English Graveyard: Native American Mass Grave

At death we are;

Laid to rest, and gone forward,

Joined with God when fallen asleep,

Answering the call heard whilst resting in peace,

Departed from this world, carried away from us,

With our names and deeds and a loving memory set in stone;

Anything but dead.

In death they were;

Laid to rest atop each other in a shallow pit,

Gone forward but pushed down,

Joined with God, but forgotten by man,

Answering the call from those lost before them,

Resting in peace after dying in slaughter,

Carried away upon a tide of violence,

Departed from their world so that others may rape it.

Even in death, only the victor's voice can be heard.

The Weathered Gravestone

I don't know you and I never will. As time worked on you, brought you inevitably to death, it now works upon the memory of you; flaking your name from the stone pages of past time, and drawing those who spoke of you up the highest hill to lie by your side; trapping with them your name, sealed within their still lip's, as they are sealed within wood. The same fate awaits me; though I never believed it when I was younger, not as I do now; I am not immortal. The ground that covers me will sink down, burying what remains of me beneath six foot of earth and generations of new blood, and in time I will fade from the world completely.

Heat shimmers off the hillside in the distance, carrying the cooler moisture trapped in the damp earth that surrounds you into the atmosphere; ascending into the sky like a spirit, forming a heaven of clouds carried across the world on a high wind to an unknowable place, only to return again to help bring new life; dropping into the ocean, the evolutionary Eden of our world. The splintered sheets that hang from the front of your gravestone are the living space of a plethora of spiders; their tiny hairs finding purchase on the smooth sides of your domed sheet of rock; perhaps they cling to your name, so worn away I cannot see it; I only know that any part of what was once you lies here from the sinking ground, like the only scar your passing left was marked in dirt. The Earth remembers you, the stone recalls you, the animals know you, the rain and wind carry you; you are welcomed too both sea and soil. What's a memory or a name too you now?

Meeting William Fry: Died on the Ninth of April 1885.

I lie down in the rich grass next to William; six foot and ninety-eight years stretch between my life and his death. We share a common journey to this point, up a steep hill to rest amongst the trees and a crowd of other souls. The hill wares this resting place like a crown; each gravestone a peak around its rim, each soul a gem glinting in the warm sun; as if the hill had been inaugurated into a deathly monarchy; a silent, stationary king of death, looking out in all directions across sea and land, searching for the points where life vanishes. I lay my hand upon the relief that marks where William's remains lie beneath the soil, a hillock of earth upon a hill, a reflection of its surroundings; a mimicry reflection of the life around it. I imagine how his hand would have felt to have held, what his life would have been to have lived. I know nothing of him save the sparse epitaph engraved upon his stone; "In loving memory of William Fry; Died on the 9^th of April 1885. " In the midsts of life we are in death."" I am in the midsts of death, with my hand resting on what is left of the life of William Fry. I begin to feel the cold set in with the fall of the sun over the shifting water; I walk back down the slope; this is my journey, not William Fry's; his journey has just begun.

In Memory of William Fry: Died on the Ninth of April 1885.

From Memory's of Peter Peasey: Born on the Ninth of April 1983.

Graveyards, Boatyards, and the Waters of Chaos

Many meters bellow me, the sea that brought us life laps at the shore that sustains us; its gray water like the fur of Coyote; randomly ruffling in the high winds. Each eddy and twist claims more of the beach and leaves behind a fragment of a distant land's soil and spirit; how often does each grain undertake this voyage, and how long does each stay on the shore? A voice that fades with the waves tells me that this is the seas secret; these decisions lie in its hands, whilst its fingers stroke unthinkingly at the land. To the right of me are the ordered lines of buildings and roads, a patchwork of civilisation laid across an uneven bed. I pull a blanket round my shoulders for security and protection from the wind, but somehow it works its way through the quilt, cutting at me with a terminal chill. Up here I am like God looking out over Chaos and Order, and like God I am surrounded by the dead; souls on a voyage back across the same waters that gave birth to them, each in a wooden vessel beneath the shovelled earth, their tomb stones masts erected to catch the inescapable, unending wind. Looking out I try to grasp a vision of what lies across the water, but I am denied understanding by the uncertain weather of these days; gray clouds fill my eyes, winning the battle against the Suns efforts to illuminate; a soft brick wall between man and angles. I think I hear footsteps in the water far bellow; an ambivalent foxtrot of soft pads against the surf, (the Devil and God have four feet between them), but when I listen again all I can hear is the creaking sound of the boats in the yard, straining at their moorings with the pull of the tide. Like my companions, I will one day take up that voyage, part-exchanging my stone house for a stone sail, leaving my shore and myself like casting off ties, to follow those padding feet to the embrace of the creator.

Response to the headdress

My father had a kinaesthetic watch, one that is powered by movement. When he died it stopped; I inherited it and strapped it around my wrist. It began ticking again within the day, but the thing that drove it, my father's heart beat, could never be replaced. I could read the time from it, but could never stop thinking of my father whenever I did. It felt as though I had stolen time from him; like I had taken his heartbeat straight from his chest. It wasn't mine to read. It now lies in a draw in my bureau, silent. It's no longer a watch; it's now a memorial to my father's spirit, its original power source and meaning can never be replaced, and with the passage of the time it marks it has changed and become something more than just a time peace.

 

Like the headdress of the Native American, sitting in a display cabinet in a British museum, my father's watch is an epitaph to a time and spirit not so much lost, as remarkably changed; evolved to something new. It can be worn by anyone, but the spirit it belongs to and the notion it embodies can never be replaced. Wearing my father's watch means I can read the time, but I will never see my father again.

A Square Foot of Conigar Quarry

I look out to the North; a seemingly endless expanse of flat farmed land, like the line of an exclamation stretched across my vision; endless beauty with a greasy punctuation of towering chimneys and Escher's pipelines on the horizon. The blue sky opens above me; water in the dustbowl where I stand; the minute pebble. The fine brown grit beneath my feat bears the scars from a wetter time and an encounter with a pack of BMX; rutted and gullied as if the logic and imagery of this place was fractal; running an identical and recurrent pattern all the way down its spiralling DNA; I'm a part of that DNA; as inseparable as the highest tree clinging on for dear life to a pile of boulders; or the rusted remains of the car lying in the shallow pool deep in the bowls depths; its mettle jutting like tank traps from the water sends spiralling ochre's and reds in outward ripples. I sit at the edge of the tallest ridge dangle my feet over the abyss and watch a parade of ants marching methodically through the rivulets running to the edge, industriously stripping an empty chocolate wrapper; reclaiming territory forever changed by the invader. I smoke a cigarette, enjoying the mixture of nicotine and clean air that fills my mouth and lungs. I feel clear; I understand for just a few moments that I can take on the world and win; that even my scars say something of my beauty, and something just feels inherently at peace. I put my hand in the remains of a nearby fire; blackening it on the thick sooty remains, narrowly avoiding a cut on the standard shards of protracting glass.

 

We would set fires here of a night, sending flickering embers on an ascending dance into the heavens, marring the illumination from the distant industry; whilst the stars opened out forever above us, beckoning and reasserting their dominance of light. We would share more there than anywhere else; exchanging stories and anecdotes between us, over flames and through hushed voices; later some of you lost that awe, that fascination and attention; you grew up and I can never forgive you for leaving me behind your exhausting drive; pumping senselessly and heading nowhere. We were all heading somewhere once, why did we all drive over the precipice, and why have only some of us recovered from the shock as we hit the bottom?

 

You were always a foot to the floor type, driving with a fearlessness that inspired me; I coveted your friendship through pure admiration; now you pace your massive four bedroom house like a declawed lioness, walking yourself into a cocktail party held on the end of a mousetrap. Did you feel the snap across your neck when you elected yourself a ringmaster? I always wanted to be like you because you seemed so free of straight lines, but now you have barred yourself from that, easing off the power and falling in at the back of the queue. Perhaps you were always there; perhaps I just needed an icon to worship and emulate; and perhaps you wanted to be just like me and everyone else; different. You don't talk to me now; suddenly I have fallen bellow your class as you trade artists for programmers, freedom fighters for terrorists. But still, you left your mark; or rather I marked myself with you, a line in my mind to help form the direction of my trail blazing. There was never a sadder loss to security than you.

“Eloquence belongs to the conqueror”; my first memory of the American Indian Other.

When I was little, like all young children I would forever be lost in my own fantasy world. It’s as if my imagination went into overdrive in an attempt to grow up and be the dominant, adult party. I wanted the trappings of adult life; after all, adults were in charge. So a box became a car, paper became money, and a long card tube became a gun. Later these were replaced by purpose built toys, such as my prized third generation action man, his plastic hands long since eroded and replaced with dollops of my mother’s clay. I once got into trouble with my father for dressing him in black and crafting a small swastika armband for him. I placed him at the end of our concrete garden path and threw stones at him, making ricochet noises for a miss and a scream for a hit. Unfortunately for me, I wasn’t seen doing this, instead I was caught by my grandmother, who had lived through the Second World War, as I walked back into the house still carrying my plastic “Nazi effigy”, and my game was taken out of context. She took me to my father and I explained myself; he was less concerned than my grandmother, evidently having not been involved in “The War” provided him with a less emotional stand-point. After my explanation was relayed back to my Nan, everything was fine.

So many of my games centred on warfare and combat, I suppose this is fairly typical of boys; an ancient genetic hardwire teaching us how to hunt and defend ourselves.

There was no shortage of toys when I was a child, my grandmother worked in a toy shop when I was very young and would often bring home gifts to win my favour or indulge her own sense of wellbeing. Once she bought a Cowboys and Indians play set; a sheriff’s badge, pistol and hat for the budding colonist roughrider, and a bow and arrow and cheap plastic headdress for the young native, all wrapped in tight film against a card backer; the image on the board showed two smiling cartoon children, wearing the attire and pointing their imitation weapons at each-other.

That cannot have been my first experience since I had already decided which I would be; the victorious cowboy, revolver in hand and sheriffs badge pinned upon thick denim; civilisation against the wilderness and its wild inhabitants. This caused a conflict with my brothers who also identified more with the hero lawmaker than the warrior Indian. Our dispute settled we ran around the garden slapping our mouths and making the well-established, universally-stereotyped Indian war call. When one or the other was “shot” we would perform a dramatic dying scene; waving a hand in front of the wound to simulate the blood jetting from the vein. This was perfectly acceptable.

Before I can even remember, I must have been exposed to some external media that inspired my determination to be a Cowboy rather than an Indian; perhaps it was “Dr. Quine: Medicine Woman”, that my grandmother would insist on watching every Saturday night, or the rare “Western” that my father would watch on a Sunday afternoon.

Then there was the media designed for my age group, such as the “Planes, Trains, and Automobiles” book I loved so dearly. It contained a two-page-spread of a traffic jam, with a variety of cultural stereotypes interspersed throughout; there was an Arabic character, identified with a mud-brown skin tone and a turban sat upon a magic carpet, a French character in a stripy shirt, string of garlic around his neck, driving a croissant-shaped truck, and an American Indian, with a red painted face, his exposed chest partially covered by his long headdress, arms crossed and oversized lips pulled down at the corners in a permanent grimace. He sat in his archetypical pose on the back of a horse; I didn’t want a horse, I wanted a car like my dad, or a fast red one like the one moving at the front of the queue in my big hardback book. I, like every other child, wanted to be the coolest hero, and they all drove sports cars and carry guns.