Evidence

I told her how after finding out our mother had been up in court when we were small I’d … looked up stuff about courtrooms online, and … read there that judges’ and lawyers’ wigs had traditionally been made and still more often than not were made of horsehair. … It means horses have been a little bit present at every important thing, just or unjust, carried out in a courtroom in this country since the seventeenth century.

Wow, she said. So many bits of dead gone horse on so many powerful people’s heads, yeah? Imagine real horses in there. Imagine them there at the trial … We should all be being judged and decided about by horses ...    Ali Smith, Gliff

A bronzewing pigeon makes its see-through raft of twigs less than a metre off the ground in a little juniper tree in the garden and lays two eggs there. The bird sits for a few days, but then I find the nest skewed and abandoned, one egg gone. Probably a currawong or snake found it. A female devil is raising pups next door under T’s brother’s house so it could even be her, or maybe the big male we found dead by the road a few nights ago, killed by a car. But though pigeon nests always look impossibly flimsy and obvious, many of them do make it past their predators. Other birds are on their second or third hatchings, to judge by the beakfuls of fibre and fur I see being carted around by honeyeaters and finches and sparrows.

Banjo frogs chorus on the dam, three or four at a time – the most I’ve heard for maybe 30 years. It’s a wonderful plucked-string sound, low and sweet. In ones and twos, over the last few years the frogs have returned to the hill after a complete silence of 25 years or more. Chytrid fungus, spread around the world by African clawed frogs (themselves immune) used for pregnancy testing, wiped out whole populations of amphibians everywhere, but some seem to be recovering where habitat is still available. Perhaps that’s what happened here – banjo frogs that had immunity are breeding and finding their way back into depopulated areas. Other species – froglets and tree frogs – seemed unaffected by the fungus, if that’s what it was, and never suffered the same collapse.

Summer has properly arrived but the days here are still beautifully temperate, apart from one leap above 30 degrees that only lasted a few hours. The southern ocean breathes up over the island and pushes back heatwaves that bake the mainland and make the burning there unstoppable. In the morning I go out into a green world full of perfume and birdsong, knowing that a few days of hot wind could bring fires here. We’re always only heartbeats away from turmoil and this season makes that reality impossible to ignore.

Bioluminescence levels are kicking up in the seas around the island as they do each year in the warm months. This time there’s extra here in the southeast because, in addition to nutrient load from fish farms and agricultural runoff, the chocolate factory upstream from the city released a huge pulse of sugar into the stormwater and sewage treatment system, overwhelming the bacteria in the settlement ponds and sending u
ntreated sewage into the river and its estuarine networks. In response to all that food, vast blooms of noctiluca scintillans, the single-celled organism that causes the glow, have become visible as red tide in the daytime and sea sparkle at night, magically beautiful, clothing every ripple, every jumping fish in a sheath of light.

At the solstice, clear sun and then soft rain in the evening. My birthday, and I’m remembering how once, during deep massage, I slipped into the embodied sensations of my birth room – feelings of horror, of damage suffered and inflicted, of abandonment, shame – an ancient tumult that had informed my every breath but from deep in, below consciousness till now. And simultaneously, in the present I understood that I had misapprehended – yes there was damage, and my birth had caused it – in that room my mother was bleeding, close to death, and I had been set aside not in condemnation but because of the urgent need to look after her.

I dream I’m shown two juxtaposed scenes whose elements correspond to each other. One is inside a paleolithic rock shelter. A horned skull has been placed on a ledge in the wall of the cave. The bottom half of the skull has been cut away so that the cranium and horns can be worn as a headdress that comes halfway down the forehead of the wearer. The horns spring from the middle of the cranium, forming a kind of parting down the middle, like those of a mountain sheep or goat, or a water buffalo. In the second scene, a wig sits on a stand in a judge’s rooms. A few days after having this dream, I come across the passage from Ali Smith’s Gliff, quoted at the beginning of this post. Can we learn to let the tender animal bodymind bear witness from the bench and in the dock? Can we amend what is judged and decided in the world, our court where evidence blossoms in cacophony and in silence? Can we let go the shame that burns and freezes us passive?

The first extravagance of roses has ended. The broad beans are finished, and raspberries and boysenberries and cherries are ripe, and redcurrants. Black currants are just beginning to darken. It’s midsummer herb harvest time. I missed the elderflowers this year but that means there’ll be more berries to pick later. Someone gives me dried flowers of St John’s Wort – soother of nerve pain, healer of burns – and I make a brandy tincture. Haymaking is in full swing; as I walk a track mowed in the pasture to show the mowers the outline of the cut, tiny grey-green grasshoppers and glossy black crickets jump away ahead of me.

Can we bring our whole selves to judgement? Darkness falls and we wade the shelving lip of our deep bay, each step a chaos of light, each wave edged in fire. Can we bear to meet the haloed creature that rises up in us? Can we greet the star that rides the swell?

 

Reference

Ali Smith. Gliff. Hamish Hamilton, 2024, pp. 126–27.