Silenced by winter's violent storms

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/27/silenced-by-winter-storms-listen

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Lying on the pavement, it stared up at me, reproachfully, out of the late December morning. A perfect starling, its eyes still wide open as if at the shock of its death. So ordinary a bird, so utterly beautiful, a mosaic of shimmering iridescent green flashes on its wings, claws and beak sharp and gothic. It's a common, almost ignored component of the winter landscape, swooping in vast numbers in its twilight murmurations, but seen singly, in close-up detail, an exquisite corpse. It was already a ghost of itself.

Like all dead animals, it spoke of its own beauty, dumb yet eloquent. It seemed a dark emissary of these few days' grace, caught in the wavering light between the end and the beginning of the years. Days when the sun barely bounces above the horizon, and when, for most of us, ordinary life is suspended. Suddenly, we have to stop.

The emptiness at this ending of the year is an atavistic anomaly, a glorious interruption to our routine. As a relic of an extended festival, this anarchic interregnum can still connect us to what it once meant, as the mad sustenance and acquisition of our lives comes to a halt – despite the statistics that show how many of us forsook the company of our families to continue the buying online.

It's an uneasy but welcome truce in the capitalist war. Like the silence after the Icelandic volcanic explosion of 2010, when suddenly the birds could be heard over the airports again, the storms of this week have reinforced that interruption. They left my house leaking with the force of horizontal rain driven into its cracks, the streets and rail tracks blocked by trees, and the phone cut off: a blissful state of imposed silence, and a reminder that even here, in the soft, cosseted, perennially connected south, we are not as in control as we thought we were. That our supposed dominion does not quite hold illimitable sway.

Swathes of Surrey and Hampshire are without power. Others are flooded out. For all their ubiquity, our imposed networks can fall apart, become as nothing as the airy constructions that they are. The elements bite back as that disconnection forces us to reconnect with the primal. We remember that our natural state is not constant noise, or even constant warmth. Down at the shore, where I swim at 5:30am in the darkened sea, the days come to a close as I dip in again, the water now the colour of pewter, liberated by the cold. This morning I swam under a clear, moonlit sky, the stars and planets as sharp as the frost. In the darkness, I thought of St Cuthbert, the seventh-century saint who was said to spend all night in the sea, naked, meditating – although he had the benefit of a pair of otters which conveniently appeared to dry his feet with their fur when he emerged. Lacking friendly otters, I stuffed my hands alternately under my armpits as I cycled back along the shore. The dawn had began to seep into the sky, and the stillness was almost tangible, heightened by the calls of curlews and oystercatchers. Even the distant docks of Southampton, working 24/7 to import all those things we buy, seemed to have fallen quiet.

Perhaps the most subversive moment in the Christmas broadcast schedules was BBC Four's revealing documentary on Sister Wendy, who might be regarded as a modern-day saint, an anachronistic presence with her buck teeth and stringent assertions on art. At the end of the film, the ferociously opinionated nun demanded that the script be put aside, and everyone stop and listen to the wild track of the moment – the almost-nothingness in the air, like wild yeast. Silence on air, silence in the air, is a dangerous moment. It addresses both the joy and the grief of this season. Suddenly, like the starling challenging me on the pavement with its own silence, we are forced to listen to ourselves. And we realise that it is a deeply discomforting, but extraordinarily liberating sensation.

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