Ways to the stone house

Whatever your life means to you; its heart and purpose were hewn in a wild workshop with simple tools, out of homely materials. You found a stone block on a solitary moor and with time and labour you chipped away to fashion your deepest dreams and treasures.*

Yet, if you take stock, you’ll see it’s half human, half rock. Utterly terrible and almost beautiful, for its colouring is of moonlight and running blood. Moorland heather clothes it and heath, with its blooming bells and balmy fragrance creeps in perpetual growth to the doorstep where you have laid a welcome mat. 

Additional features, inanimate and creatures and whole other buildings you crafted to embellish the estate: a slate-roof keep-safe constructed by you alone from timbers of love and psychological stone. Too gut-wrenching to even consider the loss of the things you have placed inside. 

Bungalows for elders. Drawing rooms for guests. Sumptuous bedouin tents for lovers. Tree houses and nurseries for the magical children. Think of the children! Adults conjoin. Then, nine times the moon doth wax and wane and here they are. You made and grew them yet you didn’t. Inexplicable and precious and fleeting and happening now. Considering life makes your heart quicken. Was it egg before chicken? Whose milk drinketh the cow? 

Edwardian style pavilions boast generous presentation rooms that display your certified gains and other proud achievements. A scullery of wins. A parlour full of good deeds and halls bedecked with tarpaulin to cover over your sins stand darkened and padlocked up. Away from prying eyes. Such is the way of your secrets and lies. 

Out on the tops beyond the crags a resplendent amphitheatre in the Roman style affords you the luxury of parading your finest hours of glory to an audience of thousands. Outhouses tail off across the valley packed full of kitchens of sinks of dirty dishes, near dells of hopes and wells for wishes. 

A five star hotel, all rooms en suite with elm balustrades and pine floors and teak communicating doors accommodates your goals. Gardeners snip pods of peas for pottage and at the head of the main driveway a limestone gatekeeper’s cottage guards the thoroughfare, taking its tolls. 

Follies and bandstands and high-arch bamboo Japanese footbridges over fast running stony brooks enshrine your deep-set regard for reputation and looks.

Look there! A marble pillared mission hall where all of your needs for approval and permission fall on oak and ash pews set neatly up for the almighty and metered out with royal blue Christian prayer books over felt-sewn kneeling cushions aside an altar where all your faiths and trusts and knowings falter. 

Then, all too soon, hard knocks and doubt, too sticky to be cast out, made you build a baggage room. A room that, no matter how often you seek to better insulate, doth leak. 

A low slung modernist penitentiary pebbledashed in Penistone potash and gypsum and silica and sunk into a clough where badgers and rabbits bolt, residents as different as coal from salt, locks away your fears. You lower your voice each time you pass by its perimeter landscaped bushes. All whispers and hushes and furtive-glanced blushes. For, even barred prison cell windows have ears. 

Baroque galleries and Victorian red brick town house chambers confine to safe storage red letter days and Kodak moments in washed out yellows and greys. All mellow and haze. The first time we met and that feeling you get and they’re playing our song. In summer, strewn along wide willow lined boulevards run lush beds of shrubs and those white flowers he loves that you planted and watered and grew. Who knew! 

And at the very centre of this precocious caravanserai of the utmost things and no-things that call the tune of heartstrings, your flagship mainstay quarters. All else built yet this you had to sculpture. A monumental manse of meaning, cavernous and future-proofed with your bespoke sepulchre. 

This is your stone house and as it ages and the rock turns sable under the water weathered years of moss and obligatory meaningless dross you have begun to ask yourself questions of grace and mortality: Can an old ruin continue to have a history? Can these bones live? Can an old fool sit easy with mystery? Can beggars give? 

There are two ways to the stone house**. Each has a cost. You are presently already half-way down one of them. Or further. Or just starting out. The other is barely perceptible. A sunken rut where the grass is too green to believe. I’d wager: this is where a carriage road ran a hundred years back. Could there have been cobbles for a pony and trap? Did the pavement walls tumble and the brickwork get tossed? It’s hard to tell. This old path is disused yet worn. Forgotten. Grown over. Neglected. Lovelorn.

Losing itself. But not lost.  

Stay awhile and take the air. Look closer. There’s a map in the undergrowth. A very map of this particular way to the stone house. The directions read peculiar yet somehow they make sense to the reader for whom they were written. But who wrote? It doesn’t matter. In the place of spatial direction, guidance for the spirit, and I quote:

‘Swing into reverse and undo everything. Now stop and stand and let the layers of your identity peel off into the sun. On presumption and assumption you are grown fat. Break into the red room for the entire roll of photographs that shot the paths you took up to this point in this life. Now grab the negatives and hereafter copy that.’

The map goes on;

‘Be thoughtless because the thieving thoughts make off with your unique and scarce attention. And stop caring and being reasonable that you might care less about vanities and see properly the others. Your fabulous, flowering, fading sisters and brothers. And what be reason but the mechanics of an ego immense? Heed this guide if only for the fact that it is not common and it does not make sense.’

This is a way and one less traveled to the very heart of your heart that should you, one electric blue spring day dare to venture in accordance with yond riddled chart, will be born again entirely. You alone. Nobody can coach. The thing about the stone house is not the content nor the location, nor the quality nor the quantity. It’s how you approach. 

So get lost without the urge to be found and remember how to forget things and set a reminder to learn how to lose track of time. Ask dumb questions. Be indecisive. Shatter coerced promises. Cut corners. Etch curves. Move away from the fools. 

There are two ways to the stone house. 

Go on. Break the rules! 

Thanks for reading.

We are one

*These first two paragraphs are borrowing so heavily from Currer Bell's 1850 preface to that year's edition of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Height's that it seems disingenuous to claim a paraphrase. Plagiarism, more like, save for this footnote. 

** Sylvia Plath's autograph journal of 1958 records her visit to Haworth in West Yorkshire. In it she refers to the various ways of reaching Top Withins and uses the phrase that I use to head this article. It inspired Simon Warner's 2012 artistic ensemble of photographs that appeared in the Brontë Parsonage Museum. Simon's exhibit was called Ways To The Stone House and is the ignition and inspiration for my article.