Beach-Combing Journal: Full Moon Bonanza

A handful of treasure and the Angel of Mons

E. B. White: “Writing is, for most, laborious and slow. The mind travels faster than the pen; consequently, writing becomes a question of learning to make occasional wing shots, bringing down the bird of thought as it flashes by. A writer is a gunner…”

---

Full Moon. The sun is hot and high. The waves are energetic, but the water is clear and clean-feeling. The sombrero-wide brim of my hat makes my view small: I can only see a few feet in front. I don’t tend to go beach-combing at midday, both because I avoid the Summer sun and because the bright high light is not optimal for finding; evening or morning’s low-angled light and / or low-contrast or overcast conditions make it easier to pick out shapes and colours. Between the hat and my long-sleeved shirt and jeans, I’m protected from the sun and therefore in no hurry. But my find-carrying hand is sweating, and my feet are hot in gumboots and socks: to cool down I stand in the sea.

There have been some high swells of late, and I see the creek has altered its course, so it’s a likely day for finding. I start finding things almost immediately, and undertake a very thorough combing of the entire beach. Despite the fine weather and Sundayness the beach is almost empty of people. I make my bootprints on virgin wet sand, though in some stretches I see the web-footed criss-crossing tracks of gulls.

Walking is good for thinking. Due to hanging out in the SaVĀge K’lubhouse over the last few days, I’m thinking about craft— looking at everything on the beach as raw material; scheming up designs, shapes, means of connection. (Most of my ideas seem to require a drill, which I don’t have. No matter, it’s fun to play with ideas.)

Yesterday Suzanne was embroidering black edges onto holes in the flag, te haki, I think to look like gunshots. Jah was binding cowries with their backs cut off into a radiating form using brown waxed cord. Jamie was weaving thick ropes, white and green, into an extremely chunky textile.

---

My finds:

I found everything here in a single walk except for the pig-face at the top right, which is from a few weeks ago— I put it in to make up the pattern.

Sharp-eyed readers will spot that the number 8 button at top left is a duplicate of one I’ve found before. I wrote about that particular set of buttons here:

Eight is by far my most commonly found number on the beach. This duplicate 8-button, though, scotches my theory that this particular set of buttons are dismembered parts of a single artefact (likely a phone); rather, it seems they represent a class of artefact, maybe a once-common design. An expert in recentish tech might recognise it, or someone who had a personal relationship with that particular object. If I’m right about it being from a phone, then it’s the kind of thing that imprints on nostalgic memory: a piece of the household… with emotive associations… that is repeatedly touched. (One of the things I like so much about these keys and buttons is the wabi-sabi wear-patterns that repeated touch has given them.)

My key collection and a bonus Bananagrams tile (the R) at the time of my show, before I found the 2 and two more 8s, including today’s one

---

Furthermore, the pieces of flower-patterned plate at top right— second from the top and fourth from the top— are also a match for ceramics I’ve found before. I wrote about that here (as well as going more deeply into the 8-key phenomenon, and doing a spot of political soothsaying via dream-interpretation):

---

The seal tooth appeared in my mind a few moments before it appeared in front of my eyes, possibly because I found it in the place where I always find seal teeth.

The last thing I found was the amethyst. My whole beach-comb-posting thing began with this rose quartz heart that I found in a rockpool:

Camouflage crab shell, erased photograph, stone heart

It’s strange to see gemstones in the context of the beach; they are so obviously alien to this place.

---

---

Later on I saw Sam at the Performance Arcade. He was wearing a Hawaiian shirt and sunglasses even though it was by now nighttime, and he was in a merry mood. He said he had seen the Angel of Mons earlier in the day. He showed me a photo on his phone: two long vertical fingers of cloud. I though they looked like rabbit ears, which made me think of Bill Drummond’s giant rabbit-spirit Echo,¹ but Sam held up his first two fingers a la Churchill, and looked at me meaningly. The cloudforms could also have been— at a stretch— the tall wing-peaks of an angel, which made me think of that scene in Defoe’s Plague Year where a crowd of people see an angel in a cloud.²

Sam: ”When soldiers saw the Angel of Mons, it meant they weren’t going to die in battle.”
Me, deadpan: “Well, I guess you aren’t going to die in battle.”
Sam: “…Today.”

The Echo-association turned out to be apt— and the Defoe, too— because it seems the Angel of Mons was accidentally spawned by a writer, Arthur Machen. The phenomenon arose following his short story The Bowmen, published in the Evening News in September of 1914. The story was not clearly labelled as fiction, and readers took it as a true account. (Bowmen, angels, soldiers— some parade of spirit-entities watching over the English, in any case.)³

I was lying in bed reading when Sam’s cloud-angel appeared in my mind. I was just thinking how I would tack it onto the end of this piece when I turned the page and read this:
”The Great War gave [Spiritualism] impetus: all kinds of occult belief flourished, among the fighting forces and among civilians. In the trenches, among men facing death minute by minute, chance incidents were blown up and acquired a magical dimension. When death is dealt out so randomly, the notion of cause and effect is lost. Phenomena like the Angel of Mons, invented by a popular writer, were subsequently ‘seen’ by thousands of soldiers.”
(From Hilary Mantel’s essay Britain’s Last Witch.)

The song in my head: Dai bach y soldiwr, Dai bach y soldiwr…⁴
This, again, turned out apt: Machen was from Caerleon,⁵ Arthur Llewelyn Jones his true name.

Stolen off t’Internet: Roman hillfort Isca Augusta / Silurum at Caerleon

Maybe the moral of the story is that creative magicians— Drummond, Machen— must be careful about what they make up, what beings they birth. (My friend Dylan’s excellent graphic novel Sam Zabel and the Magic Pen hinges around this idea— to what extent are we responsible for what we imagine?) In the most extreme cases, a character can become master of its creator, like when Arthur Conan Doyle was forced to bring Sherlock Holmes back from the dead by an outraged readership. Tove Jansson also felt that way about the Moomins: trapped by their popularity. (She fictionalises this in her dark and funny adult novel The True Deceiver.)

Alan Moore: “Ideaspace, where philosophies are land masses and religions are probably whole countries, might contain flora and fauna that are native to it, creatures of this conceptual world that are made from ideas in the same way that we creatures of the material world are made from matter.”⁶

In the world of matter I watched the mountain for the moonrise, but it came up when I wasn’t looking, a sudden yellow peach. (Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?) By the time I walked home the moon was bone-white, high overhead, throwing silver coins onto the inky sea.

---

P.S. Likes and shares are good, but comments and conversations are fuel for my fire. If anything here sparks ideas for you, how about writing something in the comments section? Chur

1. Briefly, Drummond conceptualised Echo (as in Echo and the Bunnymen, the band he was managing) as a giant rabbit. Once thought of, Echo started manifesting itself about the place. Twelve fun facts about Echo and Drummond here: Twelve Things You Never Knew About... The KLF

I also found this 40-second play written by Drummond; the characters are four LPs in a cardboard box. Bill Drummond Writes Bunnymen Play

2. “One time before the plague was begun (otherwise than as I have said in St Giles’s), I think it was in March, seeing a crowd of people in the street, I joined with them to satisfy my curiosity, and found them all staring up into the air to see what a woman told them appeared plain to her, which was an angel clothed in white, with a fiery sword in his hand, waving it or brandishing it over his head. She described every part of the figure to the life, showed them the motion and the form, and the poor people came into it so eagerly, and with so much readiness; ‘Yes, I see it all plainly,’ says one; ‘there’s the sword as plain as can be.’ Another saw the angel. One saw his very face, and cried out what a glorious creature he was! One saw one thing, and one another. I looked as earnestly as the rest, but perhaps not with so much willingness to be imposed upon; and I said, indeed, that I could see nothing but a white cloud, bright on one side by the shining of the sun upon the other part. The woman endeavoured to show it me, but could not make me confess that I saw it, which, indeed, if I had I must have lied. But the woman, turning upon me, looked in my face, and fancied I laughed, in which her imagination deceived her too, for I really did not laugh, but was very seriously reflecting how the poor people were terrified by the force of their own imagination. However, she turned from me, called me profane fellow, and a scoffer; told me that it was a time of God’s anger, and dreadful judgements were approaching, and that despisers such as I should wander and perish.“

3. More on the Angel(s) of Mons here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angels_of_Mons

4. Sosban Fach:

5. People also ask:
What does Caerleon mean in Welsh? (Answer: Fortress of the Legion.)
Why did the Romans choose Caerleon? (Answer: The site was strategically important, giving a wide area of control.)
Is Caerleon a nice place to live? (Answer: With its Roman ruins, mediaeval landmarks, and beautiful countryside, Caerleon offers a tranquil escape from the bustling city life.)
What is Caerleon in King Arthur? (Answer: It is where Arthur was crowned and held his first court.)

6. I recently quoted John Higgs and Alan Moore on Ideaspace, here: