Water, water everywhere for Jonathan Self — especially in the places where you'd least want to have it.
Water is everywhere in the solar system. Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Mars, Jupiter and their moons were formed from a solar nebula that contained water. The world holds roughly 1,386,000,000 cubic kilometres of the stuff. It’s what regulates the earth’s temperature and your own temperature, too, human bodies being mostly water, of course. ‘Nothing,’ according to Lao Tzu, ‘is softer or more flexible than water, yet nothing can resist it.’ Our house certainly couldn’t.
Before we took the decision to renovate, water was coming in through the roof, the windows and the stone walls. It caused mushrooms to grow in several of the bedrooms (non-edible, sadly, or we’d have sold them in the farm shop) and was why sizeable bits of the drawing-room ceiling were inclined to detach themselves without notice and with near-fatal results (‘One lump or two, Vicar?’).
It is not an especially big house — about the size of a country rectory — but, for various reasons far too tedious to enumerate here, it has taken a very long time to put right. Eight years, in fact. Oh, I am not complaining. Far from it. We have been able to rent on and off in the neighbourhood and we are fortunate enough to have a house in the city. Still, I will admit that, since we were forced to move out, I have frequently felt fed up with our situation, especially in the middle of the night.
Wendell Berry describes the sensation better than I can: ‘When despair grows in me/and I wake in the night at the least sound/in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,/I go and lie down where the wood drake/rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.’ Not being able to lie down where the wood drake rests, I have often fallen asleep imagining that I am tucked up in my own bed, pretending to myself that I could hear, through the open window, the comforting, familiar sound of the horses moving around the home field, the pigs snuffling in the walled garden, the hooting of an owl, the distant roar of the sea and that I could smell the intoxicating mixture of salty air, wild rose, chamomile and honeysuckle that envelops the house at this time of year.
I wonder if the dogs’ dreams have echoed my own. When their legs are twitching and they make whimpering sounds in their sleep, are they chasing rabbits or birds in a specific location — our own woods, for example — or could they be anywhere? If they were able to speak, would one of them greet me one morning with the words: ‘Last night I dreamt I went to Drombeg again…’?
I am more interested in what animals dream about than what humans dream about. Take octopuses. David Scheel, who spent 25 years studying the creatures, found that when asleep they go through a mesmerising series of colour and body-pattern changes caused, he believes, by dreams of hunting or some other pleasurable (ahem) activity. (One wonders, as an aside, of what Paul the Psychic Octopus — football fans with long memories may recall that he correctly predicted the result of the 2010 World Cup among other things — dreamt).
According to Carl Sandburg: ‘Nothing happens unless first we dream.’ If this is true, it has certainly taken an inordinate amount of dreaming to make our house habitable again. Obviously, home wasn’t built in a day. Nevertheless, with any luck, we will finally be back sleeping in our own dry beds next week.
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