Day 6: February 1
The trees are calling. the trees have always been calling.
With something akin to shock, I realize I am not being poetic when I say that I have seen, for some nine years now, scenes of a girl of eight or nine years old walking away from the ashes of a place where once stood a great tree.
Once when I first moved to new Mexico, I went on a road trip - Chaco Canyon, Canyon de Chelly, Navajo National Monument, El Morro, Valles Caldera. Once, at a cafe I got to talking to a Diné couple - we grinned about being Indians - that became a running joke during my time in New Mexico - who is the real Indian anyway. I remember the husband said he was often away on trips and she was often alone at home. They lived off the grid and the night was really night, really dark. And she would get scared some nights and sleep with the lights on. And he said that he would say to her, don’t be afraid of the dark. It is here to protect you. That dark is in the abyss. The dark that protects.
In the abyss behind me is the abyss of accepting that being unseen is the way things go because it comes naturally to me to live in nuance and shadow. In the abyss is the decision I made about 3 years ago, to write a novel, a fiction to leave behind something of what it means to follow shadow. It’s called The Village at Night. That unfinished novel is also in the abyss.
I’m losing track of what the abyss represents because the notion of a black hole that eats stars is so vivid and tactile. I want to eat up that image. That kind of power to open the floodgates and receive. Everything disappearing into the dark. the dark of arrival, the dark of departure. The mead hall of the Venerable Bede. That’s what you get for studying English literature. When you think of the dark, you think of the mead hall of the Venerable Bede. Don’t even get me started on Grendel. Or Beowulf, for that matter. Side by side with Ram and Sita stories which I read in Amar Chitra Katha comic books, there was Grendel gnashing his teeth at the epic hero, Beowulf. I am not a fan of the John Berger’s the Art of Fiction. But his Grendel - oh that. That I am a fan of. That last moment of Grendel looking down at his own abyss. The monster at the edge of his own fire. To submit to what lights you up is like falling. Not rising. The weight of submission takes you down close to the earth.
I am losing track of the abyss. Maybe that’s what this is all about. Maybe I have loved the abyss too long all these years. To leave the abyss is to leave what I have been, some kind of essence.
“In defense of the necessary dark” - I wrote this phrase last year I think, as part of my open letter to 2022.
I trust this novel is meant to find its way out of the abyss. The girl walking away from the ashes of a tree - she’s part of this novel too. Yes, out of the abyss.
THE VILLAGE AT NIGHT
a novel
Shebana Coelho
Prelude
There are moments I’ve been alone with the sea at night. No one will ever know. And it was. And I accepted that it was.
But I want to write about it now, those moments of silence, when no one exists but you and your encounter with stars. Moments of stars dissolving into skin. No one would know unless you told them.
I want to share an island in the same sea of our lives in which we are born and eventually, disappear into dark. An island of living intuition, what I call the fierce feminine, that which the world reveres but has not yet learned to value, que no tiene valor.
Aisa is also así.
I want to exist in the world after I have gone, a story of following shadows, a story with nuance enough to make you whole.
It begins in that village.
