By Ben.
Planning a festival, even a small one, is a logistical nightmare. Unless, like me, you ignore the logistics, in which case planning a festival is a tidal affair. Hope and worry, trepidation and exaltation; the poetics of logic, things coming together, coming apart, falling together, falling… well, you get the idea. I’ve been dreaming about it.
A logistical nightmare. That’s what people say isn’t it? And what a nightmare that would be: a million different strands, each dependent on all the rest, refusing to coalesce, and tangling into ever-less extricable knots. I can’t be alert to everything at once. It’s like trying to pin down a fleet of hydrogen balloons. Everything wants to levitate. That’s the thing about dreaming, it ends in waking.
If it’s gonna happen, these dreams need to be realised, that means ‘made real’. But, of course, the whole thing gets dampened in the thinking. Dreams need to be thought, made thinkable, snatched out of the clouds and gently (perhaps gently!) massaged into a clear, strategic, deliberate planning process.
No point getting stressed about it. Let’s try mindfulness. That seems to be the answer to everything at the moment. Find your centre, feel the floor, ground yourself. It’s 2021. It’s October.
The October mists are settling, and the stickmen of Sauternes pick beads with gilded tongs.
‘Stop it!’, you tell me (or do I tell myself?). That’s just the type of whimsical distraction that we could well do without! Festivals require logical, sober planning, not airy-fairy fantasies about grape-pickers and autumn mists. Who’s going to put up the marquee, where will the sea-chanties take place, have we obtained permission from the harbour master, what about insurance, fire regulations, stewards, bank accounts, first aid, licenses, Moscow Drug Club, tickets.
Tickets?!
Yes, tickets!
I say, you plan it! You say, it seems,
it’ll take more than hauteur to realise these dreams!
Rude!
But it did rhyme. Sort of.
I suppose there are some things we can predict. During the festival weekend the Severn tide will lift the Avon six times, give or take. It will come in six times. And it will go out six times. The Earth will rotate on its axis about two and a half times, depending on when we start counting. Several thousand cars will cross the flyover.
How many exactly?
I don’t know. I don’t care.
How many gallons of cider will be sold? How many daylight hours?
About twenty-five I would think.
Gallons?
Hours.
Oh no, it’s not possible to be alert to everything at once. A logistical nightmare. Best to take comfort in what we know will be in place. Thank God for practical, logical, balanced, steady, stable, reality-orientated people. Thank God for people like you.
Is that a compliment?
No.
Oh.
Stand there, stand still! Breathe in the harbour-city, breathe the mud and the salt. It’s 2021. It’s October. All around you, a festival of words is taking place. You are here. It is now. Float your mind’s eye on the ebb-tide, let it take it. Let it open out to where logistics is a matter of ever broadening circles.
Further out, sprats are schooling in their millions, and further still, the sonar diminuendo of whale song. Beyond the song is wilderness, by which I mean territories untamed by thought and planning. Let me tempt you out of this. Take my hand and we’ll step over the brink of this, this, this…?
You say, an edifice, built strong, built tall,
I say, weightless is a cool way to fall…
Deepening by degrees, in total darkness, we swim out of our bodies, out of our minds,
out beyond the whale song to where thought ends.
And further
out, out, outer still.
Out into the silent roar, to where enormous entities cohere over unthinkable distances.
I’m a dreamer.
You’re a nightmare.