. The tide which lapped pensive was now a bloodbeat – a pulse indiscriminate and indifferent. Those waters were passionless again.

Snow – soft static – fell. It answered not the events of death but drifted its way heedless, carrying no meaning. That seemed no world of mourning. For those still quick,

with blood still live in their being, there was even sun. Snow and sun, somehow not contrasted, but harmonious. Colourless stillness

pervaded despite the movement. Motion seemed almost merely a projection, so near to believable yet not quite there; the same way silence

could exist among whispers. Hush, then, in that bleared earthiness.

Forgetfulness spread over it, over its marble-constancy. Life housed. Hermitaging, unanimous hermitaging of spirit,

to disallow contrast – no dissonance permitted. Mornlight of peach; snow of braille.

It spoke not; it admitted no rationality. Though – he hath made everything beautiful in his time – it was not shown. Ignorance in its fury, merely, not understanding and not understood.

The static snow, its chainmail mesh, still, illuminate.

Its drift: more a texture than a movement. More harmony than independence. Daytime manifested, ashen. Some interbreeding with predawn in it. With sight in it. The specious eloquence in the unheeded beauty of the land.

The affront to have light and rare snow now.

The somehow rhetoric out there, unknowing unfeeling sterile. Animals in their pens that would sacrilegiously go on,

bleating blaspheming, flapping sensing only the new cold. Insulated as beasts are.

II

Well no that is just his great madness then, that his sensitivity makes him perceive & feel things greater than the facts of existence,

not your dramatic objective correlative but rather that the tragedy of a felled poplar might be to some as the end of a love as the loss of a friend as deaths & wars.

Your impertinence is to assume that as you feel they feel as you feel – rather may feel more – may with less in their lives have felt & seen & know more –

monks even ascetics with no things no journeys yet lives, & lives as rich as those of any.

I doubt if religion has ever been so rare in the religious as it was with us. It might be that the most fervent are most often the least.

But after the beginnings of the gospelbook the intensity of focus distorted fisheye

all orbit or periphery, as in an absorbent field, as warp to the woof of matter, of manner, in the way that when chronicling or when archiving life

certain prominences arise, as of peninsulas distracting from the glide of the shore,

of promontories in outlier, distending, unravelling the taut flight-curve of land in its shaping – as of this our days, made into or with dominance and obsession;

so music ceased and play of voices ceased,

when our choirs theretofore swollen with pious strength, with taste of moral and justice of finery

(thence silenced through indifference (lacking energy time and thus will)); our gardens, so lush of spiceplantings as of desert palace landscapes,

with their aqueducts of O of rosewater, of the honey and wives of desert

(of temptation of resistance: of the endless magnifying (amplifying) sun-lens burning ferrous passion ecstasy of deprivation's rarity,

of enjoyment's absence, of privation and its contrasting abundance – emaciation grown fat in suet in beautiful flower-rot filth of skeleton as sculpture as deranged drunken flesh inebriate

on sunlight and gold and the stench and odour of magnolia of myrtle of chrysanthemum) – made now barren but for food, no garden but allotment

but factory and as not lovers not artists in horticulture it no culture now at all but further toil and sustenance merely and greyed by this somehow even in summer,

as mud and dirt and work and ceaseless absence of pleasure, the old truth writing homeward with gutsmacking brutal verity and efficacy:

having and losing worse than lacking,

the intoxicates deprived now made to render unto their symptoms their – our – our withdrawal our grey displeasure of spirit – weary hungry unstimulated –

dull aching tedium and woe – so now flower runnels all petals merely furrowed soil, merely ploughmark and without excitement of the ancient

without the apprehension of otherness in becoming aware of medieval plough rows left still in fields to mould your step,

without romance without awe of comprehending time or sameness even in the awe of the years – only our ploughmarks our dull food our cabbage our turnip and coldwater and turf –

this now no silenced effort but moved shifted from transcendent garden artwork

from scent and flora and vines of association to yet more ready labour, waiting habit labour; and prayer almost gone entirely from us too,

made indifferent again by effort elsewhere,

seeking not even the love of eternity after the mundane

had reigned over us for the hours of each day for weeks and years on and respiteless constantly unutterably present,

it difficult now even to dream beyond the prose dreams of the day to come, when sleeping the acts of dailiness of quotidian parochial process are clone,

as you dress and wash and begin to work only to emerge senseless freezing dissatisfied not rested as when jolted on the brink of sleep's commencement,

and emerging repeat the parochial dream and its convolutions its hell prose of machination – the true affront in it the accuracy of the prediction, that the dream might know

before its proving the exactitude and precision of the forthcoming, might insult you to presume correctly (the insult always in the accuracy) the layout and design of your day, to which you must answer

with the identical therefore justifying series of feelings and actions and images – even dream but these absent, as we put all there was to life into the gospelbook.

And Byrhthelm suffering more still

from that desert wine depriving as he was deprived further than us all,

deprived of Centwine. There was one sole solace which yet remained forced peripheral – that Centwine was at least free of it now, wherever he was (in life, he meant),

whatever he was doing (in spirit; in soul). This adopted secondary liberty

felt through the created perception imagined from another was so near as to be a real emotion of Byrhthelm's.

Yet it halted: seized up before passing over into something he could cling to,

and though he felt the joy antonym to schadenfreude of happiness in happiness else, it was never enough to overcome all that with which he had to struggle,

our pain of mundanity and repetition and incarcerated potential. And he could only imagine – so it was never the full joy of: joy in joy perceived,

remaining only – stalling – the limited wingclipped delight in fancy,

and as a daydreamer he stunted gazed, knowing as we do even when in reverie that the vision the imagining remain at its closeness as plastic reckoning,

never fully convincing, never able to go beyond thought to belief and from belief create – being only forever an idea known intangible, crushingly known and comprehended.

As when the realisation of limits is unbearable. For in the knowledge dies the liberty.

So since belief, in us, had failed, we let religion lapse; and though remaining pious still, in hope, in faith,

in breadth of thought, our vastness shrank as seas recede, or waters from a fire. In making Aldhelm's gospelbook,

to lack seemed not to lack – imaginings not needing presence

to not be seen as flaw – and us in sultry staid prosaic patterning soon fell, to beat our hearts to drumbeat foreign and no longer question loss,

to never see or even feel the blankness of it all. He forged us thus.

Yes – and it was the worst thought he had ever had. It had lain there, for a long time, just as feeling.

Now that feeling was thought, and it was more painful still

because worry brought it constantly to the forefront. Byrhthelm now knew, had persuaded himself of the truth of it, that while Centwine loved him

(he could not doubt that), he did not love him fully.

And while he had been passionate, his fiercest emotion had been reserved,

always saved up for the gospelbook. Not that Byrhthelm demanded anything of him – he could love what he chose. He felt it wasn't a selfish urge

to want to be loved – surely he was more humble than that,

could bear more. But it was. That was the terrible elegance of his logic held up to him so simply and crushingly: that he wanted more,

wanted to be loved as he loved: wished Centwine could give him more:

felt not that he deserved more, but desired it. It could be said in such easy words: he wanted more love.

Of course, the usual self-destructing doubts were there.

They said it was his fault he felt unloved – he was avaricious, proud – he was not good enough to be loved so, not worthy of it –

nobody could love as he did. Centwine had said his love a thousand times and he no longer believed it. But now he was so harsh,

so, so unkind. Centwine could not help but love him.

Then he asked for too much. He felt then entirely alone in the world as he never had been.

It was as though he was the person cursed

with being the most sensitive in all the throng of humanity.

He had so much to give. The greatest heresy of his life came to his mind then,

as brief as the moment that extinguishes a candle. It was this:

there had been no suffering as his had been.

And the disobedience way back – it was nothing. They had felt nothing like this.

Because he believed then that to be unmatched in the love you had to offer was the most painful thing you could endure.

The fleeting first thought burst into then the flame of endless others. It was to stay with him as long as he lived.

If we could be free as to choose a simple moment, point, feeling, thought, that was to define a life, his would be this: the totality of failure,

his private tragedy, that he loved the man he loved altogether too much. It cost nothing – but then it wasn't willed – yet it cost everything.

For he was to give all the vitality of his life to this single feeling he believed a small perfection, and from it was to draw forever

the sadness in which his entirety was from then cast. It was to die alive. Yet – the joy. Though he never asked himself,

if Byrhthelm was to be able to live his life again he would change nothing: would take both the half-love and its anguish.

Like the other countless times he thought of these things at night, dawn rose and he had not slept. The sun, its light of horror,

was there now, and he had not closed his eyes.

He steadied himself once more

as the feelings he thought he was done with (for the moment) came back: what returned was his love of Centwine,

and the inexpressibility of the gulf between them. Sunlight reminded him of what he had been thinking, the trail: worry, sleeplessness,

day bringing on awareness of sleeplessness, the awareness calling again the worry. Tired, alone, and in love, Byrhthelm got up to start his work.

It was now the unwelcome legacy of a dead man's pride.

Of course, a monastery even a young one is a generous helping of chronicle, even if absent, even when dissolved. Even stones as yet uncarved

and near-dearth of arches had to be put in place; and in that a history

as of burial mounds raised before Christ, and neolithic monuments of rock

with stories of their own of struggles and hopes – the actual pulling of boulders with ropes, the hewing with primitive axes, tomahawking off the scalp of the earth's mantle,

the rolling then of those boulders on logs across marches and hills over months or years maybe for the unknown mystic divine purpose believed as herd but inspired perhaps but individual.

And monasteries have builders, architects:

even when seeming no more than a composite of ruins; such masons either hiredhands, continental possibly,

in strange fashions and distant-voiced, working in the essential hostility of the foreign for the sake of wages; or the monks the masons,

fumbling untrained yet inspired, knowing what they worked at would be a ruin before it was a building, yet striving with the endless

sometimes hidden awe of God, only a degree less powerful

than the heights of human will (deity never able to manifest fully in men's hearts) – but ceaseless unfatigued, with from time to time blistered hands broken backs hunger but always unflagging souls, the true purpose of an inspired man really unquenchable at its ultimate base, in spite of all circumstance running contrary to its fulfilment.

So the architect: professional or elegant dilettante, the latter the incoming abbot or from another house, with much learning and little knowledge,

having read and rarely experienced, yet, too,

inspired to a divine level, sunfailing amateurishly endless, with a vision out of the grasp of practical application;

with aspiration overreaching; with results consequent likely to disappoint. Still there was all that building to be unearthed, as it is the marble removed from the statue and not the statue from the marble made.

I don't know really but the presence – the presence in the mountain chain of the caravan, bearing with it the elegance, the grace carried

as if visible palpable, feasibly contained in lockbox or encaged; the heats rising in sunset passions, of sand, of dusts;

the warm night ecstasies of hope – hush warmth, gentle of touch; the existence on a plane in parallel of the body and stars,

jewelled corpus as in neatness, as in a thing ordered well (filing cabinet of constellations); harmony more likely in line than of spheres –

eccentric concentric together and apart nonetheless dissonant – inequality in containing and in overlinking, subsuming – interlace rather the greater of rationalities, rubbing shoulders

but with firm comradeship and evenness. As rows of equal windows. As pillars in the colonnade. Not that order mattered to the gentle hush (what beauty in disorder! the loving caress so eminent in chaos);

but ah, pleasing if one thing only; satisfying if one thing only – likely a part of the bloodbeat rhythm that inheres in humankind, allowing marching, allowing the definition of the second, allowing miles to be as they are and quite the same

in all times and regions no matter if called leagues or klicks. That generality that everything tends towards semitones,

all the infinite gaps as displeasing and ephemeral

as the recurring of sixes in contrast with the halves and wholes. Passions like order – order fulfilled is a passion of itself.

Under Byrhthelm feverishness became hush, subsided like decay falls in indifference, with the accumulation of moment, the stirring to nullity of the efforts unmoving.

Striving without motive normalised through the same steps of all fated normality – the normalcy of time – the normalcy of repetition, of pattern, of habit and process – no romance of adventuring sunset – no wilful conquering achieve –

no unrote changing blur in excitement; only instead was there sameness, and in that sameness quiet. Silver sunlight fell through windows each day with beauty unheeded, no matter of mosaic of stained glass,

no matter of dappling varicoloured brilliance in emulated sapphire ruby, of heraldry blood of waters and fields, of pales of saints,

of saintly paleness temptation quelled in the muted,

of the gesture of sun paint glass floor, the refracted feeling

and kaleidoscope transmuting by which we might attempt in ways small and hopeful to understand some equally small piece of our ongoing –

that a topaz lozenge in an unvisited window meant more to one than lovers,

meant maybe more in the world's course than empires in entirety, from swell to dust to footnote, the topaz lozenge perhaps a distincter heading in glossaried life,

a memory less faint or fact and experience better known, with greater claims on breadth and life. This sameness and hush impalpable, hated even,

felt as indifferent even or unfelt at all – yet there its power. For in paleness and quiet a certain strength dwelling –

the beauty of minimal order and ordered minimum –

richness of feeling in earth and earthscent, in the approach of the body to vast apprehensions – and perfection in failing, joys drawn from tragedy,

as smiles exchanged for too much expense nonetheless,

as daring ongoing nonetheless – as the nonetheless attitude of women and men, and the ongoing great graceful indifference and inertia of living,

of such wonderful character, such a reputable thing.

For the portent to come from the black – for the auspice of cloudied dawn. Such greatness in immoral in dull in working at toil.

Something of that remained under Byrhthelm. Something of the riposte to cruelty setting the motion like boat kicked from shore of the rarefied view,

of the nascence of empathy, the priest made in that moment as monks made in comparables (with us the rejection in petulance of grandmother's gift;

the beauty and taunting of hounds;

the heavy measure on the soul of perceiving cripples and homelessness; the injustice in daily acts and the contempt of authority for meekness; the burning of the precious; the misunderstandings, endless) –

these reiterated the growth external of systems of good – comprehending learning debating knowing, it the sublimest to struggle (toil to conclude and toil to go on). Byrhthelm felt,

though he knew there was no scaffold abreast his reasoning, that there was majesty only made in the difficulties of the world. He felt – and made us feel,

as Aldhelm had failed to – that ease and heroism were not the quintessence of life – that exploration, that the epic facet, were not worth extolling since not bounded.

He had learned to champion defeat, and not the grand defeat

of sudden tragedy, but the slow irrepressible ongoing endless cumulative defeat coming with years and changelessness and submission –

that as such the hush of perfect and the pale light of what was perfect somehow in their fumbling weakness superseded the triumphs of vibrancy,

and could rinse away gold and crimson with the gentle stifled blankness of acceptance. That faith was to know: to be convinced of futility and to allow it;

to no longer resist, and to strive ever into failure, restless, without comfort,

swelling always into nothing. There was final good. To sigh was all the beauty of perfection.

There the reality behind it, triumph coming even by choosing to suffer defeat.

Certainly to eighty (seventy-eight? seventy-seven?) men

all swaying in one similar belief and affected monomaniac behaviours,

it seemed so for the briefness making up most of each of them that they worked toward a book.

He was ageing, and alone, and the labour of day upon week upon year worked to quieten his soul, suppressing it in imitation of the quietude of what was now his life. Love had been liberty; but its absence,

a period far longer than its presence, made it almost a mocking tease of freedom. He sought, and failed, to know if it were better to have never loved.

Because it was like being granted sight only to be blinded – but he had never felt the lack before. The taste of perfection

had tempted him too fully and he could not undo the bitterness now of the contrast. They had spoken and written of the ache of the heart,

but he had never been able to give himself to complete sympathy;

now, in empathy, he blasphemed to believe his the hardest life that there ever had to be lived.

Magnifying proximity causes all to think our cares uniquely hurtful – still the greater sorrow is to see the pains lived and to be lived

by the vast ongoing process of humanity. In our defeat the most sensitive come to believe that mankind is no more than cyclical reproducing despair.

All heights had fallen from intensity except pain. Even the ire

formerly set borne by Irenaeus had dulled to antipathy with the work of days

and the crush of years. Longing even ceased, requiring effort of feeling to support it; only the sour active emotions remained,

the ones you sought to do away with but which kept on, unheeded. Of these, only nostalgia was not hated.

Its bitter wistfulness provided the bleak crutch of blissful remembering.

For this alone Byrhthelm kept the gospelbook on its course of ceaseless progress. With passion gone, indifference broke

the resistance of the other men. It was by now the routine of decades,

and even dreaded habits of no meaning cling when they have lived with us so long. Broken decoration, of spirit hueless and goodness empty,

continued to be created. The work was sprawling, ruinous now – had no focus, no end. Aldhelm had cultivated

an expansive esoteric encyclopaedic quality,

wanting the gospelbook universal and encompassing. But it was rational, and he had yoked order out of broadness. Like the landscape garden,

he had striven after the studied wild;

a human wilderness, controllable, definable, – limited. Now, with Byrhthelm's endless effort of dessicate passion, it was the waste of the garden of the deceased,

as though the unknown elderly had died and never been found, their lawns and roses had overgrown to suffocating strengths

of thick dry horror, reaching growing spiralling endless, grasping smothering. Aldhelm had sought grace in the untamed; Byrhthelm, untamed, had lost grace.

Discipline was there, but in working on without purpose

they effected to create tragic bloated failure as dementia has been known to cause the begetter of pâté de foie gras to stuff and stuff again

the shrieking grainsick thrice-fed goose.

It was not beauty and indifference mingled

that we perceived in the gospelbook but beauty and fear – the fear to stop, the fear of known but undemarcated failure.

Indifference drove us but the image produced was one refracted by the twisted warp of motives.

Sometimes we wondered if the manuscript that Denewulf had brought back with him (that set the project in motion that started the obsession),

had been produced in comparable conditions. It didn't matter that our scribes

worked in the cold of an island monastery, and that there was something of summer sunlight and ocean warmth in that continental work. Art and man's passion

are not so easily deterred by climate; and the relative latitude of a pen

has few effects on its dribblings, the ink's temper much more wholly determined

by the hand that makes its tracings. No thing so changeable as snow or heat really varies any sincere expression.

Yet purpose, motive, outpouring need – these altered works;

so the questions asked of us were how did the men live whose designs

brought about Denwulf's foreign book? Was there another Aldhelm, with different voice and features and manner, but same monomania?

We thought all the greatness of the world yet created must have been made in struggle and fury.

This was not unpleasantness but it had within it a blacker tone – as if fulfilment needed fuller texturing, more dimensions. His love

for Centwine of course created the rarefied anguish of any accurate precise real feeling – as of passion for music or painting or writing,

which in its fullness necessarily heralded some form of struggle.

The thing could not be enjoyed without this roundness, this fact that enabled its completion. So with voices, which in their full elegant thrill of feverish singing had that texture –

it was fragility – quavering, a quality seemingly flawed yet making more perfect. As if soared to heights a voice, like the eagle like the lark,

made no perfect course, repeating rather itself or helical – inoptimal inefficient – and there the greatness in striving. As with love then,

these flaws enabled a perfection to be. For where is pleasure without labour? – creating contrasts (raggedness of cloud and seafoam distinct yet of aspect comparable) and by opposing complementing (found in duality of pastels (blue; pink)

and in gem and setting (gold; garnet) and in temperament and character of persons discrete yet pendant (shy; gregarious. Perceptive; indifferent. Graceful; handsome (the two distinct, beauty being in grace and nobility in the handsomeness but scarcely overlapping))).

So the struggle in the wonderful opposition, the contrast as boundful as the faces of a coin – shown in way of example two theorised ripostes of tone to the same source,

say an unelucidated summons: Byrhthelm at once displaying paired feelings,

of the tremor anticipatory and curious, and its counterpart, the wilful resistance, the closing-off in reaction to unknown, and therefore the fear in disregard:

this the childish kicking rebellious denial as forceful as the propulsion of ship from drydock, the fervour the warm expansive embracing of the world, its contents;

the latter akin to the purpose of locksmiths, privacy resistance security and curiosity's opposite.

From curiosity, then, the frogspawning openness of myriad anxieties and potentialities, anticipations (this the mania alike to anxiety's suppression),

whereby all routes might be exhausted in Byrhthelm's whirring analytical way, the hope the dark, the clumsy the eloquent,

the supernovae consciousness and an anterior minute cantilevered pending.

From one to its end in a full scale, comprehensiveness was achieved (of precluding). Yet for Centwine, the same cause might create only in him a brief wonder,

dead to remembering immediately and in waiting

(not even that – not dormant: absent) until needed actually.

So their contrast: and from it, flaw; and from that, the brilliance.

And he allowed for his soul to be beautifully illegible – currents of nostalgia sitting in it (under it) as riptides.

Because all his knowledge taught him

that it did not need to be personal, yet here it seemed to, seemed that whatever small wonders going on now

as only intense flashes in remembering (as both alight and fierce) were for him merely, needing his life and his experience as fuel (as more than timber for burning – as firelighter or flint and steel).

So warm musk of fresh morning bread

or full meaning of sweeping hand on arm could come back,

be art and love even in memory, yet for him alone. Byrhthelm's difficulty was his openness to the world,

unwilled as it may have been, yet inviting him to want to let others into,

to the extent of being a part of, any facet of the interesting sensations he had lived to collect. And to Centwine it applied, and to their ongoing gospelbook it applied.

Somehow the harmony only existed in the potential for it to be shared. Or, he felt at least, knowing the experience of another

and allowing them to know the experience of you was the depth of the world's beauty.

In his reliance on memory, act subsided. So deed into thought, he lacked only word (it tried at in his work, itself not action).

For Byrhthelm smashed ice skittering over pond was one with now all wistful gesture – whether the somehow pout of backhand on hip reclining;

the overswing of walking arm ferocious; whether the illimitable strength of certain strides; the monument of imperious sitting, with back upright and armbones angular,

with hands turned flat in calm command; the bob or the weave of some shoulders in advance, apelike, brutally elegant, enviable (as athleticism is enviable, as the grace of power);

and the insouciant childlike nonchalant unknowing instinctive motion common to us yet unique to us all

(maybe hand through hair or rub of nose); whether the aquiline turn of head,

tendons bowing under force, newfound pressure producing eloquent term of movement, like being addressed, like gentle good of recognition or address.

So there it came to him – the hate to still love. That like sun

or moonlight, it was upon him, unheeded, and he was made to welcome it, all degrees and unconditionally, even if he needed a little more day,

even if he asked for a little more night. They had tried so hard to work out what they felt, extract its nature, theorise – but it was barely memory now, no longer mattered now,

for even if understood or ignored it would feel the same.

His every thought seemed so passive and so willing to give up to this –

to thinking of the pain and in thinking be its own begetter. He had known the fullness of love, and it was to him, as he hoped it was for all, a brink from which you could not step back;

and he would not dare it be different; and he could not bear it be so.

And that in this, love and pain were hardly two edges of the same blade,

but were of the same keenness and union, meaning that one was in the other, meaning that inextricable. So things seemed never as was taught and learned, weren't distinct, but in enmity with common understanding

the actual facts that life led you to showed that most things were murkier, and merged.

Though Byrhthelm had overlived his being with Centwine,

in the sense of longevity outpacing togetherness, this was no separation. He meant to die in spirit as life had died before him,

yet that was death embodied, living blank. Desiring end –

his now too fierce need – yet demanding stasis – his unfelt feeling. Since to feel was not to know, and yet to feel was its own knowing – not as sight, or but as sight of sights unseen

(as knowledge swims in deeps, so the joy or good or seeming paradisical sleeps among the known) –

he felt and knew (though did not know).

It was the contrary path to all his paths of thought (his teasings-out, his learned reasons) that said the heart was lower, the soul was lesser.

But as he felt it so he knew all the content of the world could be in sunlight – and thus that though apart, he could be with Centwine and without.

Because too much of the fabric of living was given up to that

for him to ever disengage – there was no divorcing – there was no absence. He felt alone but could never be.

This would not be so had he not been left. Since this perverse relief came with to suffer. Since the final thing which spoke to him

told that surety such as this would need another surety for ballast –

and that balanced with absence and desertion was comfort somehow, peace somehow. He hated it but it gave comfort, and while wanting to rage he was calmed.

He too had known the heights of love, making him of type with his lover,

and all the plenitude of lost lovers for now and always. He too was left behind,

and sought and drew his peace from those in this he was alike. Not bitter treating of and seeking relish in bitter – but community, peace and community

of being where others had been, and being where others would come. And as he still had the lover's adoption of lovers' cares, the taking-on in emulation (and in empathy) of joys perceived and heartaches felt,

the harmony came forth in his knowing Centwine was feeling the same. Feeling, as he did, solidarity with the ranks of all the other lonesome.

Masts on the horizon where sea cloud.

They were not to be welcomed as they had been elsewhere, thought traders merely. Brother Adriaticon saw – had been in the gardens – knew from talk of the other islands. The fear was steadying. He moved deerlike floating nearly went to sit,

sat on the water's shore. He clumped up sands in each hand which were as ashes. The sloth of the doom made its terror greater. As with life –

the gunshot the explosion the traincrash the stroke each preferable

to the deathbed only for their generosity of swiftness. At least speed seemed care. The masts six of them perhaps slow tedious, slow tedious unheeding;

lazily uncaring unthinking. Brother Adriaticon sat like stone in the rain's gently, the gently – the weather so gentle and O so present so current –

now – not soon – here, ready. It steadied his fear. He wasn't looking almost

but gazed out at sea, hands endlessly clumping at the sand mindless and rhythmic,

dropping clumping dropping. Someone went out to find him and saw him sat and saw that he saw and knew, and came in to tell.

You could not understand the gentle calm of the fear. Its slowness matching its cause. Steadying.

We came out together and stood by Brother Adriaticon and looked to see, and saw.

Six masts a touch larger now than when first seen. It was twenty minutes maybe an hour maybe; none of us knew ships. Not long

and yet our calm monotony had readied us for this calm monotony and though fear remained steady it was not a difficult fear to have.

We let it come, as they came. It was our island home our safety

so to stay or to flee meant the same. But calmer to stay. It was yet steadier. We stood watching, gazing really. What we found was that it was dull.

To fear so long – to see what comes – the end the worry the anxiety, it bored you. Not like a habit of will physical bodily

like the getting out of bed like the thirty years fifty years of writing

that easy repeat of conscious nerved willed forced one foot in front of the other monotony; not that – a difficult impossible unconscious monotony,

beyond will; you couldn't maintain it as the body cannot maintain

to be awake forever to wake forever. It was like love or like hate and you could not keep it forever could not maintain it,

the true grudge not able to be at all. Your striving could be maintained you could will it you could walk the country without sleep in one go; but you could not maintain that, those functions, beyond the will.

You could not keep your heart beating or ask it to stop. So the fear, the dull slow fear, was calming and steadying. You felt pity

though at least intellectualised pity because you had some degree of control in – so you thought what a waste that the flowers were in bloom

they would not be cared for anymore; but you did not see any waste in the loss of your body because it had been so long

since we were able to pity ourselves like prisoners dead to all but routine. And still the masts were the six of them yet larger.

Black like when reduced crucibled is left green. Black the coming-on,

it tidal, the approach. The day was nightlike, but in a blank way, not dark.

Like absence. And approach was absence too as somehow presence was leaving. Yes, that was what we believed, or Byrhthelm anyway,

he of us anyway, that presence was like leaving,

going and current being one, you see, it was shown you, we'd felt it – gone was here, going was there.

Yes, the masts grew closer; it was as if Centwine were coming back.

Six of them: hundreds. Their presence was an absence.

In a way what was shore or sea? Brother Adriaticon

still clumped at the sand and let it drop. Though to let was to will. To succumb was to will. The pity of the flowers the –

O the night of day the – O the six masts Centwine closer six O.

And Wulfrið constellation-constant, of the among not even heeding really, not sensing really, fearless to the extent of deadening –

alike to Brother Adriaticon in this yet so contrary in their perceiving, but outlet response so similar, almost the same,

he too impassive sat, all whilst the six masts the Centwine

the horizon the approach the enlargening. And of all thought of past nothing now – nothing there nor yet possible,

proximity causing currentness and fear causing currentness

(though fed by upcoming). But then despite them notwithstanding Byrhthelm was the most inscrutable in eye in act. Of us all he (even counting the silent) spoke least, heard least, but seemed to see in and of

some inner depth of Centwine and of six masts fractionally closer now fractionally nearer, in sight in thought and yet in absence and fear.

Centwine – O – the going away the separation now

the sea a mile perhaps two hard to say so close yet unreachable for now seeming. Onward the coming of memory; then newness of the old;

the reseeable knowns of the past their feltness the feeling itself. The torture exquisite of waiting of the uncertainty ever-present in anticipation yet bringing with it thus in the unknown

the worse torture of racklike gallows waterboard thumbscrews of waiting without the potential – of the knowing, failure almost,

of nothing to be. And the knowing of the lost yet once joyous known, smiles and touches of the hand and speech and laughter forgotten – so wishing to be remembered – so willed – yet gone.

Like the exact appearance of in the absence the six masts the appearance of Centwine.

The exact serried row of timber, oaks leaning to cross the sea

and the exact dreamlike vague gaze of the happy young here Centwine. The masts just closer now. And he still gone. Wulfrið sat impassive

and Brother Adriaticon clumping the sand. But it seemed to take forever and you could no longer think away the dullness

the hateful inertia of waiting we could not bear it

those of us less strong became agitated and alive with movement

not from fear but from the need to move when bored. So some paced the sands, up and down, up and down, with the stillness

and the clumping and the approach all by then the six masts

the lost quite image of how the dreamy Centwine vague gaze or eyes affected you and sat in his features – or was it mobile did it dart did it deuce advantage?

the terror of the unmeant loss, to live a century more might cause his name to go too and all image as you lose the names of those in books. But last to go

a millennium perhaps would be the feelings far beyond petty rationalisations and insignificant fact of empiricisms – beyond the what and therefore

there was the feeling – that last to go preserved still as knowing

of the ongoing of the poetry ever when the words went even when the place read O the poet's name went. What would last of us would be how we felt.

It was in itself as it was a feeling not a reasoned thing to believe

but heralding truths universal like superstition like the talk of mothers with grandmothers.

The six masts Centwine closer, more away. Byrhthelm still grasped just the vision if its fading might have blurred particulars. But the – O –

the O Centwine the six masts – but the dreamy gaze was going,

ninety percent gone like the names of childhood friends like teachers' names.

It would go and after the sight would be the greater particulars of name and age and location – and these thank God

we would not outlive the latter and then we would lose the feeling

after it all and that would not survive of us. No life no art had immortality in it; it did not matter what strangers mere descendants thought only that – O –

only that the present and your known past were known and felt.

Once deadened in feeling did it matter in memory dearth that some thing, words stone paint, would last and be seen and admired and read of if –

if Centwine could not see and admire if the absence of the O the six masts the –

Yet the pacing and clumping went on there was present. You could believe there was perhaps cause for optimism –

the gospelbook the habit it was Aldhelm we had known his ongoing had never mattered his body and dark eyes he was beyond that and here was the culmination

even if destroyed, it culminated even like offspring progeny all those he had affected all were only to him even if forgotten it was the exact place in the great game of causes that mattered

the precision of chessmove and the patience of hierarchy primogenitive – O – yes! the divine right of kings the superstition it was true, was all true

and the presence absence Centwine – O! Inches nearer

or was it half a mile was it a decade further? The clumping went on

the pacing the stillness all unheeded all passive unnecessary seemingly pointless and yet. Want want need desire – the O. How was this stillness on the shore to be withstood?

They were closer yes the tragic pity of the flowers

were closer and the pathos of the six masts. Come to us unheeding unquiet. Yes unquiet not disquiet fear still gone us all each dulled.

There would have to be some action we necessitated movement

we could not wait like this. Some began to go inside the O – the gospelbook – the Aldhelm the Centwine. How could we leave it –

They landed anyhow when the masts were upon us. Landed – splashed about in the shallows with slow dream fury,

and for moments, fractions of,

shown to be visibly tremulous when seeing our calm,

any fearlessness or pride baulking at unforeseens even when indomitable, even when it was the inexorable berserk against

our bare piety and dumbness. It was this quality of surprise at some braveness or stupidity perceived in us

that checked just momentarily their unquenchable onrush;

but it was ever oncoming and only muffled briefly, as, protruding rock slows, imperceptibly, a river.