A video to accompany the track 'Seeing' from the album 'We Are the Compass Rose', released in 2023.
"Imagine a map. You have unfolded it before you. You can trace roads and rivers with your fingers, and touch villages and woods and landmarks. You are not flying, are you? You are seeing. Gerda and Ptarmigan are beginning a similar voyage, and very soon you will read about it. In their case, though, they will not remain where they happen to be. They will be somewhere else entirely. But those two are my protagonists, and you are my reader. These are wholly different relationships and have wholly different rules and principles. So, my Cherished Reader, let's use your eyes to explore the map I have laid out before you. Let’s see what you can see."
We have no need of earth or sky to guide us through this perfect life.
We need not be tethered to the clay,
No feet of mud or halos, relics, wings or holy rhymes.
We are the compass rose.
And we may rise and simply soar ourselves away.
At the first we fly in this direction.
At this perspective everything begins
Attracting needles, pines and sailors as they sail their dewy ships
From seventh sea to ocean deep.
The great expanse of comet-seeded Lynn.
With hymns perhaps within their hearts, and rum most likely on their lips
These mariners, perhaps with albatross as burdens, look toward one glossy star
Who rises on this axis.
Dazzling, demur, afar.
A pure and lofty Guenevere.
Our next vocation.
Towns arise from nothing.
From the high hills and lowly plains.
And monuments tower over all
With fresher monuments atop.
And distant cattle graze in moon-bright washes as she waxes, wanes,
And shines on pitted, shadowed stones
Away this way.
A thousand years toil past
And, on some special nights, these traces of our canny ancestry
May rouse themselves awake,
Wrest-up and shake away their roots and soil
To dance around the village;
Sing in mighty stony, granite voice
As bells ring out in other villages.
Leagues beneath the distant Severn Sea
Another sea
This one ancient, dry and dead as our tertiary goal we reach
On landmarks let our fingers trace the contours laid by deepest time
This is a swallow, fen, or bristledown or moss on which we meet.
The sunken land is flat and black and covert,
Secreting brutal nature’s salty hide
Where once the silken water cradled necks and hides and fins and teeth.
Smooth and warm, the lives that thrived within this sacred place
They lull us to our sleep as we imagine them here with us,
Where we are now.
And as they are so we will be.
But it matters not. The where. The why. The how.
Our terminus… our final voyage-end… is drains and old canals and dirty towns.
Where people live within in tidal-reach with gull, heron and egret.
The wave came, the sea reclaimed the land, and then the land was drowned.
Further though, from the path of history with its elderly regrets
Lie the banks of a sweet river.
We are in the North-By-Northwest.
We come to rest.
We float above a Flat Bridge and our journey ends.
We have no need of earth or sky to guide us through this perfect life.
We need not be tethered to the clay,
No feet of mud or halos, relics, wings or holy rhymes.
We are the compass rose.
And we may rise and simply soar ourselves away.