The Hermetic Armada of the Psyche

Hello again dear reader.

I was listening to the shipping forecast this morning, I always find it one of the great constants in life. Fastnet, Dogger, the German bight, Cromarty, Viking, Faeroes...mythical names, assaulting the imagination with wind and rain lashed broiling seascapes, unfathomable depths and heroic deeds.

As civilizations rise and fall, national boundaries are re-sculptured and generations briefly bloom and scatter to seed, the Sea, from whence we came, claims all things in its impenetrable implacability. The sea today is iron grey and beyond my feeble emotions and whimsical reflections. It is eternal and uncaring of petty human things.

I am suddenly convulsed by an epiphany as I stare out stained library window at the flat aquatic wastes! I am the lost boy again, teleported to the old landlocked family estate.

It is the spring or autumn Equinox (one of my favourite words) and I am crouched at the distorted, milky glassed 'porthole' style window in one of the giant haylofts on the estate. These, warm, dust-moted cathedrals were the womb of my spiritual rebirth, secret spaces filled with the amniotic atmospheres of other lives and strange mythologies, that were to scribble their ruinic equations on my still soft and delicate mind.

These three broken, patchwork, early Medieval stone ships were to be my hermetic armada, my requisitioned psychic vessels that would carry me on a lifelong voyage to exotic lands, that were then, as now, beyond the ken of reasonable and practical men.

These old barns with their smoky lofts were adjacent to the old stable block, ancient worlds, sanctuary's for this delicate soul, the braying of horses comforting and somehow perfect in the muffled gloom.

Many hours would my younger self spend in those dark spectral grottoes of my imagination. The old Hohner guitar and lined notebook my only companions. Although occasionally, a plum jam sandwich would somewhat square the triangle.

My father had inherited the estate from his parents, and so on for six generations, and what had been a rather beautiful rustic idyll, had over generations of mismanagement, gambling debts and shear stupidity, inevitably decayed and devolved into the tatty monstrosity that became a playground of jaded decadence for the little Ignatius to explore at his 'relative' leisure.

The house being paid for, my father rented out the large stables and a couple of fields to equine lovers, he also acquired a small sum from a reasonably large antiquarian bookshop he part owned in London. Such was the meager income with which the tragic creature had to support a wife and son, a handyman/gardener, pay utilities and rates, the upkeep of an ancient automobile, and all the other 'little' unmentionables... that often accumulate to snap the economic camels back.

And snap it did, and quite spectacularly on one November eve.

Enough, the library is almost dark and the fire is wheezing in the grate, it is time to concentrate on the specious present.

Through the window, the sea is squid ink black and I can feel the heartbeat of the Kraken in its nocturnal awakening...