On these spindrift pages

 

“Not for the proud man apart/From the raging moon I write/On these spindrift pages/Nor for the towering dead/With their nightingales and psalms/But for the lovers, their arms/Round for the griefs of the ages/Who pay no praise or wages/Nor heed my craft or art.” Dylan Thomas, In my craft or sullen art.

May has always felt like a turning of the soul’s own season – not quite the brilliance of high summer, but not the reticent hush of spring either. It is the interlude and the moment in between like gulls balancing on a salt wind; wings outstretched, neither landing nor rising, only feeling the air. 

The cherry blossoms are stirring and their petals loosen one by one, drifting and spinning slowly in the air, delicate as breath, weightless as memory.

 

In the hush of May, I watch them fall – not with sorrow but with reverence. Because in their fading, there is beauty as if they have made peace with impermanence. In their falling, there is grace. Each descent is a dance, each landing is a kind of poetry written on the earth. 

This stretch of coast draws the vintage car rally each May. The visitors arrive – not with blare or fanfare, but with a kind of elegance that feels half-remembered, like something from a story your grandmother once told. 

The ladies wear silk scarves knotted under their chins, the fabric catching the breeze like the sails of small boats. The men stroll along nonchalantly in double-breasted navy blazers. 

These visitors too are drawn to this place, returning each year to this weatherworn edge of land. Perhaps they come for more than the view.  They, like me, are pilgrims of a sort – drawn to this coastline for its memory. For the feeling that time, here, can be folded softly – like a scarf tucked into a coat pocket – into something carried. 

For just as May is not yet summer, not still spring, so too do these visitors seem suspended between eras. A little timeless, a little lost. Perhaps, we are all drawn here by the same undercurrent: a longing for what endures. Here, by the sea, even the past finds room to rest.

 

It is Friday. The wind, southerly and mild, presses in from the water, carrying with it the smell of kelp and salt and something older still that lives beneath the tide lines. There are days when I believe a person is more akin to a tide: always returning, never quite the same, shaped and reshaped by the memories and the winds of experience. 

Friday, of all days, is the one on which I allow myself to ebb. To wash back into older selves, quieter rhythms.

The fisherfolk here know the power of such a day. Friday holds a certain gravity here. The fishermen abide by their unspoken customs. No new venture, no new garment, no tool not yet worn by use. Even to wear a new coat might call forth the sea’s wrath. 

It was a Friday, my fisherman friend told me, when he had forgotten himself in the early light, begun mending his net with a new blade and it slipped. “The sea doesn’t like new things on a Friday,” he said, showing me the scar like a relic. 

And so Friday becomes for me not a superstition but a sacrament. A day when I, too, resist new beginnings, and seek instead the familiar – old books, tried-and-tested old-fashioned recipes, melodies from songs that have worn grooves into memory. 

Here, in this quiet place, I am learning to measure my life by the depth of breath, by the kindness of slow mornings, by the comfort of being unseen and unjudged. 

In the kitchen, G is preparing lobster rolls. The lobsters were a gift from my fisherman friend. They came this morning, still cool from the sea, handed to me by my fisherman friend. He said to me with a grin: “You can’t get any fresher than this…they were still arguing about politics on the seabed an hour ago.” 

G. prepares our lunch with a certain quiet joy, the kind that comes only in kitchens by the sea, when the ingredients carry not just flavour but story.

He is playing his favourite singer, Don Williams whose baritone voice is like weathered oak, warm and unwavering. The song is called Infinity, and its words drift through the open kitchen door as I sit among the flowers in the garden, book in hand, tea cooling at the table. The lyrics are soft like the fading sea mist: “if you know how strong my love is…then you’ll know what infinity is.”

 

My fisherman friend plays the same record each week – Freeborn Man by Ewan MacColl with Peggy Seegar, on his portable music player just loud enough to be heard above the breeze. I have grown to expect it, even to welcome it. 

There is something in the music – rough-grained and deeply felt – that seems to echo this weather-beaten place by the sea. The refrain from Dirty Old Town (a duet – a wistful version with Peggy Seegar) always catches in the sea breeze just as I arrive: “I smelled the spring on the smoky wind…” It reminds me of the city I have left behind: its charred speed and motion.

 

I found myself recalling Evening Primrose – the little-seen Sondheim piece, half musical, half fable, based on a short story by John Collier. I watched it once years ago, but it has stayed with me in strange, persistent ways. A poet retreats from the world and hides away in a department store, only to find it is already inhabited by others like him – people who have slipped out of life and now live in its shadows, cloaked in night time. 

Among them, he finds a girl, Ella, who longs to remember what it is to live in the daylight. She longs for the sensations of life she has lost. There is a moment – a song – “I Remember” where she tries to summon memories of a world lost to her: the feel of rain, the scent of grass, the sound of bees. She has lived so long in this world of kindred ghosts of escape, bond together by their chosen exile that the real world comes to her only in glimpses, scents, and sensations.

 

There is a Greek word that came to me while I listened again to her song – Aletheia. It is often translated as “truth”, but the meaning beneath is older and it comes from Lethe, the river of forgetfulness that flows through the underworld in Greek myth. 

Souls who drank from Lethe would forget their lives, their sorrows, their names – their very selves. A-letheia, then, means “not-forgetting”. Truth, in this ancient sense, is not about facts. It is what we remember, or rather, what refuses to be erased and forgotten.

 

I am reading The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa, a haunting dream of a novel. Its setting – an island where things – objects, concepts, and even memories – are forgotten not by accident but decree. One day it might be birds, the next it could be calendars, or roses, or photographs. When something vanishes, the island’s inhabitants lost not just the item, but the memory of it altogether. What is forgotten is forbidden, and what is remembered becomes dangerous.

Overseeing this strange, quiet erasure is the Memory Police – a shadowy, authoritarian force tasked with ensuring that nothing remains of the disappeared. They move like ghosts through the streets, searching for contraband memory, for those who resist the forgetting. Resistance, in this world, means remembering.

Ogawa's prose is memerising, spare and dreamlike. It carries the melancholy gentleness that dissolves into its own chilling atmosphere, like the petals of a flower that once had a name, now vanished. By reading this novel, I am reminded of how fragile our tether to memory is and how easily the world we know slips from grasp when we cease to name it. 

I wonder if that is what I seek when I return to this coastal village – recollections. Some small piece of myself that has not yet been swept into Lethe’s current. The world asks us to forget constantly – forget slowness, forget tenderness, forget the subtle textures of real experience. Forgetting becomes survival. 

 

So, I begin to recall. I remember how it feels to be human – not efficient, not constant, but alive in fragments. If Lethe is the river that would wash us clean of our own identities, then writing is perhaps the slender boat that carries us back – towards memory, towards identity, towards light that does not blind but gently reveals.

 

The retreat is soft. The re-entry is brutal. There is a price to restoration: one becomes too aware, too sensitive to the sharp edges of the world. But perhaps this, too, is living – not to dwell entirely in solitude, nor wholly in society, but to pass between them with aletheia (not-forgetting) as compass. 

To remember even when forgetting is easier. And so I continue to write, to quote Dylan Thomas’s words, “on these spindrift pages”. I recall what I must. I honour what I cannot bear to forget.  

 

The swallows have returned to their nests beneath the eaves. There is no embellishment in the way they fly. No agenda. No spectacle. Just instinct, and the call of home. 

My days pass in slowness, but not idleness. There is a secret labour in stillness, a kind of tending to what has been bruised within. I read the same few pages of the books that I always return to.

Sometimes I write my journal – not to speak to others, but to myself. It is the internal dialogue I can bear. There is a kindness in the act, a soft contradiction to the uncharitable voice within me that so often sows discouragement. 

In writing, the gentler self prevails…and that perhaps things are not entirely lost. Despite the fractured faith, I am still someone with a soul capable of perceiving beauty.  

 

Dylan Thomas understood something similar when he wrote of his “craft or sullen art”. I had to look up the etymology the word “sullen”. It comes from the Latin solus ‘alone’, ‘sullen’ means not only morose but also solitary, emphasising that the poet’s task is essentially companionless, without the rewards and comforts of society. 

In this poem, Thomas said he wrote not for “the proud man apart from the raging moon”, not for the “towering dead with their nightingales,” but for the “lovers…who pays no praise or wages.” That line has stayed with me. It reminds me that the creative work is often quiet – is not for applause. It is often lonely.

 

But it is not without communion. I write to remember. Perhaps that is why I return here to this blog, season after season – to recover something that I may have forgotten. I think it may be the better part of me, the more human part, trying gently to lead me back towards the centre. "Look," it says. "Pay attention. And the world, though bruised, is still beautiful. It is still offering itself in spite of everything. A petal from the cherry blossoms clinging to a branch in the wind."

The truth is we do not need more strategic or quantified plans. We need more mornings with poetry, that kind that opens our eyes gently, that reminds us we are porous, impressionable, still capable of awe. More cups of tea held with both hands. More honesty in the face of each other’s quiet griefs. More refusal to perform when silence would suffice.

 

And so I think of Ella from Evening Primrose again. Not as a fictional creature but as a companion in the work of remembering. Like Ella, I find myself naming the small things to which I wish to tether my soul. Her yearning is mine. Her ache to live in the daylight, to touch the world again, to risk being hurt by it rather than remain untouched in the sterile darkness – it is the same choice I find myself confronting each time I come back here and begin, again, the slow turning back towards the world.

 

How do I go back? How do I leave this place of ritual and tide and birdsong, and re-enter a world that measures worth by speed and endless metrics of productivity. The truth is, I am not sure I know how. 

 

But the tide will take something of me with it, as it always does. And perhaps, if I am lucky, it will return something else in its place – some strength for re-entry. Some quiet fragment of the sea I can carry, still pulsing, into the noise.

 

And if I ever do speak of this season, this time by the sea, I will say only this: that it was in the little house by the sea, that I returned to myself in the last soft days of May, and there I remembered – not all at once, but slowly – how it felt to be wholly alive, and wholly mine.