Solemn

SOLEMN

Bournemouth contained the unemotional anemone. The flower bloomed – even though I wasn’t even sure if anemones bloomed at all – towards Bournemouth’s sea front, quite near its pier. Or it may have been Alum Chine, a salubriously peripheral area of Bournemouth with guest houses and neatly manicured lawns. A short springy bridge in Alum Chine stretched over a cultivated gorge where the unemotional anemone was thought to thrive according to hearsay. Could there have been more than one unemotional anemone?


I ever discovered despair even though I had searched the world for happiness. I knew all along that I would never find happiness, thus making it certain that despair would flourish. Meanwhile, I hoped that the consequent gratuitousness of this search would last forever, gratuitousness being neutrally preferable to futility any day.


I knew little of flowers, even less about other natural things like birdlife or geography. There was no point in me even attempting such visual identifications. However, simple sounds, those aural aide-mémoires for negative feelings, were phenomena with which I could confidently deal. And, therefore, seeking a reminder of downbeat emotions that the sound of the unemotional anemone could conjure up was less futile, more feasible.


Success at despair is preferable to failure at happiness. You can quote me on that.


“How are you today?” asked a passer-by in that leafy Alum Chine avenue.


He was evidently a little docile: a man with no suspicions. I should have been a complete stranger to him, but here he was addressing me in a friendly manner, smiling continuously despite my lack of reciprocation. He reminded me of one of those diminutive creatures who basked on slopes across the hills and far away, surrounded by fields of unemotional anemones dancing silently in light warm breezes; he was a skewed version of Gollum: one with no hang-ups, no wrenching facial muscles, one without the need for anything but palely colourful afternoons of lazy nonchalance, ever seeking only peace and quiet or racing clouds across a peachy sky seen from his upward horizontal face amid the unemotional anemones. He sought least of all a ring: that resonant resident noise: a mnemonic for solemnity.


By not seeking, I thought, one often finds.


I never tried to be trite. Only trickly.


“Have you found it?” I asked, hoping he would discover, by answering me, that he was not searching for anything at all, this being my gratuitous good turn for the day.


He scrutinised me squarely as if to think: “Ah we have a fine one here!”


I hoped he wouldn’t understand my kind motives. Very little can be gathered from expressions, even stated intentions, so I kept my face moving with fleeting emotions, most of which were intended to make him more and more wary of me. I would say nothing further until he did.


“Found what?” He scratched his head. He could have said: “I’m not looking for anything” but I had to take him as I found him, so I replied:


“Your little precious.”


“Hmmm.”


I gave him the benefit of the doubt by taking this as a proper contribution to the conversation.


“A flower. A special flower,” I continued.


“To cook what exactly?”


I did not take kindly to jokes. I think hatred must have skimmed a suspicion of a tail across my features, as he tried to walk on without further contact between us. It was hatred, I’m sure, but he may have taken it as rage or even potential violence. I heard thrumming in my ears as pressures built. I clearly heard, too, the nearby surge of sea, as if it now were conjoined tidally with my own body. He walked towards the springy bridge, me in his wake. I glanced down at my feet: were they able to absorb the unexpected shocks of spongy suspension above the tiny gorge, if I followed him across?


At least I had a pace-maker, now. With his lead, I could at last cross to the other side (just this side of ‘across the hills and far away’) where flourished the unemotional anemones of Bournemouth.


Like the nature of a pleasure pier (such as Bournemouth’s), this suburban bridge would stop part way across before it reached its other end upon a new coast; in the pier’s case, based upon my shaky geography, its new coast was the Isle of Wight or Isle of Man. Swung like a hammock between two middle-class avenues across a grassy knoll or gorge, the bridge was somehow even less certain, even less like a rite of passage, despite there being two ascertainable ends. Both pier and bridge, meanwhile, had something in common: gaps in the planks or in the sturdy netting, with sea and foliage respectively seen below. Nothing in between in common.


The local man – or one I assumed to be local – had by now hastily reached the other end of the bridge and he turned anxiously towards me as I staggered against false pressures along the bridge that tricked me at every sway.


I’m sure he was crying. He watched something awfully gooey slip slowly asunder as each gap took responsibility to filter me downwards to the ground where I surely belonged. Despite there not being any rain in the area for weeks (he knew), the terrain towards which I inched in strings of miscooked mississippi mud cake was already sodden to the gills.


I could hardly see the anemones.


The last sound I remembered was the knell of church bells towards which the man had been walking. It was his precious Sunday morning, of course.


The saddest thing was not that the local man was indeed crying, but that he had any emotion whatsoever, joyful or solemn.



Written and published here today