Confinement Six

Ban Apinihan 2/5/2020



For years I have been getting up at the crack of dawn. No matter what time I have gone to bed or the quantity of alcohol – sometimes industrial quantities – I have consumed, the first light of day sees me up and vice versa.



I have never liked the English expression ‘crack of dawn’. It implies a violent birthing, an incessant pounding on a reticent door. A burglar will crack a safe and I wonder how our language, so rich in metaphor, has failed us so miserably when describing this one daily event. For dawn may mean doom or it might mean light. Whether it be with anxiety or hope, the dawn does not crack. It is not a whip.



It is something that comes gracefully and even soldiers awaiting the sunrise assault or the prisoner condemned to perish can see the bitter paradox of something so gradual leading to such a terrifying finality.



The dark sky turns just a little bit darker before a pastel eggshell coldness begins to radiate elsewhere. The distance separating night from day never seems more unbridgeable, and yet she comes.



When the light is unbearably there, vibrant yet not blinding the sun sends an awesome ray, a delicious portfolio of distant emanations of colours and heat.



The crack of dawn. The horizon becoming a canvas; tree lines laid bare in a contre-jour of blinding contrasts and then splendour! The universe seems to open its arms in an embrace to fate.



Another daylight time of cacophony and turbulence, another morning given over to chores and tasks; simplified lives sectioned into bite size pieces: brush teeth, sprinkle face, grind coffee, push ups, deal with the taste of last night: wine still fresh yet abandoned in the upper throat.



In urban Vientiane the roosters’ crows, the abundant cock-a-doodle-dos resounding from backyard to garden, set the stage for other drama. After a night of sleeping the cat stretches and lays down for a nap.



There’s only so much I can take before going mad and, like Goethe, call out for “more light”!



When we finished building Ban Apinihan, the land was in a terrible state: clay covered with building debris. Our gardener and friend, Zdenek Sedlacek (Z pour les intimes) nourished that soil, planting trees and bushes and flowers…all in a way that made it look as though the hand of man never touched it.



Over the years the earth was rebuilt and a topsoil developed, to such an extent that I was able to cordon off a metre and half strip at the southern end of the garden, beyond which bulrushes grow wild in the lake water. And so I cordoned it off and gave strict instructions to Z and his workers that no-one was allowed to prune or cut or clear away any of the vegetation in that strip. Of course, without Z’s work it would still be a wasteland, but now it is a small forest: tropical, rare, perfumed and intimate. Birds frolic in the branches and some animal has dug a burrow. In the small pond, fed by a septic tank, live tiny fish and frogs; dragonflies fill the day.



Growing wild now are Birds of Paradise, lotus leaves occasionally break free of green destiny to sprout a long stemmed flower of dazzling white that lives for a day or two before collapsing – petal by precious petal – onto itself, leaving behind a solid wooden receptacle with holes in the top in which the lotus seeds lay until it, too, drops into the water; there to mingle with the aquatic life until its day will come and lotus it will be in its own light.



At sunset, the crepuscule. The light is perfect and foliage seems to be taking its one last breath – an inhaling, long and steady – which has lasted all day and now, on the cusp of exhaling, all breath stops and the plants seem poised on that crest of understanding.



The silence. The meditative silence as night fondles day and turns it into slow darkness, like a pulled blanket.



In the garden and beyond the insects roar. The mosquitos are out and the birds, dragonflies and geckos are on the war path.



Munch, munch goes all Creation.