Kate Millar

Atmospheric Tendencies

Haar: Scottish (n.) cold wet sea fog

There is terror and miracle in the way that fine particles of water can rob an entire steel rail bridge from the sea. The world becomes a blank page. A distant oil rig on the North Sea, a vanished brown blot. Haar erases even red, the colour of announcement. The rust-red of the Forth Bridge subsumed into a grey-tinged white.

The encroaching fogbank moves silently, first erasing the horizon line, then the seawater, more and more. 

–

Every year I dread the fogbound days of March: crossing 

the threshold outdoors and entering another walled room.

The growing tired, growing tired. 

– 

Leaf-buds disappear, 

my tree’s reassurances. 

–

In the Old Testament, God’s presence:

A pillar of cloud and a pillar of fire 

The temple filled with cloud 

Often, a sound:

From within the cloud the LORD called to Moses 

While Peter was still speaking, a bright cloud covered them, and a voice from the cloud said 

–

As a teenager I was prayed for in a tunnel of fire: a human aisle of congregants stretching out their hands. Warm palms on shoulders or the crown of the head, chests filling with the warmth of the spirit, of attention, “a fresh filling, a fresh filling.” Pure fire, no smoke. My limbs were full of it, even as I climbed the stone turret steps in school, even as I stood listening to my friends by open windows at house parties, wisps of smoke wafting inside.

–

One day, I woke up and the world was white. There was a veil of fog between me and the Pentland Hills, even when I went to walk in them. The wheatfields, the pines, the reservoir at the base of the hills, were gone. Silent and without warning. Only white and the ankles of long grass rising from the muck. My footsteps muffled against a cushioned wall. I had no way of knowing if Mum walked two meters behind me in the mist. 

–

In the mouth of fog, pale chasm 

in my chest, inevitable as a change 

in weather. The soul’s warmth cooling. 

–

Fog: bringer of disorientation: defamiliarisation of home.

Cold damp like the premonition of disaster. 

Clamminess in my palms. Harbinger, haar bringer.

–

To swim in a lake is not the same as swimming in the ocean. In the sea, the water is alive around you. It pushes power against you. You are small, swayable. You cannot change the course of the waves. The lake is stagnant––though its air is sweeter, the smell of mulch and pine––and you do not feel so small. The water. You don’t feel the water around you, as much as a thin atmosphere of coolness always moving to accommodate you. It is a water that does not impose itself, barely perceptible. Motionless––a thing you exist in but cannot feel.

–

The professor told me that every story I wrote wasn’t a story. Because nothing happens. 

Just fields and the smell of cow pat. Us kids playing in the garden in complete silence, like ghosts. The sky, a low grey ceiling. “Not a peep,” Mum urged through her teeth when Da was meeting with families in our living room. “Folks are grievin, don’t be messin.” Us sitting in the crook of the chestnut tree’s thickest branch, swinging our legs, peeling leaves apart vein by vein.

What you have here is atmosphere, not story. 

Granda’s old piano in the hallway sitting upright, wooden and shut. We were forbidden from opening it. The ivory keys coffined inside. My sister and I used to tap our fingers along the lid, pretending to play, imagining cascading sound coming from our fingertips. 

You have to get your characters un-stuck, she said. Imaginary sound is not enough. 

–

In the mouth of fog, I am always doubtful 

of change, of shivelight ever breaking through cloud.

–

The static days:

Bored (adj.): a banned word in my house growing up. Boredom is a choice, insult to this life you’ve been given. You only have yourself to blame. Your lack of creativity.

–

The precarious afternoons of childhood, perching one butt cheek on my bedroom windowsill to gaze poetically towards the Pentland Hills, the giant chestnut tree waving its fat-fingered hands at me while I wished and pretended to be witnessing something holy in the motions of the trees. 

–

I have questions for the Google search engine, like the rest of the UK:

Why am I so tired, 

Why am I always tired, 

Why am I always cold,

The whys of our existence, bound up in weariness, the ice of our bodies. 

–

My head is an empty house. My soul

tightens like a rag rung out. 

–

Story is interruption––rift. Story interrupting story.

The soft crackling of wood, the distant lowing of cows in the fields, the occasional horse’s whinny. Mum reading from Luke chapter two. Right as the angels appeared to tell the shepherds of Christ’s birth, the telephone rang in the kitchen. Da was up and answering it. Next thing he was into the dark night. 

Da worked in the shed, sometimes eight hours at a time. In the paling light, he’d come out carrying a long wooden casket, new skelfs on his hands, grey under his eyes. The smaller the box, the heavier. 

My friend Annie always tells me, You don’t want your life interrupted, Kate. Believe me. 

– 

Really, what I want to ask is why the waiting

for the weather to pass, for the rotting 

bus shelter’s plastic welts to heal, for

the message back. 

My friend is waiting 

for a man to love her, to make a home, 

the beginning of her life. Another, 

for the SSRIs to kick in. 

Why 

the falling asleep in church and on the motorway, 

while waiting in line at the post office. Why 

the coughing up of tonsil stones, the indelible staleness 

of my clean clothes washed twice at the laundromat,

why the waiting for the cavity to be filled and the numbness 

of the filling to fade. Why the waiting to be seen 

by a doctor, to be heard, to be understood.  

–

God interrupted Peter mid-sentence––where is my interruption? 

WOULD SOMEONE INTERRUPT ME, PLEASE? 

–

I grew bored of praying, of reading, of waking, walking, eating, repeating. One of those tired nights, a dream came. And I knew it was from God––it felt like the solidity of the ground, that absolute knowing. 

I was walking through a desolate landscape, sandy flatlands, pale sunlight. I carried a small drawstring bag in my hand, and I knew my purpose was to gather pebbles inside it. But there was no way of opening the pouch, with immovable knotted string, and no pebbles on the ground to pick up. As I walked, I had the faint sensation of tiny pebbles knocking against themselves, multiplying with each step I took––but when I stopped to check if they were really accumulating, the bag was empty to the touch. I could only gain what I needed if I kept moving. There was no double-checking in this place, no gathering stock. Only footsteps and the faintest sensation of provision. 

I was reminded of Psalm 84. The dwelling place of the Spirit existing only in motion. A pilgrimage outside the courts of God, towards a place to call home––and the interruption that said, I am on the road just as much as the stopping-place. 

–

But the sour tonsil stones are months-old 

dregs of food and mucus, calcified 

in the crypts at the back of the throat.

The marks on the bus shelter walls are 

cigarette lighter burns made by school children 

waiting for their bus home. 

In the six weeks between the phone call 

and the appointment, a tumour grows

to the size of a grapefruit. 

–

God––

have I grown tired of you?

The fogbank is the hem of your skirt. 

–

Since water is 800 times denser than air investigators were long puzzled as to why fogs did not disappear through fallout of water particles to the ground.

It turns out that the drops do fall, but in fog-creating conditions they are buoyed up by rising currents or they are continually replaced by new drops condensing from water vapour in the air. (From ‘Fog’ by Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge)

I resented the fog because it stood between me and everything that gave me joy to look at, because it showed me that life was more boring than I wanted it to be. I had forgotten the miracle of fog. Or never noticed. Its defiance of gravity. Beautiful, unrepeatable water droplets cycling through air.

–

Deus Absconditus:

Think of the fog of an ultrasound. 

Echoic white. The indecipherable 

possibility of life.  

Mist encroaching the shore. Reestablishment

of life’s only firmness: the firmness of ground,

the smell of salt. And silence. 

–

Haar, the visible world disappearing.

Both terror and miracle.