This is how it happens: I draw a faint outline: running hare, bear in sliding water, migrating swifts, skylarks rising. Just the faintest shape and a few lines to guide the movement of the brush. Then I flood the shape with water, the brush loaded and dripping. I keep my head close to the surface of the paper, looking along it so I can see the shine of the water, the dull of the gaps in between. If the gaps are well shaped I continue. If they’re not I dry the paper, start again. Then I load a brush with Indian ink and I touch the wet surface with it so that it just breaks the skin of the water. As it does the ink flows in, finds its path, spreads out. I touch the water again, more ink flows in. Then again, and again. I push the edges of the fluid to make the shape of a primary feather, or a beak, or a paw. Then I wait for the shape to emerge more clearly. I take a pinch of salt, sprinkle it on the less flooded areas, then on the darker patches, thickly here, so that the salt can pull the pigment out. My process is a kind of guided flooding. I see it as an act of engulfment.
The word gulf has evolved through many languages. It’s a word that’s scaled up. These days it suggests profound depths and distances. In earlier usage it meant a sea bay, and further back, the trough between waves. It also referred to the wave-like fold in a garment. It’s linked in Norse and High German to the word vault, which was a curve or an arch, also a bosom. So engulfment was an act of embosoming, a curving in, a tide flooding in.
Yesterday I drove along the back lanes roughly following the line of Offa’s Dyke and the border, curving in and out of Powys, Herefordshire and Shropshire. The night before it had hammered down again and the lanes were flooded, water pouring off the steep, bald hills. The rivers and streams ran brown. The sky brooded and the sun broke through in sliding fans, glistening sheets of soft mist, rainbows. Nothing is ever fixed in this place. It flows. I stopped at the village of Clun, to peer up at the ruins of its Norman castle, a huge structure of dark stone like a fang protruding from the land. It sits on a steep cluster of hillocks, overlooking a little river and an ancient packhorse bridge. It’s a crossing place, the location of ancient fords which the Normans wanted to control. I stood on the castle mound, waiting for the latest shower to pass through, for the following beams of light.
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