Introduction

This piece was sparked when Julia, my friend and fellow unpsychology editor, told me she was embarking on a collaborative conversation project around one of Ursula K LeGuin’s books. This kind of spark happens every so often for me, as LeGuin and her work come back round regularly to catalyse something.

The last time was a year or so ago when I decided to explore The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction after listening to one of the Crafting with Ursula conversations from the excellent Between the Covers podcast.

The time before that, around the start of 2020, I decided to embark on reading all her short stories and novellas over the space of the next year or so. And before that was the day, in early 2018, when I found out she had died, aged 88, leaving one of the greatest legacies of any writer in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Indeed, since I was a young adult (and a teacher and a father), I’ve returned regularly to her work - particularly the Earthsea books (I’ve always has a penchant for YA fantasy!) and her wonderful, uncategorisable book, Always Coming Home, that I find myself re-reading every few years for its every-unfolding luminous mystery, poetry and utopian realism…

She loved the world

So, this cycle of return and response has been there since my early adulthood. This is partly because LeGuin always seemed to be a bit of a prophet to me – albeit a quite ordinary, common-sense one – in that she has seen coming many of the shifts and movements in our global cultures since the 1970s. And also because I just love her writing and the worlds she conjures; the ways she could spill her imagination across the universe, but still stayed grounded, with a weather eye and a quizzical raised eyebrow to the strange culture we live in.

Ordinary? Yes. There was nothing magical about her, though she often wrote about magic, and respected its metaphorical power. She never claimed to be a philosopher or an opinion-former, though she achieved both by default over the decades. She was a hardworking, gifted and grounded writer, a mother and cat lover who, like all the best writers, saw and recorded the human (and non-human) condition with clarity and precision. Her thing was the story. Her thing was the simple telling. Her thing was the way that a story (or a poem) could teach us something important and universal, but that the ‘lesson’ was never to be the explicit aim. Polemic was anathema to her; the world for her was at once a simple, glorious, complex, awful, nuanced place in which story-telling humans miraculously exist to observe it.

It wasn't just humans who told her stories or were the subjects of her tales. There were dragons, of course; different strokes of humans; intelligent non-humans and planetary, plant-based consciousnesses on far distant planets; a whole town that moved from coast to scrubland to mountainside to the annoyance of its inhabitants; coyotes, jackrabbits and chipmunks appearing in mythical stories along with real human children; ants recording their own language in texts, messages and stories carved on acacia seeds. All people to her.

There was something in her rare, often funny but always peculiarly ordinary imagination that let nothing through. No bullshit anyway. She was aware, as she grew, of her own missteps and misgivings. She made mistakes, then acknowledged and rectified them later in her writing. She imagined peoples who were not bound by ‘gender’, and foresaw the kinds of ‘culture war’ nonsense that follows the simplistic binary thinking of prejudice and determinism, that has made the world so dangerous for so many ordinary people who do not wish to be defined and controlled by their culture’s embodied and sexualised fantasies. She saw, and wrote about, the cruelty that can emerge and grow into individual and collective lives, and was always clear about the ability of poetry – of storytelling – to speak truth to power, yes, but more importantly, to speak truth to ourselves.

Above all, she loved the world. She loved people and skies and animals and stories. She loved the stretch of imagination that is found in speculative fiction writing (sci fi, fantasy etc.), and rejected the myth that fiction had to be tethered to some kind of literary realism. She recognised the ways that this narrow view of literature – that saw the ‘men of letters’ as the grown-ups in the room – was excluding for whole swathes of others who wrote and were written about. Women, children, non-humans, people of colour, non-binary and neurodiverse people, working class people, people from the future and many others. However, she didn't ‘include’ these ‘others’ as a gesture, but just wrote the universe as the diverse, weird and frankly queer and wonderful place it is and – beyond the boundaries of what is ‘known’ – how she imagined it might be.

I’ve worked as a psychotherapist and counsellor for much of my adult life, and I’ve also been an activist, teacher, writer and editor. I’d say that no-one has been more influential in forming my practical view of the world than LeGuin. Of all the political theorists, psychological researchers, philosophers and general bigmouths with big ideas; none of them get close to her grasp of the ways in which humans act, behave, fight, motivate, imagine – and become mad, sad or bad.

Even other writers whose trade is imagination understand this. No-one gets close to imagining what she does…

And while she was not usually writing directly about politics, or psychology, or science, or ethics, she was always writing about all of these. I think this is because she was not prepared to separate the world into compartments, disciplines and silos. She was not prepared to accept the hierarchies that our cultures all too often impose upon us – whether these be modern, post-modern or indigenous.

She tells us, playfully, but with more than a hint of subversion, that “it doesn’t have to be the way it is”… 1

Jealous of a man

There is a man in America I am jealous of. His name is David Naimon. He runs a book podcast called Between the Covers, and he was a friend of Ursula LeGuin in the later stages of her life, and had the kinds of conversations with her I would love to have had. In 2022, he devoted a year of monthly podcast episodes to the theme of Crafting with Ursula, talking with twelve writers – all people who knew and had worked with her in some capacity - about her life, writing and influence.

(For that gift, I am prepared to forgive him his fortune and privilege!)

As most people know, Ursula K LeGuin died in early 2018. Three days after she died, I published a piece about her.2 I wrote in particular about the influence on me of her strange and beautiful masterpiece, Always Coming Home, a book that has been with me as a touchstone since I first picked up my treasured copy in the late 80s. I wrote:

‘It begins wonderfully: “The people in this book might be going to have lived a long, long time from now in Northern California”. Time-twisting from the start, Le Guin plays with the idea of then (before) and now and then (to come), and tells us something marvellous about this game of life: “What was and what may be lie, like children whose faces we cannot see, in the arms of silence. All we ever have is here, now”.

This sensibility has become central to my life and work, as I evolved from naive, troubled activist and doting young dad, to a (hopefully) more mature therapist, writer and doting grandpa. I have changed, as we all do, but Le Guin’s book has stayed with me; and I read it every few years with new insights emerging each time.’

Her death touched me deeply, and I wished then, as I had wished before, that I could have met and talked with this wise, brilliant and inspirational woman.

David Naimon had the privilege of talking with her a number of times. In an article he wrote soon after she died, he reproduced one of these interviews taken from the book he wrote with her entitled Conversations on Writing, and reflected further on his collaborations with her in another piece Ursula K. Le Guin, Editing to the End (both of them are up on lithub.com). They are great reads and Naimon brings out Ursula’s character beautifully in the second, his heartfelt tribute piece.3

However, I love the interview most, as her voice is in it, and I can imagine her saying the things she says, in the ways she says them. There are few people in the world I have that feeling about. It’s a strange relational mystery – that I should feel so close to a person who I have never met, who I only know through her words. I don’t feel that with other writers I admire; they stay at a writerly ‘distance’ – psychologically ‘appropriate’ perhaps – but not Ursula LeGuin. I became a bit of a LeGuin completist (I’m not there yet!) not just because I wanted to read more of her stories and essays, but because I felt that the ‘clear, clean lines’ she wrote held something of her and, in turn, held something important I wanted to listen to and understand.

It’s not a culty thing, I hasten to add, and not (much of ) an obsession either. It’s more of a practice – in the meditative sense of the word. Something involving contemplation, with a rhythm and a flow that, when I’m reading her, carries me along like a current; sometimes gently, sometimes in a rush. It’s an image she used in one of her short stories, Unlocking the Air,4 when a group of student revolutionaries are arguing about direction and choice. One says: “When the dam breaks? You have to shoot the rapids! All at once”. It’s a line I love and have written about; her work is scattered with these amazing sentences and paragraphs, full of wisdom, yet totally and necessarily in the context of the story they need to be part of.

Things to be imagined and reimagined

What we learn from Ursula K LeGuin is that things can be imagined and reimagined. That souls can be made and remade. That there are empires in time and space and we don’t have to get the physics right in order to reach them. That imagination and fundamentalism are in conflict, and that fantasy, therefore, is an act of freedom – and poetry too, as LeGuin puts it so eloquently in her interview with David Naimon.

They are talking about an literary prize event at which, as Naimon puts it, she “gave both a beautiful and blistering speech about the commodification of art versus the practice of art.” He goes on: “In it you say that resistance and change often begin in art, and that most often it is in the art of words that you see the beginnings of resistance and change.”

And LeGuin replies: “After all, dictators are always afraid of poets. This seems kind of weird to a lot of Americans to whom poets are not political beings, but it doesn’t seem a bit weird in South America or in any dictatorship, really.”

Politically and psychologically, Ursula LeGuin understood that writing – and other forms of imaginative work – can be a subversive act. However, we do not do the job of creation - writing - in order to be disruptive. We do it in order to tell the stories and write the poems that show us how the world is – how WE are. This, in itself, can be as subversive as it gets..

I’ve learned this the hard way, of course! Like many others, I’ve written fiction that ‘tells’ not ‘shows’. I have written poetry that is polemical and obvious. I have written non-fiction that uses rhetorical imperatives: “we must!'…”, “we should all…!”, “let us…!”.

Ursula wrote passionately about the things she believed in, but these most often were in the form of inquiries and deep questions. Her most well-known story of ethics, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, is gently written, yet searingly brutal. It invites the reader to consider, “what would you do?”, and asks again those nagging question she kept asking: “Why are things as they are? Must they be as they are? What might they be like if they were otherwise?”.

These are questions that politicians, psychologists and others should always be asking, but somehow usually forget to. Perhaps one of the reasons this project is called ‘unpsychology’, is so we can at least remind ourselves to keep asking them!

• Why are things as they are?

• Must they be as they are?

• What might they be like if they were otherwise?

In the current political climate, we live in a world in which there are many people – fundamentalists, dictators, populists and others – who do not want things to be ‘otherwise’. Or rather, the otherwise they imagine is the myth of something that they half remember from before – a story, “that not only has Action, it has a Hero. Heroes are powerful”.

The Hero (the male hero, of course) becomes the carrier of the story; the noisy, talkative, hero storyteller with his long-form podcasts and sensational theories about Man the Hunter, the carnivore, the virile, God-fearing, patriotic male-of-the-species who has been emasculated by… well everyone else who is not male or virile enough, I suppose.

In truth, and as Ursula LeGuin told us with more of her clear, clean lines, the human story was never really about a Hero who hunted and fought. It was about the ordinary people – maybe woman and children, maybe the outsiders and queer folk – who wandered around gathering stuff to put in their containers – their carrier bags, as LeGuin puts it. These are not Action stories, granted, but they are real tales about the ways in which most of us live our lives, when we are allowed to, and are left alone by Heroes. For we know how disaster strikes when the Heroes get involved. And they are, I think, gathering again to do their Heroic, Authoritarian, Carnivorous, God-fearing thing, and so these times are once again perilous for us all…

Yet, dictators hate poets, so here’s a lovely poetic piece of story, from Ursula LeGuin, to finish this chapter, from her small essay, The Carrier Bag History of Fiction.5 It isn’t a Hero story – and Ursula, by the way, isn’t a hero either for doing the things that she and other humans need to do to get on and live and imagine and reimagine our lives. We at unpsychology will have more to say about this in the future; other episodes to imagine and write along the way. In the meantime, Ursula wrote this:

“If it is a human thing to do to put something you want, because it's useful, edible, or beautiful, into a bag, or a basket, or a bit of rolled bark or leaf, or a net woven of your own hair, or what have you, and then take it home with you, home being another, larger kind of pouch or bag, a container for people, and then later on you take it out and eat it or share it or store it up for winter in a solider container or put it in the medicine bundle or the shrine or the museum, the holy place, the area that contains what is sacred, and then next day you probably do much the same again – if to do that is human, if that's what it takes, then I am a human being after all. Fully, freely, gladly, for the first time.”

Notes

Blue Marble...

is an eco-poem about the Earth, how we humans see it, and what we are doing to it. The original pamphlet was written by Steve Thorp and illustrated and designed by Ruth Thorp (www.ruththorpstudio.co.uk). It was published by Raw Mixture Publishing in 2017. Three further stanzas were written for Earth Day 50 on April 22 2020 and these are published in this post below the main text.

A spoken version of the original poem (read by Steve) accompanied by music and video, is available on Daily Motion at https://dai.ly/x7yyakl .

Blue Marble (original version, 2017)

1

When you are flung so far away from Earth,

you first see the pristine curve and endless luminosity,

then marvel at the perfection of the blue marble

that hangs there. Your breath rises. You find

yourself unable to move; you think, ‘surely it was

never this beautiful when my feet were grounded

there?’ From out here you can believe in both God

and Science, and know truth in the astronaut’s

words: ‘that’s what it takes to build a civilisation’.

2

‘We are all travelling together’. The astronaut’s eyes

glow like the earth. ‘There is a paper thin layer –

a line barely hugging the surface of the planet;

all that protects us from the harshness of space’.

Eyes dim. Shadows fall and night’s black sky comes

alight with storm-crackle, volcano-blaze, star-dazzle,

city-shine, aurora-dance. Now it does not seem so

protected; everything feels breathtaking

and precarious as we travel the space waves together.

3

Thrown further out, and Earth is still shining.

Here the perspective is of distance and connection;

jewels set firm in a black sky. Out here is more emptiness

than matter and though infinity is beyond, your eye

is still drawn to home – an orbiting speck in the

pull and bind of a system at the edge of a galaxy,

that orbits the universe in a year of millions of years.

We are significant – insignificant; a centre that is no centre.

We are jewel, starlight and spinning dust.

4

Back towards Earth – this mesmerising exception,

this ordinary wonder – you notice glowing oceans

as your orbit follows the dayline. In night’s shadow,

the cities shine – colonies of beautiful parasites –

illuminated only because we hollow out our home.

The seas are rising; icebergs calve from glaciers,

roaring even as their requiems are sung.

Daylight reveals deep gashes in the land and

vast, sullen conurbations of energy, dirt-grab and drill.

5

The Universe is too vast for our minds to flow around.

There are a billion trillion stars and we float on the

edge of time – the distances always growing. One day,

our star will die. One day, our galaxy will be so far

from the next that its isolation will be complete.

We will be long gone by then and so our own isolation –

our existential inheritance – is all in the mind.

The oceans and mountains seem endless, and seven

billion is far too large a number for us to fathom.

6

Turn to the Earth and there is Gaia and her chemistry.

We are microbial souls, the stuff of earth, stars

and cosmos. All we have is this cosmic quantum

stuff and the molecules of our imaginations.

Here now is myth, growth and new life. Here, the name

of the sun god. Here, the gods of earth and ocean.

Here, stories that warn of the dangers of flying too high.

Here, songs sung of the perils of the underworld. And

meanwhile the ice melts. This is our folly and legacy.

7

A pianist plays his elegy; a plaintive melody as

green Arctic ice crashes into the sea. The sudden boom

sounds like the very lowest notes of his instrument.

A seabird spears across the frame. A polar bear,

chasing the icemelt, leaps into the water, swimming

desperately towards a receding future.

The boom time sounds like war. Green ice looks like

heaven. The unimaginable already imagines itself.

There will be many drowned and dying cities.

8

Home now to the warm earth. Small things swarm,

and all seems right with the world. Here the goddess

does her thing. The dichotomy between fertility and

destruction is right here in the soil and soul of this

good, good earth. Not long ago, there stood a

stone house – now hidden in the deep undergrowth.

This is what the goddess does – she covers over

our histories: we who are human; we who are animal;

we who are stardust…

…We whose consciousness is embodied,

animated, evolved, propagated, imagined.

9

Exploratory restlessness is one definition of our

humanity, and the foundation for all this was laid in

Gaia’s garden: a small place out in the West, made

with modest hopes from growing meadows. Oak trees

are witches’ familiars; magic is evoked in animate

symbols: Donkey. Red Kite. Earthworm. Millipede.

Sparrow. Cormorant. Seal. Shark. Octopus. Porpoise.

And on the beaches: the small and ancient shell people.

10

Seasons do not always provide an antidote to destruction.

When this garden grows into Spring and dies in Autumn,

the world will not be saved, your future will not be certain,

but your fingers will be grubby and tired and

your muscles will ache from squatting down here in the dirt.

You will have seen the start of something. Right here,

you may learn to feed yourself and to notice how all

beauty begins. Then, you will be flung so far away –

with your dreams of blue marble and jungle green.

11

And so we hurtle onwards on Gaia’s great spaceship.

Tending gardens. Singing Earthsongs. We are lost souls

with a capacity for love and connection; a propensity

for blind destruction. We are the animals who forgot;

the angels who learned not to fly. We are space-apes and

gardeners – tending our children and the land –

laughing wildly and dancing the world. It is too late.

It is not too late. This is the good Earth – blue marble,

green ice promise, rising oceans, falling tears.

12

Now Gaia lives small in nooks and folds, in sea-swell

and beach caves, in tended gardens, on coast paths –

and always deep, deep in the forest. She cares nothing

for the hollow men and the dark shadows they cast.

It is a healing time for the world, and infinity beckons.

The angels are gathering in a galaxy a million, million

light-years from here. Eager for their home, they prepare

to fly. Earth waits, and she will welcome them as

she always did. And we? We will be flung so very far away.

Blue Marble (2020)

New stanzas written for Earth Day 50, 22 April 2020

13

So, here is Earth. And here is this organism on the

edge of life. It is a familiar visitor, spreading like wildfire,

melting us away, leaving us perplexed and fearful.

Yet this blue marble carries the anticipation of something;

a way of life we have not yet learned to live — though

there is nothing too complex in the system, just a

reflection of the sphere in the mirror of our minds,

and the clarity that emerges when we meet each creature,

look them in the eye and learn to live their ways.

14

This story is about how we are embedded, and how we

lost our old ways — intuitive knowledge held in each

molecule and organism, each corner of the world,

each ecosystem. When we look up, we see the deep

dreams our ancestors saw; when we look down,

our knowledge returns to soil and sea. This lore

flickers on the edge of life, like a virus does; settles

for a myth of transformation. There are deeper

wisdoms here, but we may have to dig for them.

15

Today is an Earth Day, a name we humans have given

it, though the spirits of the place would prefer more

practical moves. Still, it is a moment on which things

could turn; a pause is always a gift of sorts. The gods,

for their part, are indifferent. Nothing is written in the

stars, though our fate rides on the nature of the turning.

And so we ride on orbits within orbits, faced with the

unimaginable, staring with bright eyes into a future

we could still — even now — bring into being…

Notes and references

Blue Marble is an eco-poem about the Earth, how we humans see it, and what we are doing to it. The original piece was inspired by Sarah Wint’s ‘Gaia Garden’, part of The Daisybus Gardens near Solva in Pembrokeshire. A new edition of the pamphlet - including the extra verses – will be republished in 2024.

• A spoken version of the original poem, accompanied by music and video, is available on Daily Motion at https://dai.ly/x7yyakl.

• One of the themes in the poem and the garden is the Overview Effect which, according to Julia Calderone, “occurs when you are flung so far away from Earth that you become totally overwhelmed and awed by the fragility and unity of life on our blue globe".(Quote from ‘Something profound happens when astronauts see Earth from space for the first time’ in businessinsider.com, August 31st 2015 - updated July 2019)

• The astronaut’s quotes in the poem are taken from the film ‘Overview’ which can be found HERE on Vimeo:

• The pianist playing his Elegy to the Arctic is Ludovico Einaudi. You can find the video and the story behind it at: https://www.greenpeace.org/international/story/7570/ludovico-einaudi-performs-with-8-million-voices-to-save-the-arctic/

• The idea of ‘microbial souls’ comes from Caleb Scharf’s remarkable book ‘The Copernicus Complex, The Quest for Our Cosmic (In)Significance’.

• A virus was described by ‘an organism on the edge of life’ by Professor Ed Rybicki in 1990 (see this Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virus)

This is the fifth story from the Watertime taken from Unpsychology Magazine. It appeared in the second of two issue of Unpsychology in 2023— Imaginings 9.2 (both volumes are available free as PDFs from HERE and in print from: https://tinyurl.com/Unpsychologyprint)

FREE Unpsychology Imaginings issues

BUY ISSUES 9.1 & 9.2 IN PRINT

The stories are set in a future — in a place a bit like the UK — beset by devastating seasonal floods. The Heat has ravaged the land; and the RageTime has left an uncertain, fearful society — a world in which outliers, artists and Lostlings creep around the edges of the present, and live with the legacies of a far distant past.

You can find the first four stories in previous editions of Unpsychology and at the links below:

1. Bobcat in the Watertime is at https://unpsychology.substack.com/p/bobcat-in-the-watertime

2. This Soaring is at https://unpsychology.substack.com/p/this-soaring

3. Habitants is at https://unpsychology.substack.com/p/habitants

4. Peregrinatio is at

   https://unpsychology.substack.com/p/peregrinatio-a-story-from-the-watertime

IT HAS BEEN RAINING FOR WEEKS. Prolonged downpours are not unusual these days, but right now Bobcat imagines  she is trapped in a vast dark building with a persistent hammering on the roof. She is deep in the forest – walking through streams and pools where paths once were. She hadn’t realised the forest stretched this far and the rhythm of her journey has induced a kind of trance. This in itself is familiar – trance is a state she is used to – but the depth of it surprises her. Everything seems magnified and endless. 

It seems an eternity since she met Human travellers singing and camping in the forest clearing, and spoke with the women with her drum and rumbling wisdom. Since then, Bobcat has encountered no-one. Even the Habitants and ghosts, her usual companions, have become subdued and out of reach. 

With her tracker’s sense she has been following the familiar signs of Habitants on the move – a rustle, a snap or a sudden burst of flight – but in recent days they haven’t come near, nor spoken with their familiar, reassuring, intuitive mind-chatter. And the ghosts are just not there at all – as if her ghost-sense has deserted her.

This feels very wrong. As a Lostling, she is used to being alone,  but she has never been without the companionship of voices from the world around and beyond her. These are always present – reference points for her instincts and intuitions; senses swirling and settling; hidden things rising up, her body brimming with energy, crackling so the whole world feels encapsulated. 

Feeling fear rising fast, she does her usual thing to calm herself with breath and presence. She sits at the base of a tree just above the waterline – and empties. This routine  is  well-practiced, learned through a chaotic, loss-filled childhood, perfected in a short adult life. In the emptiness, she trusts that something inquisitive will come to explore the space. Then others will follow and she will be filled with presence, life and perception again. Ready to move on.

So, she sits beneath this tree, with the imposing monotony of the forest canopy above, trusting her lifetime of practice. Waiting. Waiting.

Nothing comes. She probes with her ghost-sense. At the edge of her awareness, something flickers, then seems to withdraw. Nothing. She opens her perception to the surrounding forest.. She knows there are Habitants all around – she can even describe the unseen tableaux: a pair of jays squabbling high in the canopy; other birds circling, settling and calling; a fox hunting, as other more timid animals on the forest floor fan out before the predator, trying to be the one that escapes. Below all this, amongst soaked detritus and flooded channels on the forest floor, small things of myriad variety living in their own small worlds. 

All this, she senses, but none of the Habitants have a voice. And the human part of her begins to ask, what happens when this part of ‘me’ is all that there is? She seldom uses this word – but  what if there is no-one here but ‘me'?

She panics. Takes out her Pad. Thinks about calling someone – another human: brother Jake in the City; sister Flute at the Big House; even someone random back in Town. She has no Contact here however, so even this distraction is not available. 

Something rises inside and she howls. A desolate baying cry that pours out from her body into the forest – though it is  immediately muffled by the incessant rain. There is no reply or response. If anything, the forest quietens, thickens, as if the air and water around her was congealed by her cry. Everything closes in. She feels she is being forced underground into a burrow that is too small for her, and does the only thing her body can do – curling up tight – and whimpers to herself until eventually she sleeps.

She dreams. Wakes. Forgets the dream, retains its essence for only a moment. The grim chill of wandering somewhere desolate fades. She dozes, dreams, wakes; dozes, dreams, wakes. She senses  dark figures looming over her near-to-waking self, as if they want to tell her something, but whatever they say is lost in waking. 

Now,  even  the smooth transition between the waking and sleeping worlds is lost. She wakes the next time in rage and fear. 

Everything that makes Bobcat Bobcat is fading into a singularity; a one-dimensional experience of her ‘self’ she has never felt before. Even when she lost Mamma and Gramma, even when Dadda left and Jake was taken, the voices, ghosts, dreams and connections she  forged across time and space meant that she always knew she was part of something intricate and beautiful – the world as she imagines it  really is. 

Not a Human world of Teck, fear, big ideas and broken promises, but one filled with ordinary wonder, and taken-for granted magic, with no sleight of hand or trickery. Now, all gone, washed away in a deluge of weeks of rain in an endless, flooded forest. 

She lies there. The landscape is monotonous and unchanging. Rain hammers, waters rise. She lies there, as saturated as everything else, eating nothing, drinking when she feels thirsty, holding out her hands to catch water that drips incessantly from the tree canopy. Once in a while she stirs,  moves uphill a little to avoid the rising water.  Mostly,  she sleeps, dreams and wakes; sleeps, dreams and…

Waking, she senses something is different. It is quieter, brighter. The rain has stopped and shafts of sunlight are shining through the canopy. She is struck by their beauty. They remind her of  the colours and shapes refracted through stained glass high in the tower of a Big House, illuminating the people below with glorious halos. 

She remembers what she had decided to call this  journey – her  ‘peregrinatio’. 

What was it that someone had written on the Pad Note?, “It’s walking for God, for fuck’s sake”.  Maybe this is what she was walking for, this moment of glory? Maybe this is what the people in the long past meant by God?

Maybe… and her thoughts trail off into the ordinariness of this moment. The sun has come out. It does this every day somewhere, and now it’s here and the rain has stopped. The journey feels hopeless again..

She looks around. The forest begins to steam. The suffocating coagulation she felt before begins to dissipate, and Bobcat  feels a lightening in her bones – even in the air itself. And now she feels hungry. So hungry. The awareness of this is so strong and sudden  that she staggers. She  she needs to eat, desperately!

Bobcat has been foraging since she was knee-high, and is soon in gathering mode. Many of the plants she would usually search for have been submerged by the water, but there are a few nuts and other fare scattered around. Not much,  but enough to feed her as she wanders. 

Walk on, she must. Something draws her and, though she still cannot sense the Habitant’s voices or the ghosts’ whispers, she trusts that something must be guiding her. This is how the world works. Yet, this is new territory for her and she is miles from familiar trails. She stops, realising that she is utterly lost, unsure of where she is and where she is going. 

Breath. Presence. She turns to practice again. Look at where the stream is flowing, she tells herself.  It is a directional signpost she is familiar with, and  will lead somewhere other than this desolate, claustrophobic wood. The channels, however, are in full chaotic flow and it’s impossible to see the direction the original watercourse might be heading. 

Breath. Presence.

Follow the higher ground, she thinks, and starts to climb a nearby hillock towards a small summit, on the other side of which is…more water. 

Breath. Presence.

Let’s not get lost in panic, though everything else seems lost right now.

Breath. Presence.

Through the trees she sees a change in the tone of the light. It is not sunlight descending in shafts, more a spreading illumination. She scrambles towards it, which takes longer than it looks like it should, and emerges – scratched and newly saturated from several tumbles  into streams and bushes on the way –  into a clearing. 

What opens up is utterly unexpected. Instead of endless trees and the rustling sounds and faint calls of Habitants, there is a hum of human activity and Lectrix.  As her eyes become accustomed to the brightness, she sees a cluster of buildings – brick-built like those on the flooded estate back home. These,  however,  are not ruined, empty homes for restless ghosts, but buzzing with life. Human life. 

Her instinct is to fall back into the familiar cover of the trees, but her human mind is thinking now and there seems little to be gained in returning to the forest. Cautiously, she approaches the nearest building. She can see there are people walking around the area. Most look purposeful, some are relaxed, chatting, enjoying the warmth of new sunshine. There are as many people here as she would usually see in the Town, on the few times she ventures in. 

At first no-one notices her; then there are some curious glances – not unfriendly – but she must look very bedraggled and strange to these cleanly clothed humans. They are dressed a bit like the people she met in the wood – simple, easy garments in subdued colours, and certainly not Teck made. 

Some look towards her as she stands stock still. Her habits of surviving in the world have deserted her. The Habitants are silent, the ghosts are gone. All that is left is a small, wet, ragged human in an unexpected and very human place. 

“I feel strange” she thinks, “Me, me, me” - as if she is practicing saying the word. 

Her body is calm. She is composed, silent and still, as one of the people approaches – concern on their face – and speaks to her. She cannot hear the words. Does not respond. Stares blankly. Allows herself to be led along a path, through a door and into one of the brick buildings. Follows down a lit corridor, to a room with a bed. 

Bobcat sleeps…

When she wakes, and has been gently bathed, dressed and fed by quiet, kindly folk, she feels certain  that she must no longer be a Lostling. Here, now, in this place, she can only be a Human. This thought surprises her, but it seems true. Everything she has known of her  is gone, and what is left is a young, underfed, tatty-looking human animal. One that she sees in the mirror in this plain and comfortable room. 

She begins to wander the corridors of these strange buildings – unhindered, and unchallenged. It occurs to her that there are connections in the world of which she has been entirely ignorant.  If she had spent more time attending Homeschool, maybe she’d know a little more? 

The thought tails off. Another one takes over.

Humans connect with   each other. She remembers Mamma, Gramma and Dadda, with affection and feels their loss. She misses Jake and Flute, when she thinks of them (which isn’t often). Yet, she has never engaged with people like these, and has little in the way of conversation to offer. Fortunately, for the most part, they leave her alone, nodding a greeting or asking if she would like something.

The Habitant voices are silent and her ghost sense is gone. There is nothing but a swirl of questions turning around in her mind. She feels panic rising. Breath. Presence. She practices her shutdown, then picks up her Pad. – She has  Contact in this Human place – and wonders whether to call Flute or Jake first to share the startling family news.

Each morning, as soon as she wakes, questions start whirling. The thoughts are like voices, but all of them her own. The ones she has known, and  now craves, are silent –  as if her mind has been hollowed out. She is left with being Human, like all these people walking about this strange place. 

A human person, just like everyone else.

This is the fourth story from the Watertime. It appeared in the 8th edition of Unpsychology — an Anthology of Warm Data (available free as a PDF from: https://tinyurl.com/Unpsych1to8FREE, and in print from: https://www.thegreatbritishbookshop.co.uk/unpsychology-issue-8-an-anthology-of-warm-data)

These stories are set in a future — in a place a bit like the UK — beset by devastating seasonal floods. The Heat has ravaged the land; and the RageTime has left an uncertain, fearful society — a world in which outliers and Lostlings creep around the edges of the present, and live with the legacies of the far distant past. You can find the first three stories in previous editions of Unpsychology and at the links below:

1. Bobcat in the Watertime is at https://unpsychology.substack.com/p/bobcat-in-the-watertime

2. This Soaring is at https://unpsychology.substack.com/p/this-soaring

3. Habitants is at https://unpsychology.substack.com/p/habitants

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BOBCAT IS ON A JOURNEY. The Habitant voices have named it a ‘peregrination’ and though she does not think she has ever heard the word, she likes it. It reminds her of the falcon she would watch from her tower perch high above the flooded estate, its sudden stoop never failing to thrill her. And it sounds a little bit wild — not like most words in this Teck-smoothed world. One day as she watched, the raptor fell and flew between the spaces, higher than mountains, then stooped in a column of air. It stopped time. She stared it in the eye for a moment that seemed like love and it held her gaze…

…“and I am there still”, she thinks, “following its spiral up and up and up to heaven and down again to ground in a moment”.

Gathering herself, she whispers another goodbye to her sister who is walking back to the safety of the Big House where she lives and sings and sometimes grieves. Bobcat, miles now from the insecurity of her own home, walks quickly away, already deep in the forest, even as she is remembering the sweet smell of Flute’s hair as she kissed it. Even as she is tuning out her sister’s love, and tuning in to the voices that guide her.

The world is so real. Right now, as she walks further from her home, further than she has ever been, she understands this and is comforted. She has always feared the journey — the stretch from home, as she has thought of it — but it was good to see Flute and her grand, safe and solid home, and she is reassured that the voices are still with her along the way. There is a subtle difference in their tone, she notices, but that is all right. As long as their wild words and whispers are still there for her.

The ghosts, on the other hand, might be more of an issue. The ghosts she knows — the familiar spirits of the past and the future — seemed more specific and situated in the places she was leaving behind, now perhaps forever.

She remembers Gramma, her ancient great-grandmother whose life stretched back into the RageTime and the Fire and beyond. Her crackling voice had been a connection to the familiar ghosts: it gave them context and grounding. Without the history embedded in Gramma’s voice, Bobcat is scared that new ghosts might begin to overwhelm her. When the ghosts come — even the familiar ones — the experience is exhausting and can leave her feeling feverish and delirious. Bobcat fears the unfamiliar, it can easily become overwhelming, and so is stepping out with trepidation.

Peregrination: a word she had heard in the Habitant voices around her. She remembers her Pad still has some Contact, as she is still quite near the Big House. So she takes it out and types in the word carefully, hoping she has spelled it right. There it is: ‘Peregrination’. The Note says something short and vague about a long and winding journey. Well that feels about right, though she is disappointed it doesn’t have more of the hawk in it!

Above it another word, almost the same, just a letter missing: ‘Peregrinatio’. This Note-thread is longer and more intriguing. The first entry seems to be an extract from a longer piece of writing": “Essentially”, it reads, “peregrinatio is a pilgrimage that does not follow a specific route or lead to a specific destination. It is leaving one’s home and wandering, but not aimlessly. It is an inward journey, with the goal of coming home to one’s true self.” Underneath someone else has added a Sub-note: “It’s walking for God, for fuck’s sake”.

Both entries puzzle her. She isn’t sure what is meant by a ‘true self’. It seems such an attenuated phrase. She assumes that the writer is referring to their experience of being a single, human Habitant, but how could this ‘self ’ be reduced to a singular ‘truth’? This seems alien to Bobcat. To Bobcat singularity is almost never experienced, and she assumes this is the same for everyone (even those who aren’t Lostlings, with the constant ebb and flow of voices and ghosts and connections and shifting time).

And the startling postscript. God. For fuck’s sake. What is God?

The stories she grew up with hold a vague memory. The name God is associated with the Fire and the RageTime and the BeforeTime. She remembers a Storydancer once who had woven an ancient tale of Flood with the Habitants of aeons ago. There had been a voice called God in that one — but she had been young, and Bobcat hadn’t really understood.

Still, she likes the directness of the line. This is a ‘peregrination’, the voices tell her, but she’d rather be walking with purpose than wandering vaguely in the world. So this is ‘perigrinatio’, she decides. She is “walking for God, for Fuck’s sake” — whatever that is or was or will be.

Some of her voices seem to be chattering now; a bit like the whispered disapproval that would spread around the village fire-gathering when people had learned of some minor transgression or social indiscretion in the community — but Bobcat likes the unfamiliar certainty in her decision, and pushes them away — for the time being at least.

Yet the voices seem to get louder, and there is singing too. The voices don’t sing, not in a human way, and she is confused as she often is when everything seems to be crowding into her head. She takes some breaths. The practice calms her and she tunes into her senses, as if she is a ‘self’ for a moment. She realises that the singing isn’t coming from the voices, but from somewhere ahead of her in the forest.

Naturally cautious, but perennially curious, Bobcat scouts along a curve that leaves the path, but stays connected with it. As she tracks around — near silently, because she is used to keeping quiet and staying unseen — the singing voices get louder. She smells smoke and then sees the fire and strange cloth huts pitched in the clearing (tents, she remembers they might be called.)

Although she is accustomed to the forest, her experience of humans is that they are generally creatures of manufactured habitation — most staying close to their Teck-built dwellings and quiet, tidy streets. The usual fire-gathering is a centre-of-town event and, though ritualistic, is carefully organised and tightly supervised. Apart from the games of children, playing with fire in the half-hidden scrubland at the edge of town, she’s never seen this thing before: fire and song in the wild and a tented village in the wood.

The ghosts are beginning to swarm. She has let her guard down, and they are gathering. She knows that if she stays here alone, she will fall into their swirling, grey worlds, into their histories and their constant harking after old tragedies. She could get lost in them. It has happened before, and it’s hard to come back. She remembers her last journey, the old wooden box she found and the book she is now carrying, and the agonised voice of the woman who said just one word over and over: “Flood; flood; flood; flood…”.

Bobcat hears the maddened voice as if she is listening in that empty room way back before the Fire: “I am not here. I am in a new room far from life and familiar breath; I have recently arrived here. I have taken a long draught of these bright waters. I drink them to enter heaven. I will return, will take a claim and stake it.”

She shivers and shakes herself free. She doesn’t need to be lost in that world right now. So she does the only thing she can do in this moment: Bobcat steps into the clearing.

The people there are still singing. One or two see her enter and smile, but they carry on with their song. Bobcat wonders if there is a Storydancer here (and feels a pang of loss for her brother, Jake.) Apart from one woman with a drum at the far side of the fire circle, the rest of the gathering — around 20 or so — are singing raucously but tunefully about (as far as Bobcat can work out from the chorus) a young man who moved to the City and got into a bit of a sticky mess (now that could be about Jake!). By the laughter, she reckons the song is not very tasteful (a phrase her old Gramma would use with a twinkle in her eye), but the song is coming to its end, and there are no more verses to find out the full story.

The drummer gets up from her seat and walks towards Bobcat, as the rest of the gathering disperses towards their tents, and a few head out into the forest alone or in pairs.

Bobcat feels the cold whisper of a ghost’s voice brush her cheek as the woman approaches and holds out her hands for Bobcat to grasp in the traditional greeting. It’s been a while since anyone she knows has used this salutation — not since her parents were alive — but she recognises the warmth and welcome in it and takes the woman’s hands in hers as is the custom and expectation. They are rough and warm, lined and freckled, and as she looks up she sees that the woman’s face has the same creases and patches of light brown scattering her smiling face.

Her hair is silver, gathered with a single band, and it hangs long behind her. Her clothes are…not rough-hewn exactly…but not the kind of Teck-designed garments that Bobcat is used to seeing. She feels at home with this woman, somehow. There is a touch of freedom about her: someone used to wandering, and finding the spaces between the edges of things; someone used to stretching beyond home; someone (perhaps) familiar with the ways of ghosts and the voices of Habitants and of the world.

“Who is God?” she blurts. (“Why did I say that?” she thinks) and the woman laughs — a deep, rumbling, joyous laugh — and Bobcat blushes and feels small for a moment, but then smiles. The nature of the laugh tells her that here is someone who understands her world, the real world, the ground, and the visions, and the way a small human can get lost (sometimes in a good way) in everything that surrounds her.

“I don’t know” says the woman, “but you are a pilgrim, I think…”

“I’m travelling, yes”, answers Bobcat, “I thought I was walking for God”. She feels awkward for a moment, and then realises that this is the first human apart from Flute, and Jake on Pads, that she has spoken to for such a very long time. She feels sad. Understands, in a moment of clarity, what it is she has lost.

The women looks thoughtful, “A pilgrim travels to find something, true, or to leave somewhere. But the moment she tries to name what she seeks, it disappears. Words are delicious, but cannot say much. They’re like smoke: you can follow, but can never grasp hold. And yet we can be guided, taken in a direction for a while, until we turn another way.”

Bobcat says, “I have voices who tell me I must travel”…

“Then travel”, the woman replies, with a smile that implies that the problem is entirely solved.

“But I don’t know where to go, There is something I have to do, but…”

“You don’t know what it might be.”

“No,” Bobcat whispers. “Can you help me find it out?”

The woman smiles, a little sadly. “That might be,” she says, “a very cold question”. She pauses. “Stay a while”, she adds, and turns back to her seat at the edge of the fire, where the drum waits for her.

The camp finds a new rhythm as people move in and through the forest and the clearing; in and out of tents; around the fire — and some are following the smoke, it seems to Bobcat. There is chat and conversation, and for the first time she feels that the voices of the Habitants and the earth and the people around her are intermingled. There are distinct strands and connections as the voices weave, and even the ghosts have quietened, but it feels …not whole exactly…but righteous.

And then the drum starts up again and others play instruments and there is a chaotic, joyful moment when the music comes together, and another where it falls apart, and a voice rising that reminds her of Flute singing. As another person moves and sways she remembers Jake dancing his stories somewhere far away in the City. She remembers Mamma and Dadda and Gramma and the stories that brought her here. And Bobcat gets up, and dances – and dances and dances…

When it is late and the dancing is over, and she is sitting with some food and a cup of something strong, she turns to the woman (whose name she still does not know, and never will) and asks another question that she thinks might be warmer.

“What do I need?” she asks. “What is needed?”

And the woman smiles that grave smile again, and answers Bobcat: “Tenderness is what you need, little one. In this time…so much tenderness is needed”.

NOTES

1. The definition of ‘peregrinatio’ comes from “What is Peregrinaio”, by David Sanucciat: https://medium.com/peregrinatio-blog/what-is-peregrinatio-2bfac936fa5b

2. The lines,“Words are delicious, but cannot say much” and “in this time…so much tenderness is needed”, are by Nora Bateson. The first is from her book, Small Arcs of Larger Circles, (Triarchy Press, 2016). The second is from an online conversation between us in March 2020, just after the start of the first COVID lockdown.

A break from promoting Unpsychology Magazine 9.1: Imaginings. This week’s post is the third short story instalment in our new Fictions & Fabulations series.

To submit a story idea for this publication contact us at: submissions@unpsychology.co.uk

Habitants was the third of the Watertime series of short fictions written for Unpsychology Magazine. The stories are set in a future — in a place a bit like the UK — beset by devastating seasonal floods. The Heat has ravaged the land; and the RageTime has left an uncertain, fearful society — a world in which outliers, artists and Lostlings creep around the edges of the present, and live with the legacies of a far distant past. The first of the stories, Bobcat in the Watertime, can be found HERE, and the second, This Soaring HERE. These are all newly edited versions for this new Unpsychology Substack.

We are the Habitants of the Watertime — living free while Humans struggle, as they always have, with the water and the earth and the baking sun. We adapt.

Slithering in the wet lands; sheltering in the desert dry. Our time is short and long — each one of us a mortal spark, come quick, soon gone — but Habitant time lingers; stretching into the deep past and beyond; into the deep future and beyond.

We are living timepieces, some of us: trees that grow slow and still have souls. We (the trees) are the Habitants that hold all this together, and we (other, other-than-humans) are the Habitants that tell the stories.

Who is speaking this? It cannot be a fox or a hawk or a ferret or a badger or a mouse. It cannot be the wind or the hills or the encroaching tide or the beating sun. It cannot be the ghosts or ancestors or descendants. It can only be the conduits, those Humans that are called Lostlings, who speak with us and follow us into the currents and flows of the World — as it was, as it is, as it will be.

She is a Lostling. She roams these lands. She scurries and crawls the narrow runways through forest and scrub like a small animal herself. Sometimes climbs trees. Sometimes explores crumbled Human remnants of past ages. She finds other kindred spirits — across time and distance — and speaks to them: embeds herself in the Lands and avoids and keeps her distance from other Humans – as we do.

She – like us – knows what has been done; knows the Rage and the Heat and the Water as times of death and pain. But these are also times of Pilgrimage. She travels to times and places with the zeal of human believers who raised their faces to the sky-gods (much good it ever did them).

Till now, she has travelled well-trodden lanes and byways, but we know she will make a longer journey — a sacred, perilous odyssey. We like human words that have hints of the wild in them — so she will embark on a ‘peregrination’ very soon, in a future that she and we can sometimes see: when the time is right; when the conditions are favourable; when the wind is in the right direction; when the tides and flows are aligned.

Who is speaking this? Are you suspicious of this voice? We are the Habitants and we are the dolphins and curlews and seals and sea-otters and sharks and a myriad of small creatures. We are a universe, a constellation of fire. We are the ancients — the ghosts and echoes, the future manifestations. She is Bobcat, and she is one of few and she (and they, the few) speak for us. You will have to trust this certainty – and listen carefully when they talk (which is seldom, as Lostlings are solitary, lonesome creatures).

This is what they will tell you: There was a Fire and a Rage and a Watertime. There were waves that swept away Humans in great surges and outbreaks of hope and death, disease and fear. And the Lands were flooded with grief, and they lie under these dark waters to this day.

The other thing about Humans is that they sing. Bobcat remembers the songs her mother sang to her; and Gramma too. The Wildthings, Flute and Kim and all the others, sing now and they sing for the world – and our voices can be found in their voices.

We are the Habitants and, when a Wildthing’s voice soars, the people hear us in these songs: the whispers of us-the-trees, the roars of us-the-bears and the songs of us-the-blackbirds. They hear the rumble of thunder and surf, and the wind high up in the mountains. They hear the soft plash of us-the-brook and the harsh, relentless clamour of us-the-storm. The people are frightened and uplifted – their existence terrifies them as it always has. In ages past, they turned to gods and their clever ways to fend off this fear. Now the Wildthing songs remind them of us. It keeps them grounded; keeps them honest and fearful — which is how we like to see them.

Humans are peculiar creatures. They are Habitants too, though have long forgotten this. Still, after all their trials, they build their smooth buildings and travel to the City in their near-to-silent Letrix — like long snakes carrying unrelenting dreams in their dark bellies. There have always been Tecks and BigMen among the Humans, and for all their cleverness, they always forget to learn from what has come before. They have their History, which is written down and spoken with a kind of reverence, but nothing ever seems to change. We Habitants have no memories of that kind (except through the channels of our Lostlings) but we adapt and embed what went before into what will come. The Humans once called this evolution – much good that knowledge has done.

We sound critical of the Humans, but we are indifferent really. They are lost cousins who were determined to step out in a particular direction, against our advice, and left the rest of us behind. After a while, with a shrug, you have to let the wayward cousin go on their way, and turn back to Life and all that it offers and demands. And they made us suffer, these self-regarding cousins – they would deserve our hate and vengeance if our souls that were made like that…

Bobcat is sitting curled up in a hollow in the woods. She hasn’t spoken for days. There are songs going around her head, and she wishes she could hear her sister sing or just hear her eager voice telling her news. Her precious Pad sits useless in the deep pocket of her coat – drained over days, so cannot connect any longer. She would like to talk with Flute and hear that voice that gives life to the world — she would like to tell her the stories she holds inside about the way the Lostlings have always been the edge people – Borderlanders, she remembers someone once called them. She would like Flute and her kin to give voice to these stories from beyond the borders.

There has been a change and Bobcat is retreating from it, as all Humans have tended to do. The inevitable must be faced, however, and she knows she will have to move, and soon. The clamour in her head is becoming overwhelming, and lying here, still and breathing, in the way that she has learned to calm herself after the hot ghosts have been visiting, will not be enough. She will need to move. To travel. To leave these lands she knows so well, to go into the past, into the future, into the City, into the Tecklands, then into the West, where she heard so many Humans fled when the Ragetime struck.

History has been building in her mind. Flooding in like in the old times. And the ghosts and Habitants who had started whispering are now more insistent. Tell our story, they are saying, tell the Humans who we are and why we are in you. Bobcat wants to fend off their call, but she has no refusal left in her. She remembers those words from the book and the voice of the women in the room with the dead eyes: “Then the floods came.The fires came. My home died. I died. I rose again. I wrote this story.”

We, the Habitants are swarmed around her, waiting and listening, shuffling and rustling. Expectant. The story she told – of that other Lostling* – is our story too. And Bobcat’s journey is in the telling. We know, we have seen this coming.

This time she is leaving. She rises from the hollow. She will set off in a direction; probably to the West. But first she must make a visit before she turns away forever from the familiar scrubland, soft groves and the seasonal rise and fall of the river waters, and the sediment they lay down.

First she must climb the crumbling stairs to the tower and go to the turret room right at the top and gaze out over the lapping flood-waters, and whisper farewell to the familiar ghosts with their familiar stories, then descend into the scrubland behind the estate and say goodbye to us the waiting Habitants who have been protecting her all this time in preparation for this journey.

And then she will go back home (carefully, carefully) and she will gather some things (Humans always do this, even Lostlings), charge up her Pad and pack a small bag. She will look around the meagre room she lives in and close the door behind her when she leaves (carefully, carefully) in the dead of night.

She knows that she will not be leaving us — we will be with her all the way.

No-one will miss her here, but this journey is about connection and she will travel by foot (carefully, carefully) using all the tricks and tracks we taught her, and make her way to the woods that surround the Big House and hide there. She will see the Wildthings and their Guardians walking the paths, but they will not see her, and she will hear the songs of the Wildthings as their voices soar in the Hall. She will call Flute on her Pad and tell her that she is just outside, and Flute will gasp and laugh and go and meet her, and hold her tightly and feel her Bobbie’s cool, ghost-sense against her cheek like winter’s breath. And Bobcat will hesitate, but only for the moment in which she will kiss her sister on the head, and breath (in her turn) the soft summer smell of her hair, and then turn and disappear into the woods, where we are always waiting for her.

We, the Habitants of the Watertime are living free, but only, as ever, within the bounds that Humans created for us. Yet, we adapt. We have weathered the storms of their making, and found ways of orienting to their time and space. This is hard, and we need the channels to be open, but this is the task we have set ourselves, in the Watertime that lies before the next Time.

Slithering in the wet lands; sheltering in the desert dry, we will be with Bobcat as she goes. This time to the City, perhaps to see Jake. This time to the West, perhaps to find the Humans who left. This time? Wherever the hot ghosts guide her. And then onwards on her pilgrimage — her peregrination.

The purpose is only partly known, and there been a bargain struck. We, the Habitants, need our story to be told, so the future (which we know) can become what it is destined to be. Bobcat needs to find a kind of connection — she’s not sure what or how – between the book (which she now carries alongside her Pad in the shoulder bag she carries close to her) and the ghost voice of the woman in the room.

Who is speaking this? Are you suspicious of this voice? It’s time to make a choice: to trust what you are told, or to turn away in scorn and disbelief, and believe your other gods instead if you must.

Who is speaking this? We are the Habitants and you will have to trust this certainty…

The second instalment in our new Fictions & Fabulations series. To submit a story idea for this publication contact us at submissions@unpsychology.co.uk

This Soaring was the second of the Watertime series of short fictions written for Unpsychology Magazine. The stories are set in a future — in a place a bit like the UK — beset by devastating seasonal floods. The Heat has ravaged the land; and the RageTime has left an uncertain, fearful society — a world in which outliers, artists and Lostlings creep around the edges of the present, and live with the legacies of a far distant past. The first of the stories, Bobcat in the Watertime, can be found HERE. These are all newly edited versions for this new Unpsychology Substack.

This soaring; this transcending. The world has been a terrible place, but when Flute is singing she knows there is something else beyond all this. There must be. Why else would people take a small girl from her family and make her sing?

The Mill House in the valley was flooded many years ago, and that was where the healing songs had started; people gathering, exhausted and broken in the aftermath of conflict after conflict: the big ones from the Heat and the RageTime, and the small everyday grindings and face-offs that mean that no-one had the heart or the energy anymore to make something of this life. But the Mill succumbed eventually to the rising water and, moved upstream, became the House-on-the-Hill, with music, song, dance and wordings filling its halls.

It feels like a place of hope and, perhaps because of this, is sometimes regarded with suspicion, occasionally even hostility, throughout the land.

Flute is just happy to feel sheltered and to know that what she is here to do is this. The separation hit her hard, and she wonders where the others are now. Jake, she knows, works in the City; childhood friends have scattered into surrounding WaterTime lands; but Bobcat — oh her lovely Bobbie Bobcat — is a Lostling who hides from the consequences of her daemonic sight.

When they were little, Bobbie’s ghost sense was something cool. It set the sisters apart and made Flute a little proud – and Mama a little scared. Then came the TeckTime when everything was supposed to be fixed, but instead things turned bad and were screwed down tight. And then came separation – and all that is left for her now is the song.

When the Tecks took Dadda, and Mamma died, the people from the House-on-the-Hill heard news of the orphans, and came to offer their kindness and help. But Bobcat hid away when they were around, and Jake refused to go, so they took Flute, who never really had any resistance in her, just dreams and songs, and so there wasn’t any sense of there being a choice.

In any case they told her that everything would be wonderful at the House. And it has been – for the most part – but how do you put back together what has been broken apart?

Flute walks down the corridor towards the Hall. The House is very old — built of ancient red bricks — but the Hall is a relatively new construction — made in the early days of TeckBuild — it is smooth and vaulted, with perfect acoustics and filled with white brightness, even on the dullest of days. Whatever else she is feeling, her spirits always lift in the Hall — there’s always music of some sort going on in there. Now there is a small band in the corner composing a praise-song or a healing-song or just one of those old-fashioned love-songs that used to be endlessly streamed back in the day. Flute nods to them, and walks towards the other side of the enormous, vaulted room.

She sees Kim and smiles. Kim is her song-sibling and they share everything together – their voices blend like they were born with the same soul. They get to work. There is a Healing in a week, and work to be done.

The tone of the piece needs to be right for the occasion: a memorial event for the days before the Heat and Raging, when humans were naive and well meaning, but ignorant and with no sense of limitation. There will be hundreds there, perhaps a thousand or more, coming to heal and share memory and pain, and to pledge that there will never again be burning and digging and killing and endless accumulation.

And there will be gatherings like this all over the land – as far away as the City and beyond, in any of the places where humans can still live – giving thanks for sustenance and re-connection with the Earth and the Habitants. It all depends on the WildThings, the singers, dancers, artists and voicers whose stories now hold the world together.

It’s all a thing of joy, Flute thinks, as her voice rises with Kim’s and swirls like smoke into the highest reaches of the Hall. Everyone else in there has stopped what they were doing, just to hear the song of these two, and Flute’s senses are turned to the vibrational energies she feels whenever her voice is tuned in to Kim’s.

It’s all a thing of joy — nothing like it — she thinks, but then is aware of something else beneath that; a subtle kind of grief that makes her voice break.

Kim notices the change, and catches her eye, and Flute is back in the moment, but the shadow is still there – is always there. This is what she lives with – this complex weaving of grief and joy that can never be fully integrated or put to rest. It is worst at night, or when she is watching Screens in the Reck after dinner. Then she sees the flickering images of smiling entertainers, and wonders why no-one ever talks about the bad things any more. Things feel best when she is singing or walking the pathways around the House, and then she feels a little like the WildThing she is meant to be.

She thinks again of Bobcat out there in the WaterTime and wonders where she is and how she is right now, and whether the ghosts still comfort her as she wanders the world alone.

After the rehearsal, she walks back with Kim towards the main House, but her mind is now somewhere with a memory of Gramma talking about the old world which, it always seems to Flute, was full of choking smoke, speed, loudness and drowning desperation. But there was nostalgia too, in the voice of this ancient old lady who had survived where so many, including her own children, had not. In Flute’s memory, her great-grandmother’s memories whispered of the old days, when there was an endless belief that things would grow and get better.

Back then, when Gramma herself was a girl, there had been a knowledge of what was to come. The BigMen of the time had all the data and all the Teck – and the people knew – deep down, they knew – but somehow nothing had changed.

Gramma had been sitting outside in the shade of that warm summers day, and she said sorry and cried, and little Flute and Bobby and Jake had said what for, Gramma?, and she had said, for what we did to you, and they had said, don’t be silly Gramma – because old people are silly – but Gramma said No!

No, it could have been different! There might have been no Heat and no RageTime (though humans have alway been a fighting kind), and then Gramma cried some more, and Flute hugged her, and said don’t cry, Gramma, and she thought again, Gramma is silly, and then they all went off to play.

Gramma died soon after, and everything was sad for a while, but Flute sang at her Memory, which was the start of things, she supposed, when people realised that she would be a WildThing.

She remembers that hug with Gramma, and the tears come, and she wonders what it must have been like to grow up in fear, regret and endless hope. Now, everything is quiet acceptance. Nothing is meant to grow any more — except the Wild and the Food; nothing to be extracted or taken from the Earth. Life is hard for some for sure, though the Letrix City runs smoothly and the Lands are settled these days – except for the usual gangs who roam around in their ancient Autos, roughing up and kidnapping the odd straggler, shouting at the Royals and bothering people with their brashness.

And now she is lost again and this is familiar to Flute. The world that was, a blur of fire and noise; the world that is, unsettling and unknown. She thinks of Bobcat wandering; flitting from shadow to shadow, ghost to ghost, and never trusting anyone except the Habitants, and realises it has always been like this, from when they were children.

Flute always followed Bobby into places that were damp and deep, and sometimes high enough to touch the sun, and she never understood – just followed – always with a sense of fear, tempered with a blind trust in her Lostling sister.

She talks, now and again, to Bobcat on her Pad – when she is allowed Padtime and Bobby is somewhere with Contact. Usually, the conversation is furtive and blurry – Bobby in some dank cellar or old hole in the forest, with the sounds of Habitants around her. She is always distracted, Flute thinks and after every fleeting talk, she feels a sense of loss, and wonders whether it is really worth it. All she knows is that there is a kind of magic in Bobcat’s voice, and that the ghosts that surround her are somehow necessary and comforting.

Each time Contact is lost, Flute feels like crying, but puts on her brave face and thinks to talk with Jake on her next Contact – Jake with his soft, distracted acceptance. Maybe one day, I’ll join him in the City, she thinks, and walk the smooth streets and sing in the CellarBars.

I am not wild, she thinks, not a WildThing at all, just a small thing caught in the glare of a fierce world. Flute shivers, and Kim sees and touches her arm, catches her eye and offers the familiar tenderness and companionship that Flute so needs and values. They share everything, these two (even, perhaps, a soul) and though the Big House often still feels strange, and never feels like home, Kim’s presence is always a happy thing.

Is it love?, she wonders, as Kim takes her hand and leads her to their room at the top of the Big House. She isn’t sure what love is anyway. She knows she loved Mamma and Bobby Bobcat and Jake and Gramma — and Dadda before he faded — but now, with Kim, the grief begins to recede a little, and the two hum their healing song together as they climb the stairs, then laugh as they reach the door, then look around to see if anyone is watching, then step right in and shut the door behind them.

New from Unpsychology Voices – the first of our Fictions & Fabulations: to submit a story to this publication contact us at submissions@unpsychology.co.uk

Bobcat in the Watertime was the first of a series of short fictions written for Unpsychology Magazine and appearing online at our Medium publication. The stories are set in a future — in a place a bit like the UK — beset by devastating seasonal floods. The Heat has ravaged the land; and the RageTime has left an uncertain, fearful society — a world in which outliers, artists and Lostlings creep around the edges of the present, and live with the legacies of the far distant past. This first instalment appeared in the Climate Minds anthology (Unpsychology Magazine issue #4). These are newly edited versions for this new Unpsychology Substack.

In the watertime, Bobcat is stealthy; weaving wraith-like between old buildings. It would not do to be seen. Watertime is danger-time in these parts.

Hiding in the broken corners of a waterlogged house, Bobcat hears the growl of the patrols further up the valley. At this time of year, only the Royals are about. There is too much water; too much danger of flooding a precious and illegal Auto engine; too much at stake for most people to be stopped with a little bit of something in the back. But the Royals don’t worry about flooding an engine and, with too much time on their hands, wouldn’t miss an opportunity to pick up someone out wandering.

Bobcat could sit here for hours at a time — days if her mind is set on it. She could hide anywhere in this place, and Watertime is Bobcat’s time — a time to sift through the ancient memories carried in soggy artefacts and the occasional photograph that she unearthed; of a family, long dead or moved away, or an unfamiliar landscape captured on paper long ago. Bobcat is intrigued by the texture of paper, and wondered how it had ever worked — it seems such an inefficient, ephemeral form of communication. She touches the pocket where her precious Pad is hidden and shivers at the thought that someone might ever see her with it.

When Bobcat had been small and feral she would often disappear into the estate, and brother Jake would be sent in search, but now Bobcat is grown there is no-one to search; no-one even to know she is gone. Jake has moved up to the City now, with his Hawkmate Linden, and is living in a crowded Collex off the London Road. Mamma dead. Dadda long gone. And Flute, the little one, taken for a Wildthing, and learning to sing somewhere in a Bighouse up the valley.

Bobcat would like to sing, but knows that the Royals, and the Hawks, might be out. They know the keening of a Lostling well, and would close in quickly. Best to wait here, in the dark and damp of the receding flood and think of home. Maybe later Bobcat will find a time and a place to let her voice rise. Maybe later.

Mamma would always sing to Bobcat and Flute; and Jake had always danced. He was the storyteller; the storydancer. From small, he kept the fires burning on cold, late nights. Someone hadn’t liked his stories, and the Hawks moved in, but Bobcat — then as now — was quiet and stealthy and crept unseen beneath their keen watching.

Dadda was a gentle man, until the Tecks said no, and then he would sit at home, growling lightly to himself, as the nightlight fell. The spark had been taken out of him, when the bright-suited Tecks had said no. Then Dadda went away — or was taken away — which was much the same thing. For what is there to do, when a person’s factory-life dies?

There is another world, down here in the forbidden flooded zone, where textured, wet brick scrapes on Bobcat’s skin, and creatures slither in and out. Bobcat marvels at the sheer roughness of brick. It is like nature’s stone, but human-made and so extraordinary. Everything from the old world seems so rough, she thinks, yet so alive. Sometimes Bobcat hates the factory smoothness of the world; misses the chug of imagined industry. At these times, she wants to hear something more than waterlap, Letrix hum and birdsong. Even the Royals’ patrols are welcome; their powerful, hunting engines alive and growling, in contrast to the swish of the giant Letrix that carry necessities and VIPs, snaking from the City to the Lands and back again.

There are the old Autos too, of course, with engines that chug and stumble, and that these days are only good for farm-runs and illicit forays across the fields and lanes, carrying the delicious, forbidden carcasses that everyone eats at Waterfest — in the waiting days each year before the waters rise and the curfew comes down.

What was it that Mamma used to sing? An old song about a river?:

“I was born by the river in a little tent

Oh, and just like the river I’ve been running ev’r since

It’s been a long time, a long time coming

But I know a change gonna come, oh yes it will”

Years back, the Heat came — and then the Ragetime. Now this river is a raging, tidal sea, bringing salt to the sweetwater lands for three long months; leaving barren, brown silt in its wake each Spring.

This is where Bobcat now sits. The waters have receded, revealing the upper reaches of an old estate — built from old brick and filth, its old lanes ribboned in black — more silted over and broken each year. At low-water, Bobcat can explore the whole estate: from the big house at the top of the hill, with its top storey that still poked, incongruous, from the waters even at the peak of the Watertime, to the small houses at the bottom — long drowned.

Humans lived here once. Bobcat has seen their ghosts and sung with them. They sang Mamma’s river song, but many others too. Strange laments for lost times. Songs of coal and gargantuan fires in the heart of the earth. Of ships and cranes, noise and rivets and oil. And men. Men who hewed coal and heaved fuel needlessly around the world. Men who thrived in the rough world; brought their hardness to their fists and then even to weapons that boomed, barked and tore. Men who went on journeys — exploring faraway lands. Bobcat knew this from the stories, but found the idea of it strange and unearthly.

What could ever be wrong with the bit of Earth we live on? Bobcat aches at the thought of Jake, somewhere out there in the City, far from home. She had seen images of the City on a screen at Homeschool once, back on one of the few days she had agreed to attend. Mamma had said it would be good to get some learning, but Bobcat only went sporadically — just enough to keep Mamma off her back. That day, an over-enthusiastic volunteer Learnman had showed the kids a film of the City. It seemed strange and busy; a smooth, self-important sort of place. People everywhere, but all of them aimless, Bobcat thought. It didn’t give her much of a taste for learning — or for cities, with their manicured CityFarms and their wide streets populated by the giant Letrix centipedes that carried people from here to there.

Looking back, Bobcat wonders whether this was when she first knew she was a Lostling: strangely at home with these damp, crumbling bricks and their lost history; and with the Habitants — the creatures who always shared this land with humans, even as tides and storms washed away the old places. Bobcat looks down into the estate, and up into the sky where gulls travel back to their roosts on the coastal cliffs, and further up to where kites and buzzards circle — high above the flood-washed land — and wonders what it had been like before.

A sudden noise. A falling stone or brick, and Bobcat’s heart beats fast; she feels hunted. The Hawks might be out; it is their time of day. In some ways, being picked up by the Royals might be preferable to the Hawks. The Royals patrolled to keep the land clean. They rough you up a bit, but then they’d tip you out of their truck somewhere in the wilds and, because you know these lands so well, you’d back in Town before too long.

The Hawks are a whole different breed of bird. They select their prey with care, then home in and always take it. With the Hawks, who knows where you might end up? What you’d end up being?

Bobcat’s heartbeat subsides. It was likely a feral cat, fox or some other Habitant. She decides to move, though, and finds herself climbing the tower of the big house. Bobcat is careful; it’s the only dry place on the estate, and someone — Human or Habitant — might be lurking. The rotting steps that remain strain and creak, and Bobcat has to do some shimmying where the stairs have gone. She is careful, but there is no sound from above. Bobcat sees a familiar ghost, and whispers a song to it, and the ghost goes up ahead on the stair, into the room at the top, a kind of turret, made of brick, not stone like those ancient castles. From here, Bobcat can see for miles in all directions. It is breathtaking as the sun starts to set over the water, and she stands there for a while.

And then Bobcat sits down on the floor and beneath her hand the timber crumbles a little. Searching around in the space between the broken floorboards, she finds a box. It is a simple artefact, made of wood, but carries patterns so unlike anything she has seen in this world, that it seems like a piece of magic. She realises that it has been carved; inexpertly to be sure, but this is still a crafted thing. It was not produced from a box by a TeckApp, smooth and certain, safe and sustainable. This is wood, carved from a tree, with patterns imagined by some Human who might have lived here, in this brick tower, high above a land that once was proud and unapologetic — a land manufactured from a belief that anything can be utilised, consumed and replaced.

And yet this box does not have quite the same feel as its deluded times.The ghosts are different — Bobcat can sense them faintly buzzing around the lid as it is opened. This, she realises, is an artefact of uncertainty — one born from care and patience. It is, to see it plainly, an item of plain and precious beauty.

There is unimaginable pain and grief here; she can see the hot ghosts of these emotions clearly. They hit her like a storm, and she closes the lid, before gentler wraiths whisper comfort and her courage rises again. She opens the box again. There is an smell of old wood and must, and a small cloud of dust motes rises in the early evening sunlight.

Inside is paper. That stuff again! Bobcat is momentarily disappointed, but she fishes out the wad. There are small objects in the box too: a bracelet made of beads and threaded on wire that instinctively Bobcat puts on her wrist where it fits snugly; a small smooth heavy object made from something Bobcat guesses must be a metal of some sort (she vaguely remembers touching a metal pan and a hammer head one day in Homeschool — not entirely useless, this learning, then, Mamma), but she cannot discern its function. There is also a small frame made of a substance a bit like it was made in a TeckApp box. In it is a faded picture of a smiling man with a checked shirt and a cap.

There are other things too, but Bobcat’s attention is drawn to the piece of paper at the top of the pile, which seems thicker than the ones below. She notices that the pile is joined at one side, and that the paper is hinged to open. “Book” — the word comes to Bobcat like a flame. She flicks through it. The paper is musty and delicate. On the front is a picture and some words. The words on the front are regular, like on a Pad display, but the words inside, whilst readable, are irregular, strange, idiosyncratic. Some of the writing is faded or smudged, and Bobcat loses patience. She puts the book aside. Reading is tiresome at the best of times. She has gleaned enough learning to decifer regular Pad-text, but this seems too messy and difficult.

Now a ghost gets inside her and she surrenders to the familiar static that always crackles before the visions and voices come. This is what it is like to be a Lostling — and Bobcat embraces the sensation. What once was so frightening and othering, is now who she is. She settles in.

There is a woman in a room. It is drab and empty and two men stand beside her. She is hunched in the only chair, which sits by a window. Outside can be seen an even drabber place where there are rows of things that appear to be strange small Letrix or Autos. Bobcat reels, she has never seen so many of these machines in one place. The effect is overwhelming and the vision almost fades. Bobcat breathes and holds on.

The woman rocks gently. One of the men is talking, but Bobcat cannot hear his voice. All she can hear is the voice of the woman in the chair. She is repeating one word over and over : “Flood, Flood, Flood, Flood!” Her mouth does not move; her voice like a silent scream. The men seem kind; their body language is caring, but Bobcat knows that the woman cannot hear them. And she knows that the woman is also a Lostling.

The connection flies like lightning.The woman’s eyes flicker and she raises her head momentarily. She is terrified and her eye catches Bobcat’s eye — or so it seems — and her voice says, “Everything was lost”. Then she is back to rocking in her chair. One of the men, catching the subtle change, seems to move towards her. Then he pauses, breathes out, says something final to the woman and to the other man standing there, and turns to leave. Bobcat is now in deep; she asks the woman a question. The woman’s head stays down but her answer still reaches Bobcat: “The floods came”.

And then she is gone. Bobcat is used to this sudden disappearance, and brings herself back into the turret room. The early evening has given way to dusk and there is a chill. Bobcat isn’t averse to spending the night on the estate, but today she wants to go back to Town. She decides to leave the box safely under the floorboards and tries to make the space look as undisturbed as possible.

As she begins to track back through the hidden paths and gullies, she thinks of the woman and the way her eyes had died when the men spoke to her. She settles into the rhythm of her walking and notices, as she always does, the rustling and shifting of Habitants on their unfettered familiar way around the land. She is always something like happy at these times — alone and surrounded by the beings she can understand and connect with. Alone with her visions too. Alone with her questions.

And then suddenly she understands that the box and the book are connected to the woman and her story. She needs to touch these objects again to know what she must know. Bobcat stops and turns, and reluctantly winds back down the paths to the Estate again.The familiar ghosts welcome her, as they always do, and she climbs through the cooling evening air, to the turret room again.

No time like now. She fetches the box again and feels the shiver as she touches the lid. Something shifts in her — another familiar sensation, but this time she knows it is more perilous. She opens the pages of the book and begins to read the smudged, untidy lines. She hears the words spoken distinctly by a woman’s voice:

“I knew when I took the box in my hands, that a mistake had been made, though I could not turn back now that the Earth’s future depended on me. So, I stood for an age, holding this crafted, hardwood artefact. it seemed an innocent-enough, small piece of beauty.

It did not occur to me that I could open it. I became so used to holding it, that it held me; its iron wood, magnetic. Then I caught my fingernail on the clasp, and my attention turned to what I held. I set it down upon the table. Wood upon wood, it clacked and settled there.

It sat expectantly, as if inside was some carved homunculus, or an acorn holding the worlds daemonic potential; as if it would come to life and, its lid-mouth flapping, speak its arboreal truths with hinge-creak and a wood-voice croak.

I waited. It sat heavy and squat. I clicked open the clasp and lifted the lid. There was a faint squeak and I peered inside. At first there was only darkness: a sable light, radiance inverted. Then there were a billion stars: a universe encapsulated in carved boxwood. Tiny lights whispered; dark light absorbed the silence so only my watching remained.

‘I am not here’, I said, ‘I am in a new room far from life and familiar breath; I have recently arrived here. I have taken a long draught of these bright waters; I drink them to enter heaven. I will return; will take a claim and stake it’.

I spoke as if the names of this new world could promise our forested reunion. The box was still and silent. I closed the lid. Inside it, a prayer echoed. A faint, olive fragrance of hardwood lingered.

Then the floods came. The fires came. My home died. I died. I rose again. I wrote this story.”

Bobcat is a Lostling and understands that meaning is not a necessity, but she knows with raindrop clarity that she is holding a thing of madness — an object crafted in the eye of a storm, a story written by hand in the days before the world became smooth. She is glad she didn’t live in those days, when words such as these were seen as crazy by well-meaning men, and when such deep loss was regarded as an acceptable price to pay for Human freedom.

Bobcat understands freedom — it is the way she weaves between storms, keeps out of the keen eye of the Hawks, makes sure that a sniff of her isn’t caught by the Royal hunters in their growling machines. Freedom is in the vision itself, and the way the Habitants live and die with each other. Freedom is in the way Jake couples with his Hawkmate in the City and Flute sings for a rapt audience on winter nights. Freedom is in the precious scarcity of made-things — and can even be found in the Letrix, Collex, Factories and CityFarms. Freedom is in a quiet world, and in the storms and tides that are worshipped in the Watertime.

And freedom is in Mamma’s deep song of the river. A river that long ago swelled to swallow up the Estate and the sanity of a Lostling who lived on its banks a long age ago. A river that hides — even now, in the silt and detritis of its comings and goings — secrets and artefacts, books and boxes, bones and memories — and ghosts.

Bobcat sees all of this, and she is glad, above all, that the ghosts are here to whisper to her tonight.And she lies down on the floor of the turret, high above the Earth and Water and sleeps in the Watertime with Mamma’s voice washing through her:

“It’s been too hard living, but I’m afraid to die

’Cause I don’t know what’s up there, beyond the sky

It’s been a long, a long time coming

But I know a change gonna come, oh yes it will.”