Ports/Portes/Portals
‘Il faut qu’une porte soit ouverte ou fermée’
- French Proverb
On departing, arriving, beginning and ending
In French there is a saying:‘Il faut qu’une porte soit ouverte ou fermée’. A door must be open or closed – there is no middle way. When is a door not a door? This week I notice doors everywhere I look. Gates open or closed to shut in livestock. Barns secured against the curious or acquisitive or verminous. Doors that have not been opened for decades. Doors which will not open again, or close, lifted from their hinges and leaning against stone and plaster. I imagine them being lifted off for the final time, gently, like helping a small child down from a high wall, before they are propped and forgotten, the wood wormy with time and smooth with touch. I wonder why I have suddenly begun to notice them.
This time of the year does not lend itself to such open and shut thinking. Autumn this year still has one foot in summer, even as the air temperature drops and the sun slumps imperceptibly in the sky, little by little becoming all light and no heat. There are still dahlias and sunflowers clinging on in the potager. I swipe the last three tomatoes from the greenhouse, sunwarm. Yet the air bites harder with each passing morning. As we drove the hour from port to farm they were clearing the maize fields ready for the next season, pulling and chipping the bare canes and the air smelt green and wet as we passed, like a bubble of summer bursting. Crows have replaced the swallows of July and they mass on the church tower and walls, perch alone and precarious on chimney stacks, a black vacancy against the sky. Brambles and sloes begin to wizen in the hedges. The hens’ laying slows. Liminal autumn, the old-gold, russet fulcrum of the year, neither one thing nor another.
I lay out a tarot spread for myself. I draw The World. A woman dances in the middle of a wreath of green, stepping forward with one bare foot, glancing backwards over her shoulder. It is a card of beginnings and endings, of the cyclical nature of things. ‘What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.’ The last threads of the other part of my life are tucked into the weave and secured. I leave an avatar of myself to save my place while I step forward, a fetch for the internet age.[1] ‘There are no endings. If you think so you are deceived as to their nature. They are all beginnings. Here is one.’
The World is also a card of travel. On the ferry I stand at the stern and watch gulls and pigeons trick flying over a landscape of painted metal. Blue, ferrous red, macaron pistachio, all undergirded by rust. I am watching for the moment of release, the threshold crossing, the departure. I want to see the very moment that it happens. Ropes as thick as a man’s forearm strain at squat black bollards as a low rumble like an avalanche beginning rolls through the belly of the boat. At first a speck on the quayside then getting closer until he resolves into a man on a bicycle, in a grimy, pillar-box-red life jacket: the one who will release us. He paces back and forth between the taut ropes. He has to wait. It is not yet time. I feel the ticking, twitching, of a muscle in my right shoulder as though someone is tapping me there with one elegant finger, trying, polite but insistent, to get my attention. What am I missing? What am I not seeing? And in that moment, while my eyes are on the washed-out dawn sky spiked with cranes, a signal is given, one I can’t discern, and the ropes slip their moorings and foam churns in a widening gulf between boat and quay. We are underway. Though the moment the journey began, the actual moment, is lost in a moment of inattention, perhaps lost much earlier. ‘Everything begins before it begins.’
[1] A fetch is the English name for a figure within Irish folklore, the precise spectral double of someone who is yet living. To see fetch was considered to be a portent of death, but a fetch sighted in the early morning could also signify long life. See Michael Traynor, The English Dialect of Donegal, 1953.