Beauty in decay - by Lu Hersey

This year has spun by, despite the never-ending cold, wet January and the bake-us-all-alive summer - and here we are at the autumn equinox already. A brief point of balance in the year, when night and day are of equal length. It always makes me think of TS Eliot's Four Quartets (even though I never really understood them) and a few lines of Burnt Norton that resonate:

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,

There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

 I find it a good time of year to reflect and gather in ideas, create a store of projects to ponder and to work on during the darker days of winter. Outside, there's already the smell of fermenting apples under the trees, and the dawn Avalon mist has started forming over the Levels. The leaves are turning and soon will be in full autumn display, a swan song before they shut down for winter. 

There's a haunting beauty in decay. Something new always comes from it. At the recent twenty-five year memorial for 9/11, I revisited a programme I'd first heard on the radio when I went to register my father's death last year. An episode called Momento Mori on Radio 4's Sideways. 

The programme introduced me to the extraordinary sounds of the Disintegration Loops, a series of albums made by musican William Basinski. He'd been trying to transfer tape recordings he'd made earlier onto CD - only the initial magnetic recording tape he'd used had decayed. Instead of giving up in despair, he found beauty in the remaining sounds, and from the tapes created the Disintegration Loops - one of the most haunting soundscapes you're likely to come across. 

The part of the programme that really sticks in my mind is about half way through - when Basinski talks about playing the Disintegration Loops, which he'd just finished recording, through loud speakers on his NY warehouse apartment roof, while watching the cloud of dust that followed the collapse of the twin towers. A totally surreal experience. He later dedicated the entire four albums to the victims, and the Disintegration Loops hold something of the haunting sadness of life passing. You can get a flavour of it here - not to everyone's taste, but extraordinary none the less:

Autumn brings an acute awareness of the year passing, with hints of that haunting feeling of decay. Here in Glastonbury, people gather on the tor to celebrate the equinox (the autumn equinox is one of eight fire festivals in the wheel of the year), and the bongo drums play on well into the night. While I appreciate the importance of community celebration (honest!), I prefer to go the coast to find a beach away from it all. If possible, timing the visit to coincide with either high tide or low tide (depending on daylight hours and the journey time it takes to get there). When the tide is either right out, or right in, there's often a patch of relative calm, like a breathing space when the world stops for a moment, before the tide turns. When you can catch a sense of that still point in the turning world. 

It doesn't really matter what I'm writing, or trying to write back home - or what I will write in future or have written previously. For a precious hour or so, I don't worry about any of it. 

Then it's time to go back and prepare for the winter to come.

Lu Hersey

https://www.lu-hersey.com/