Part Four of the serialized novella Ebbed Tide by Byzantia Harlow
PART ONE
In the distance, a shard of light sweeps through the night. Signalling a warning in each arc, the beam casts around and around in unending search. The varied whites from eroded cliffs, glow luminous in each sweep, and an oily sea glistens beneath. The beacon’s precision seems clinical – a silver blade slashing at the night sky – piercing the fabric of the unfathomable, as though to excavate for truth within. The unseen sea sounds a deathly chorus, as bells on floating buoys are tolled by the swell, clanging and clamouring on the waves through oblivion.
The ray originates from Plymouth Breakwater, a lighthouse just across the water from Cawsand Bay. I have returned here hoping a glimmer of understanding may reach me, within the darkness of my uncertainty. For some lead back into reality, and to the safety of myself, which currently feels so lost to me.
In my mind I follow a thought of you, as it weaves through the past five years.
I pick up the strand at the point we last met. A chance encounter on your old street, nine months ago. A memory held like an insect in amber, some beautiful flaw within my clarity. An inclusion which provides cues to my history, adding value to the very core of me.
I have not seen you since.
At that moment time had suspended itself within a song, one that spilled from the open roof of a vintage car. A song I had first heard within the borders of sleep. It was unknown to me, but the chorus repeated so urgently, that it snared within my memories. A song sung by identical twins, a siren call to the sea. It had opened a portal within, to a land of mystery in me, a space not without its treacheries.
The synchronicity had seemed so charged to me, that it sapped all vitality from the life it surrounded. Those moments before and after, a faded monochrome, next to this brighter thing. A blazing timelessness, entangled between two worlds, which was met by you with a sigh. With a teasing roll of the eye, and one dismissive line, ‘’I suppose you’ll think this is another sign’’.
I follow this strand further back, to our first encounter. A strangely familiar time. We both felt sure we had met before, although this was an impossibility within our external reality. It was then, when a man cast from an identical mould to his brother walked past. We had both met one half of the pair before, but couldn’t be sure which twin we saw. Nor, which of us he knew.
And then I lose track of these thoughts, as they regress within the fabric of time, becoming tangled around painful memories. Like thorns within a mess of brambles, containing caught emotions, I feel safer to avoid. So that now, lost to me my past recedes, like the failing light of dusk, absorbed into night.
I pull my eyes from the mesmeric scan of the lighthouse, reaching out across to me from Plymouth Breakwater. The far-off sound of unseen bells fades into the distance.
I return to the present, to the neutrality of this rented apartment, the modern furnishings set against its ancient stones. I am in the bones of a former pilchard- hut, sitting directly on Cawsand Beach. A huge wall of glass looks straight out to the dark water, the site of the original entrance which once opened to the spoils of the sea.
I pick up the tarot deck, nestled in rubbed black velvet in front of me. I cut the deck absent mindedly, flipping one card ambivalently, to reveal the Six of Swords. A card that had been haunting me, and which appeared frequently when I consulted on our connection.
Grief will continue to pull the same card up through the depths of the deck, into consciousness, I think to myself.
And then words flash through my memory, those spoken to me by a blind seer :
“I’m being shown a tarot card… I see a brown jug, with the face of a bearded man… an enchantment. It’s being pulled up… from the bottom of the ocean…I see someone in water. He’s calling for help, but you can’t hear him. You’re waving to him as he drowns….”
I consider the vision I had experienced a few days previously, of another life, long ago.
Standing on a wooden ship, on a voyage to an unfamiliar land. Hands that were mine, yet not my own, clutched around a salt-glazed jug, fashioned to the form of a grimacing man.
I was aboard a vessel, which was fated to be tossed onto Bermuda’s reefs.
I had seen the bottle plummet to the waves and recede. The features became blurred and distant, as if lost through time. And then I had felt myself begin to drown.
But what did it all mean ?
I couldn’t be sure if the memory was real, or a false contrivance in response to the blind man’s words. Perhaps my fractured mind, desperate to weave some sense of the last five years, had stitched the fragments of available material together.
I had researched the ‘Sea Venture’ because of the intensity of my vision. Interestingly, I was to discover the things I perceived were historically accurate. A Bellarmine Jug was amongst the wreckage and the ship had departed from Plymouth Harbour, just across from Cawsand Bay. An unknown place, that had felt so familiar to me on first discovery, that I had carved my name into its shore. Along with the words ANIMA MEA.
The costal village, I later discovered you visited every year.
Though I had felt your soul lap through its waters, long before I had even met you.
The place I had returned to now, in pursuit of answers.
To make sense of these thoughts, I begin to write them down. Fragments of memories and ideas scrawled across a white page in blue ink, with arrows to connect, to make some order of disjointed phrases. Words like ‘Soulmate’, ‘Past Life’ and ‘The Water’.
I start to write ‘The Seabird Song’, but my hand becomes transfixed in the loop of the final letter. Around and around it circles, in ever expanding hoops.
My mind becomes blank, as if a curtain of fog has been pulled across within.
When my awareness returns, I discover I have been drawing in an altered state, and I have rendered a realistic scene.
A cloud of wheeling birds, churning over a coastal cliff. Below them a limitless horizon. A woman in historic dress is staring mournfully out to sea.
And as I stare fixedly into the drawing, I sense you looking back at me.
________________________________________________________________________
INTERMISSION
A wind burned woman stands on the cliffs of Cawsand Bay, looking towards Plymouth Harbour. On the surface of the sea, waves are tossed and driven by the wind, churning crystalline waters to a white spume at the rocks below. Foamy droplets rain down like spittle with each crash. A cool breeze floats through fine saline fog, biting at her raw skin. She tastes the steely breath of the sea, which reminds her of the pilchard-hut, where she toils each day. It seems to her that this very sea runs within her. A group of birds jostle above, flashing silver wings through the air.
The hypnotic laps of rhythmic waves begin to soothe her weary soul. She thinks of things fading and falling – the leaves, the seas, her anguished feelings. The cry of a lone seabird rouses her from her lingering. She sighs and her breath seems to carry on the wind, to wrap around its mournful wail.
She wonders if love can give as much as it takes.
Musing that life has its consolations, as well as its penalties.
A beauty, even in its decay.
The sea seems a tranquil thing to the woman. In it she sees a violence and danger, but one that will subside, given time. Like her love.
The cascade of ebbing and smoothing waves comforts her, the knowledge that water will always find its level. She marvels at its depth, at what it would feel like to fall into its abyss, into unconsciousness.
Rising from the white caps of the waves, a murmuration of bright gulls begin to fly upwards in a rippling cloud to the sky. They float above her head, whirling through the winds in a swarm. She feels the beat of their wings through her shawl as she edges forward on the cliff.
Looking into the hypnotic waves below, she thinks of her lost lover. Laying somewhere in this same sea, for there is only one world ocean, she thinks. Each molecule of water, separate and yet part of this bigger, pulsing thing, which flows together, boundless and dissolute.
And she whispers to the wind “this world isn’t big enough to keep me away from you” as she steps off the ledge.
________________________________________________________________________
PART TWO
My attention returns to our tangled story and the events that marked the start of our last separation.
You still lived so emphatically within my memories, that I felt you trapped within my soul. It was as if I had swallowed a thrashing bird, one that wouldn’t be purged. You were caught in the net of my heart, which pumped erratically to the beat of you. And those desperate wings, thrashing to be free, charged the very life in me.
At that time, in an attempt to quell this internal torment, I followed an unknown costal path, walking into the depths of an ancient forest. I had followed a track of beaten ground, carried forward by a moaning wind. A canopy of trees either side of the path, reached out through the sky, to meet in an arch above my head.
I was lost within the depths of my love for you. As I traced a way through the ancient land, I was looking for a route back to you, within myself. But you were not there. I was walking towards nothing, again and again and again. In some futile enactment, until I came across the tree.
A knotted beech, covered in a vitrified skin of charred bark, a scarring left by lightning’s mark. The impact was so spectacular that its sturdy trunk had cleaved in two. One half had fallen dead, like a broken back, arching singed leaves across the woodland floor. The other half refused to die, and so entwined new foliage around the charred arms of its barren counterpart.
Its resilience appealed to me, resonating with something lost deep within. I felt the tree was charged by its own destiny. An alchemical vessel containing quintessence. The promise of a phoenix birth.
I had encircled its rough body and held on to you in thought. A focal point for my very dreams to orbit, like stars swept around a stronger, brighter thing. I tethered myself to you with little drift. A float bobbing on black water, above a rusting wreck. A phantom anchor to a love, long sunk.
All this I held within grazed palms, in remembrance.
I had tied myself to a knot in the path of our past, to mark the experience.
And then I murmured to the blackened bark :
“ Earth, Water, Air and Stone,
Fire, Blood, Flesh and Bone.
Goddess Moon and Stars above,
Let my life be Blessed with Love.
I call upon this flowing water,
Give this gift to thy daughter.
I call upon this swirling air,
Let me be held in tender care.
I call upon this sacred stone,
Never more to be alone.
I call upon this fertile earth,
Grant to me a heart of worth.
I call upon this blazing fire,
Bind to me my true desire.”
________________________________________________________________________
PART THREE
A few days after I had uttered that plea, you had come to me – but you had also since left. So months later, I returned. To search for the tree once more, in an attempt to resolve the anguish within.
I followed that same costal path, now known to me. The crash of waves rose from the seas, merging with prevailing southerlies. A thrashing which seemed to bewitch and torture the leafless trees.
I saw the past spread out before me. Held within the tread of absent boots, imprinted in the skin of the earth. Twigs snapped underfoot like broken bones, as I walked through these histories, disturbing the echoes of remembrance with my presence.
Eventually, I found the tree, now worn thin and weary by winter. This time the tree’s twisted form seemed torturous to me, interwoven and half rotten like our love affair. I wondered if the living side had been dragged into decay by its desolate counterpart, some force spreading its dark shadow.
Sap seemed to congeal like blood, in a patch on the place my palms last touched. Poisonous fungi sprung from the ground. Where they met the trunk, spores infested the bark, and rose through the air in a stale must. I drew my scarf tight around my face, so not to breathe in the dank. Silver feathers were scattered around its twisted roots, torn-out plumes marked a circle of misery, following unknown injuries.
The biting January wind made a huddle of me there, as I clawed the frosted earth with numbed fingers. The ground was unyielding and resistant but, I persisted until torn nails bled red rivulets onto white snow.
There I buried the Six of Swords. I had written our names on the card, within the waves of the sea, with a plea, ‘Bring him to me. Or release me and bring someone I’ll love equally…’
And there under the broken tree, I left my intentions to rot to nothing.
As winter receded, I felt freer of you, and that beating bird seemed to be dying within.
As a counter force that had long been brewing, grew stronger day by day.
A desire to untie our knotted cords, worn and frayed to snapping point.
To scrub at the vision of you in imagination, rubbing you from my memory.
I felt as if a rocky cliff, firm through years of quiescence from eroding winds, suddenly resigned to tip. To plunge itself into the waves.
Swept by the wind then taken with the tide.
My memories of you rolled out on crests.
Your spell was broken by their crash.
And eaten by an immense horizon.
That once bright vision I built, to maintain you in your absence, fell away. And what remained had nothing of you left in it. Some quality, some lustre you once had, had been worn away by the ebb. Left in the wake of past emotions.
By the time delicate buds unfurled to the sun on the tree, a new love became manifest. A hopeful ember reignited in me, and you faded under its glow.
But as gradually as your presence had receded, the turn of seasons drew you back, and you re-seeded in my soul.
The wind changed, bringing the chill of Autumn, and you seemed to carry on its breeze.
A feeling of you began to creep around my skin, which I wrapped in wool, in attempt to prevent you seeping within.
Yet a long dead fluttering arose.
As deeply hidden feelings were dragged in.
Fiercer now with the turning tide, and the move of Fate’s wheel.
As I should have known.
For the flow always returns from the ebb.
_____
I trail my thoughts from you, placing them back on the drawing in my hands. And gasp.
My mind must be playing tricks on me. For all I see is a scenic view, the rugged cliffs of Cawsand Bay and a murmur of birds that dance in the wind.
I look again, searchingly, for the figure of a woman I remembered so vividly.
But I find no trace of her within the scene.
She was never there.
The wind sighs in answer to unspoken question, “Daughters of Phorcys, your clawed fingers have plucked at a thread within the fabric, and rewound it onto your spindle. Now to be used by you, anew.”
About the author
Studio Portrait
Byzantia Harlow (b. 1986) lives and works in London. She received her MA Painting from The Royal College of Art, London and her BA (Hons) Fine Art from Central Saint Martins.
Solo exhibitions include ‘Take What Resonates’, Harlesden High Street, London (2021) ; ‘Lunar Water’, Platform Southwark, London (2019) and ‘From the same source I have not taken’, Yamamoto Keiko Rochaix, London (2018).
Harlow’s work investigates the intersection between true experience, constructed encounter and embellished recollection. Her long-term interest in alternative societies, groups exploring the spiritual or supernatural and unconventional healing practices informs current work. For Harlow, every determination of an event is the balance between cynicism, or acceptance of the mystical. Blending the natural and the supra-natural, the work asks the viewer to take a leap of faith, to follow Harlow through the labyrinthine structures of sculpture, of social performance, and of constructed narrative. The artist is opening the door to both possible enlightenment and potential (dis)illusionment.
Alongside her art practice Harlow works as a Psychic Reader using a Tarot Deck she created. She will be exhibiting her deck within an upcoming solo show at Yamamoto Keiko Rochaix this year. Her Project ‘The Silver Stream’ on Soho Radio explores the artists’ theoretical concerns in collaboration with invited guests.
Byzantia Harlow, image – durational performance within ‘Lunar Water’ 2019
Part One, Two and Three of Ebbed Tide by Byzantia Harlow
