Tatterdemalion (2016)

Сюжет кино: For look, the whole is infinitely newer
than a cable or a high apartment house.
The stars keep blazing with an ancient fire
and all the more recent fires will fade out.
Not even the largest, strongest of transmissions
can turn the wheels from what will be.
Across the moment, aeons speak with aeons.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus
‘It does no good to blame those before you for the world you have inherited, and then do nothing for it,’ say the travelling storytellers Bells, Perches and Boots to a rapt audience of listeners in Tatterdemalion (my book with Rima Staines, forthcoming with Unbound — more on that later). The fire is hot and popping. A kestrel watches from the roof of a red wagon. They are telling their listeners a yet unheard story about the woman they call Anja Born of the Buckeye, the woman whose birth heralded a great upheaval in their world: the Fool’s Uprising. ‘No, our sins were not erased by Anja, not then or now,’ the tellers continue. ‘Anja was birthed by a human woman, Wheel. It is true that she was fathered by a Buckeye, but the only reason for such a fathering was the woman Wheel, how she in her solitude sang to the trees at dusk, stroked and told tales to the woodrats, left gifts out for the stars. You see, she earned the love of the Buckeye, she earned it so completely that he walked out of his own bark and roots to love her in hers. It is true, little Anja was born just as the doors at the edges of the bramble-thickets, fallen houses, stone walls, were opening, but she was mostly the product of a mother’s hard work: her lonely strength, her utter strangeness, her eyes which saw the faces of the spiders and the trees and called them ;
If there is any hope of wholeness in this world, it is a wholeness that must be earned. Not through repentance, not through guilt, not through fear. No, it seems to me that the only way toward Wholeness is to have one eye on the ancient fires of the stars, and the other on the minute and beating hearts of things. To give the spiders our praise and our love for the sake of the spiders themselves, and not ourselves.
‘Anja Born of the Horse Chestnut’, By Rima Staines