Posted 20.02.24

Beyond Last Point

Vern was the sea. He was the washing of the waters. He was the pull of the wind and the smash of the storm. He was a one man island on the edge of the living land, at the end of a path stretching 400 miles away from the nearest cluster of small, semi-stacked hillside huts which was Last Point. Vern did not have a conscious understanding of Last Point. Driven by Ernie Armstrong through this blur of leaning shelters after a 20 hour ride from the Old Lug port 37 years ago, no image or feeling had ever been established in him about his nearest link to the human world outside his own. They were the two words that appeared on the quaint half-moon lilac stamp on his bi-yearly receipt of essentials that came by boat. The words which arched over the image of a long billed Heron of some local description, perched on the edge of a blacked out signpost pointing at an angle away into the empty distance. Last Point was not a place in his mind exactly. It was just other.

It was his only source of that particular shade of lilac, and for this he wondered at the words that otherwise gave no signal and rang no bell of association within him. He would eye the Heron and marvel that it did not seem capable of flight. At first, every time the image came back to him on that thin sheet of copy paper, he would expect the bird to have flown. After all, it was sat above the sign, and a direction clearly intended. But the bird had never responded to this most obvious of promptings, the large black arrow upon which it perched and whose point it followed with its beak. As time passed, and the lilac stamp came round again, much like the seasons, Vern considered the possibility that the Heron had indeed flown away as bidden, but had returned once more to the signpost, in time to have its image captured on the sheet of paper. Perhaps this sign was a half way point between worlds that the Heron inhabited. This seemed increasingly likely to Vern. And over the years, Vern began first to suspect, and then gradually to become convinced, that the Heron actually spent very little of its time on the sign. Just as Vern would only ever look at the heavy eye-shaped maple wood clock, resting on the shelf in the lighthouse living room, when it sent out a single chime every noon or midnight, what appeared never to alter was in fact in constant unseen motion. And this conviction grew over time until he came to spend hours imagining the incredible journeys that the Heron would undertake between its returning to the signpost. This is what the words Last Point meant to Vern – unattainable colour and flight.

This battered shelf and the lighthouse stuck on its edge were home to Vern, had been ever since that long haul dash with Ernie however many seasons ago. Throughout that time, the giant bulb and its roaming spotlight were the only man made intrusions he had lived with on a regular basis. That and the clock’s twice daily chime. And the twice yearly delivery of so called essentials brought in by Ernie, to begin with, and in later years by Ernie’s nephew Greg. The rest was wind and rain and mist-obscured sun. It was the swirl of darkening clouds and the spray of the ocean. It was the wet sharp existence of one man versus the weather. Visibility was always low. If Vern sometimes heard a low stretching horn coming out of the grey, he never saw the vessel it had come from. In 37 years, according to official records, never had a ship been in collision with the rocky wall below, and not once had Vern been obliged to offer shelter to another human being. That ships and their crews had perished in these mountainous waters could not be denied. A solitary floating beam, lately snapped from the hull of some unlucky tug, on a clear morning, dancing over the surf, was as close to proof as could ever be found, or anticipated. The sea could occasionally belch a clue but its true nature was to devour, and to never give up its secrets.

So Vern had grown broader and his weight had shifted forwards onto thickly set knees and ankles, rooted, gripped. His whole body had caught a downward bias, but his stoop was as rugged and firm as any age-old tree. His rain flattened forrid carried fewer lines than you would expect of a man approaching 70, and his skin was a rubbery, glowing testament to the benefits of a stiff breeze and the brutality of high speed fresh air. In particular, the skin on his face pulled loosely into jowls, into protective hangings, a melting of wax beneath eyebrows like feathery fishing flies, eruptions of silvery spider’s legs.

Tumultuous and bleak the background to Vern’s solitary life. He had begun to interpret the buffeting of the wind, when at its least violent, as a vital caressing. The physical touch of another human or animal had become alien, and, he often thought without acknowledging it, if ever he experienced that again, it would break his resolve and snap him in two. Vern was a man with dextrous hands and nimble fingers, who had once played concert pianos in the great cities of the world. But he had found the weight of expectation destabilising, the vulgarity of high society in unbearable conflict with the grace of the music. The former demanded everything of the latter, and did not learn from it. So Vern had sought what he hoped would be a quieter, roomier arena, freed from any exacting, selfish audience. He had become a lighthouse keeper. The drama of music had been replaced by the more powerful score of his environment, whilst the delicate keys whose magic seemed so totally hidden until the press of a fingertip released the fragile purity and strength of a note, had given way to the needle and thread, the mix and weave of colour and pattern. In the storm, the clap and boom, the shudder of loose fixtures, Vern would inject layer upon layer of texture, combine a desert sand with the richest fuschia and delight at the effect of combining colours, as once he lost himself in the thrall of musical composition.

For Vern, each different colour had its own tone, a note either happy or sad, haunting or desperate with passion. Like a puzzle without an answer, like bubbles of oil on the surface of water, the effect would never be completed, and the variety was infinite. The small circular lounge with its unbroken line of tear strewn windows was adorned by hanging textiles and miniature tapestries, whose splendour and complexity were a vivid recreation of one man’s imagination and creativity alone. No storm cloud could have inspired these images of dancing stags and pink rich shifting dunes. The forests and the laughing children, the exotic fruits, as bizarre and magnificent as nature herself, the spiralling mazes and multi-threaded non-explicit images. In short, a riot of visual imagery. Patterns and colours as intricate as crystals. An interior that demanded comparison with its counterpart, as uncompromising in its dazzle as the world beyond was unforgiving and stubborn in its hammering greyness. Both heart stopping. And Vern would feel tension, and a pull like the tide between these two worlds. And contemplate a marriage of forces. In this way Vern fuelled himself. It were as if he absorbed the whip and lash of the chilling wind, the slap and roar of the fractured ocean, swallowed them and digested them. And from them he made warmth and mystery. Vern, the translator of one power into another, the tunnel, the funnel which fed on the rampage and delivered the beautiful.

In many of the tapestries, almost like a signature, woven swiftly and purposefully, the motif of a flying Heron. Never in the same corner, never in the same pose, but always in flight, and always with head turned, a spectator to the fabulous imagery of its surroundings. And if the picture were pattern only, the Heron would appear within, or form part of, the framework of the image. The Heron was structure and content, the point of generation, the mark of cross-reference and meaning. As an emblem, it was absolute. It was, as much as Vern, the funnel between the two worlds.

And Vern, if he had let himself think about it in such a way, would have argued that his manufactured world, his collage of unreality, was a match in every way to its gigantic opposite beyond the lighthouse wall. It competed on the same terms. It did not shrink away from enormity, but, rather, it shone and penetrated into that other.

*************

Vern knew that the boat with essentials was due shortly. Within hours or days he could not be sure, but the sun would creep upwards in the morning above the crag with the three trees like wizened hunch backed witches, silhouetting their twisted forms, so he knew it would be soon. The sun rising in this part of the horizon had always signalled the imminent arrival of supplies. It was an accurate forecast without being precise. But Vern took nothing for granted. Always the chance that no boat would come. That soon his gallery could reach an end point of sorts if the next batch of coloured threads did not arrive. In this case, Vern was decided, he would start to unpick the threads he had so intensely arranged, starting with the oldest compositions first, working forwards. In this way he would never reach a point beyond which there was no further point. Like a species evolving, he would unravel and re-unite, destroy to invigorate a whole new landscape of images. In this way, the Heron’s journey would not end until his own did. But he was reluctant to begin deconstructing these threaded photographs, the woven memories that he shared with the Heron, these knitted snapshots which were companionship. He felt he saw truth inside them.

But, now, he was running short of many greens and reds, and was worryingly down to the last two metres of white thread. He had plenty of beige and silver, but white was essential to the separation of parts and the emphasis of light beneath the pictures. The clock chimed and Vern looked up from his work. He could feel the return of the Heron. He could see the thin copy paper and the marvellous lilac image it carried. He sensed its importance. He smiled and looked back at the textile in progress spread over his lap, the magic of orange blossoms and the spray of yellow petals, shaped like feathers, falling down upon a silver unicorn sleeping upon a mossy blanket of turquoise leaves. The Heron could only be seen if one were to look closely and carefully for it, swooping beneath a crop of sun kissed olive trees on the edge of a vast and incredible valley whose vegetation was so detailed that each stitch had somehow conjured whole woods or settlements.

As was his ritual, or self imposed duty, Vern would dress in his waterproofs and head outside at every chime of the clock. He would walk for one mile along the cliff face heading south before turning inland in a north westerly direction, arcing around the lighthouse until he reached a point on the coast approximately a mile north. He would then walk back south towards shelter. It was often a fierce last leg and a blustery conclusion to his surveying. Depending on the strength of wind of course, Vern would usually return within the hour. Some journeys, especially the midnight runs, would be halted for many minutes at a time whilst Vern sheltered in trees or hollows along the way. Occasionally he would be forced to spend the night in a cave opening very close to the point where he re-joined the coastal path after semi-circling the lighthouse. Here Vern kept a box of provisions, and extra blankets for just such times. Also, a tin containing paints of various colours. Also, a collection of rocks, both chalky and rusty, whose colours would implant themselves onto the cave wall under Vern’s persistent guidance, enlivening the dark and shiny flint, sectioning and partitioning spaces which could then receive colour, and meaning. His route was marked with cairns, and the engravings of strange animals and patterns with swirling arrows. Vern’s decades-old solitary discourse, imprinted on the larger canvas of boulder and root, speaking to him and being enriched daily. A hidden patchwork of communication operating beyond the boundaries of space and time, but not between beings. Vern, mapping his environment with coded images, marking out his territory with recorded experiences, believed he could, by so doing, somehow tame the world outside the lighthouse walls. His twice daily vigil became, like the Heron, if not religious, then spiritually essential.

******************

Then, the chime of midnight and the two clock hands together, pointing up, feigning stasis. The incomplete tapestry on the lap of the suddenly awakened Vern. It’s patches and gaps betraying the lack of appropriate colour. A distinct lack of brighter reds and greens. Cross-hatched sections of bare canvas backing, sagging like scars. A startled look in Vern’s eye, even though the chime is now a minute gone. And then a sound from the east, like a human cry. And then the wind whistling through the grass and churning the waters. And again, a sound like a human cry. Vern rises and crosses the circular living room and takes his waterproofs from the peg. Carefully, and slowly, he dresses as if preparing for combat, securing each tie, checking and re-checking the fit. Then a scream, unlike any human scream, as Vern places his hood and descends the spiral staircase. Vern must charge at the single door to the outside world to lever it open the wind is so vengeful. Again, further sounds of distress reach Vern’s ears in splits of seconds before being snatched away. The sense of really living a moment never so strong. The fear, of some human tradgedy, fighting in him against the fear of unwanted contact.

Vern leans into the wind and finds its direction. Staggering like a drunk, he edges, expressionless, towards the cliff edge. There is only darkness and a wicked howling from the east. Then there is illumination to accompany the yell, a glare that spotlights swell, before everything plummets into black again. And in the blackness lines of colour imprinted in Vern’s eyesight. The cliff edge in rich green, the salty explosions of the waves a dull purple, and an upturned boat, maybe, a shifting oblong of emerald blue. Then, suddenly, light roams from left to right again, and Vern’s eyes pierce the view, beneath eyebrows shifting downwards blocking out the spray, the swipe of coldest air. Now nothing there. No further calls. No blue, only green and purple in the dark. Vern could be sure of nothing, but that someone or something had been lost. If it was Greg with his supplies, he could not know for sure. He could only hope to search for clues come morning. With a deliberate step forwards, Vern began his 12 O’clock route, edging south, spying east with every turn of the light.

The force of the gale that night took even Vern by surprise, and he headed inland away from the coast before he had gone the full mile south. The moon appeared in spells but was, more often than not, obscured by thickly tangled racing clouds.  The gusts were not as strong further in, as he joined his well trodden path down into the grassy hollows which lead on to thorny bushes and the dense scattering of bare trees on the outskirts of the forest which swept darkly to the west. Various symbols carved into the trunks of the trees flashed at him when the moon or the spotlight threw sight in his direction. Familiar images of beetles or dogs, of pyramids and spirals, were emblazoned and their secret messages imparted. Crouching underneath the trunk of a tree which had forever lain across this stretch of path, Vern, seeking shelter, was drawn to the scratched image of a snake, it’s forked tongue curled around an egg. This image, this serpent, like the countless figures inhabiting the fantastical quilted scenes depicting the Heron’s journeying, not literal. This was his portrait, and it stood like the entry in a dateless diary, a metaphorical journal without pages, specific only to place and meaning, regardless of time. It’s message, this place has suffered life to be stolen from it.

Emerging from beneath the fallen tree after several minutes’ respite from the icy winds, Vern could see the clouds rolling decisively over the moon, swamping her sheen and mugging the shadows of things. And then, instantly, seconds before a deafening crash, the world lit up a hundred times brighter than the sun as lightning forked from above into the ground not twenty metres ahead of Vern. Unable even to catch a breath, and startled beyond all ordinary fear, he fell to the ground, clutching the grass and branches underneath him, stunned into an earthly embrace. The second strike and clap seemed simultaneous, and Vern’s ears coiled from the heat of exposure to this fearsome strike that sought him out as its epicentre. Rain as hard as rocks, pelting into all spaces, came suddenly from wind, itself blown out by the totality of downpour. As each flash lit the sky like a nuclear explosion, Vern could see intense blood red flashes from beneath his clamped eye lids. His finger nails gouged the earth, and his nostrils burrowed downwards, each gasp and snort a terrified, mucus filled frenzy. After several minutes, thinking that the storm had moved onwards, Vern lifted his face up from the ground and scrambled to unsteady feet, just in time to see another fork streak downwards onto the top of the lighthouse with an angry crash that brought him to his knees.

Soon, the wind had calmed, and the clouds parted as the storm was sucked away, thumping elsewhere. And in typical fashion,Vern, alive, scratching at the root beneath his forearm with a small stone, the picture of a lighthouse with a vertical streak darting towards its tip. He whittled by moonlight. The last bolt, the direct hit, must have knocked out the giant man made light.

By the time Vern had reached the coast again, the lull in the weather was over, and ragged torn clouds were yanking stabbing gusts into the cliff edge which spiralled up and over in tugging eddies, nipping feverishly at his overalls. The safety of the cave was welcome, and its echoey stillness more than sanctuary. Staring out over the waves washing at their highest to within feet of the cliff entrance, Vern marvelled to see no artificial light grazing and sweeping the scene. On his way to the cave, he had glanced several times towards the lighthouse, now blackened into silhouette, its heart plucked out. It was a stranger on the horizon, a towering shell full of ghosts and dizzying winds. He saw this, his home, with much trepidation, like the embodiment of a dark, brutal destroyer. With the steady sound of distant storms and the wash of the sea, Vern succumbed to sleep like a punch-drunk boxer.

Vern awoke, stiff, a lifeless body, his limbs sodden and heavy on the cave floor, his neck twisted away from the cave entrance, like a wet leaf which has been slapped to rest by a charging torrent, caught by the fissures of some stony obstacle. The endless depth of cave to one side, the expanse of endless ocean on the other. The deep cracks on the cave walls and the bright-dark mural etched all around. The wooden box of provisions, a shape in the dark, a shape amongst shapes. And as Vern looks out to sea, and the light which hurts his eyes, the brightest colour, brighter than this landscape would ever normally proffer, is visible, and swimming , half caught by the rocks of the craggy shoreline. It is a square of vivid orange, a fluorescent bobbing cube of colour. Inspired and curious, Vern stretches towards the cave entrance and retrieves this oddity. He recognises it as a life jacket, but this is secondary. He flips it and reads, Last Point Supplies. He can see other colours. He sees the dark brown of soaked parcel wrap, only scraps. Also, the light blue of a cotton T-shirt, torn and tangled with weeds. The dark green of a bottle, upside down and floating several metres from the cave entrance. Vern understands that these fragments have been born out of accident, and that life, of some kind, of many kinds perhaps, has perished. Vern fumbles after his provisions box and, whilst chewing on the meagre samples of food inside, the dried pulses and the nuts, extends his shaking fingers, holding a colour soaked rock, and paints the moment. And all the while, as he scrapes and fashions, he does not care to acknowledge any feelings of relief.

And then a discovery. A meeting. There on the steep grassy slope leading up from the shore like the head of a very large paint brush, freshly dipped in oil, the slick, sleek body of a bird. Vern unable to escape the enormity of this moment. He approaches and gently kneels beside the prostrate creature, spread onto the flat so deliberately, so incredibly. It gleams and sticks to its grassy canvas. It is a Heron, like the Heron of his depictions, the Heron of the signpost. It is dead, but it has no mark of harm, and nothing has been torn from its perfect curve. Your journey is over, he whispers. Vern is staggered by the stillness of this moment. And the strength of this image. It is as though nothing could have been more certain than this. And, peering closer at the Heron, he can see a rainbow of colours so deep and mysterious that he cannot believe colours like that exist. Colours so dark and silvery that flash the deepest tones when disturbed. Such unrivalled solidity of colour, so rich, these feathers, so unimaginable. And then, swiftly, Vern plucks four, maybe five feathers, pockets them with the greatest care, whispers some thank you, and turns back towards the rising cliff edge.

*************

He walks south back to the burned out lighthouse, his mood surreal, not funereal. As Vern approaches through high wind, he can see, 100 yards away, a scorched black line running down the side of the white cylinder of home. He can see holes smashed into the roof, and boarding flapping, twisting in fits and starts. Every window is glassless, and the door banging shut on its bottom hinge like some mad thing hitting itself, tortured by incomprehension. He knows damage, but not in this place, where his pictures, his stitches, build safety, knit together an impenetrable comfort zone. But this is damage, naked and raw. And yet there is no sign of fire, and no reason to expect his textiles should not have survived the lashing storm. They must surely be saturated, ripped and ragged, but still there, ready for restoration perhaps. The bulb must have shattered in to a million pieces. Those pieces lay scattered and glittering all around, some pieces as large as the windscreen of a car. A veritable battleground of sparkling razor sharp catastrophes. Inside, no picture left upon the wall. No mirror unsmashed. His boxes and chairs and bags and bedding all heaped into one corner, window panes splintered and crockery blasted into fragments. Then, somewhere, impossibly, the smothered chime of a clock. And everywhere, soggy threads unravelled, spaghetti webs of washed out colour stuck in random clumps over every surface. Like joke confetti. But the threads are still here.

And every now and then, a complete picture, snagged under a snapped floorboard, or blown up into the crevices of the stairwell. Vern ascends, adjusting himself, pushing against the elements on the inside where they have never been, to the point of impact, the open roofed top, the room that housed light before attack. He collects more and more of the pictures he had thought obliterated, each one a simple pleasure to behold. The stoop and recovery mechanical. And in them he sees the beauty that they had always held. But this beauty, in the context of so complete a destruction, no longer feels total. He pulls the feathers from his pocket and lays them flat against ragged thread, spreading them to reveal a million different shades in constant flux.

***************

Vern did not receive supplies that winter, and Greg’s disappearance on the supply run was only confirmed to him in the spring when, from the safety of the cave some mile north of the broken and abandoned lighthouse, he watched the approach of a boat filled with half a dozen men, scouring the shoreline with binoculars raised. Vern rested in shadow and made not a sound as the boat pulled into the shore beyond his visibility south of the cave entrance. The men would be looking for him, for Greg, for clues, for life. They would, no doubt, have plenty of provisions, and plans to restore the lighthouse. But what would be the point of that, thought Vern. It did not have the power to save a life. It could only warn of destruction that was imminent. How much better not to know. They would, of course, offer to take Vern back with them, to nurse him back to health, and help him come to terms with the trauma he must surely have experienced, having suffered so greatly in isolation, so far away from civilisation.  They would speak to him and not know his secret.  The meaning of his connection with this place. They would not know that he had brought two worlds together. They would look at him with a mixture of wonder and horror, and he would see the colour of their blood. After several hours, the motor started, and the boat pulled away, into the churning sea, heading back with little more than stories of death and destruction, of grey abandonment and the loss of life on the edge of the world.

And Vern, clutching the Heron’s feather, would once again fly in his dreams to distant lands where colours unknown to man shone with a radiance brighter than a thousand suns. And in the day, Vern would depict the places he had seen through the Heron’s eyes, etch them into the walls of the cave, and for each new section, attach a strand of the Heron’s feather lending to them an infinite spectrum of colour. The tapestries had become unimportant. The depiction of the flying Heron in each of the surviving pieces showed their invalidity. The Heron was not simply motif, could never be peripheral. It contained more colours in itself than did the views it flew through. Vern had no more paints, but would not have been able to depict the colours he had seen with paint alone. Instead, he carved and coated his work in blood with the finest of instruments. The tool he used was a curious shape, pointed and pearly, hollow on the inside and delicately ribbed, like a seashell, on the outside. And just as it had once pointed towards the distance, prompted by the signpost, the Heron’s beak would continue to seek out new lands, and return after flight, to its place of rest, halfway between worlds, beyond Last Point.