Algiz by Nick Hayes

To mark publication of her new collection of essays, Nemesis, My Friend, Jay Griffiths asked writers and artists to respond to the idea of Ritual, one of the themes of her book. In this essay the writer Nick Hayes considers a tree which has been a lifelong companion.

Raised a Catholic, popery put me right off ritual. It was a case of the baby and the bathwater. As an altar boy, I was given access to the backstage area, God’s green room, and every Sunday I would watch the Holy Blood of Christ decanted into a chalice from a supermarket wine bottle, and the Holy Body of Christ unwrapped from plastic wrapping like Carr’s Water biscuits. On stage an hour later, I’d watch a queue of performative solemnity, celebrants lining up to poke out their tongues for redemption, and it all felt like a pompous sham. When I finally grew into my teens, and could assert my own will on my weekend, instead of accompanying my parents out of the house to church, I preferred instead to devote my time to an hour and a half of uninterrupted, focused masturbation. Like so many sullied tissues, I flushed away from my life the cassocks, incense, pomp and charadery of the Catholic Church, and with it went the value of tradition, repetition, symbolic significance, ritual.

But now, a quarter of a century on, a tree outside the window of my barge is orchestrating a change in me. The tree is a tall black poplar, the tallest tree in eyeshot. It’s not attractive in the way trees are supposed to be – its shape has been butchered by the wind, and old limbs lie like amputated bones at its base, leaving great big gappy accidents in its silhouette. I’ve known it, tangentially, all my life. As a kid, in an inflatable kayak, I would use the tree as a waymarker, halfway from the village to the weir. Later, I would pick mistletoe from its lowest boughs, make love in the long grass by its trunk and write a poem that a decade later would become The Book of Trespass. Living in London, it would appear intermittently in my dreams, a hieroglyph of home.

I bought a boat in early lockdown, and cruised it a hundred and fifty miles to Bath and back. I ended up on the Thames, just downstream of the tree, fulfilling a simple urge to dive from my new home into the waters I had grown up beside. Each morning I would wake, and from my pillow I would see the tips of its branches poking out over the other trees. It was now not just a waymarker of distance, but an anchor, its form slotting neatly into the silhouette template etched into my dreams. Something clicked into place and I was surprised at how powerfully I felt this homecoming.

As summer ended, I wrote to the estate that owned the land around the tree, to see if I could moor on their bank for winter. They agreed, and found me a mooring directly opposite my tree. I was now closer to this big tree than ever before, living my life in the shadow of its toppermost twigs.  Every day the tree would catch my eye and I would pause, and take some time to watch the crows play in the wind. The most impactful aspect of this new life on the river was not having to go home at the end of the day: living in nature is different to visiting it, and seeing the tree in every weather, by full moon or shrouded in a dawn mist, I felt that our relationship was deepening; we were cohabiting.

I began drawing the tree from the bow of the boat, my hand following the lines drawn by its boughs, tracing it onto paper. I was learning the tree like a song you can’t help listening to on repeat, its lines embedding themselves in me unconsciously, so that I could sing it without prompting. As I learnt the tree’s form, I could draw it on paper without looking and doodling away at night, it began to abstract, condensing into its essential form. I remembered learning about the Russian artist Piet Mondrian, who kept returning to the same apple tree, trying again and again to capture its essence. His journey took him from a lifelike classical copying of the tree, to reducing the detail, colour and volume of the tree, and led him eventually to his grid paintings, for which he became most famous: flat black grids of rectangles and squares, filled with primary colours, the building blocks of life.

As my interpretation of the tree morphed through the pages of my sketchbook, I noticed a form emerging. The long pole of its trunk, the various diagonals of its boughs, abstracted into an antenna shape, a trident fork, and then, before my eyes, I noticed that what i was actually drawing was Algiz, a character from the runic alphabet of Elder Futhark. Going back over my sketchbook, I could see Algiz in every drawing, its essential structure reproduced, but overlooked until now.

As a new boater, wood had already gained a much greater significance in my life. Instead of buying wood from the coal boat, I went picking and sawing fallen, seasoned boughs, that lay scattered on the valley slopes of the river Avon. Instead of just walking through the woods, I was now spending hours in them, getting sweaty, getting cut, getting deeper enmeshed in their ecosystem. Searching for wood, I was off track, meandering through fallen trees, uncovering like a child the life of the leaf litter, the woodlice, the earwigs, and seeing the early decay of wood, the bone white mycelia, the black spalting. Sawing the wood, you can smell it; stacking the wood, you can hear it, each with its own peculiar clock and clack. I began learning about wood, first in ways that directly applied to me – which woods burnt well, which were a bastard to saw, but it wasn’t long before I slipped down the rabbit hole into a world of wood lore. You don’t burn elder, said the folklore, unless you want the devil to dance on your chimney and then, later, I discovered that the elder contains glycocide, which produces cyanide. The pragmatic had led me into the esoteric, and vice versa.

Wood lore led me to Ogham, the Celtic tree alphabet, thought to have been created as a code for resistance communication under Roman rule. Ogham led me onto runes, an alphabet created around the same time, that was also used as a divination tool, much like Tarot. Each rune represented a letter, but also a concept, which could be interpreted in the context of a question or dilemma. What gripped me about runes is that for all their mysticism, they were an alphabet forged by the material they were written on – each character was designed so that it could be cut into the grain of wood, which is why there are no curves in the runic alphabet. Because I had a load of wood lying around, and more saws than I’d ever owned before, I was able to start cutting slices of branches, like pepperoni, and begin carving my own runes. It began idly, because I could, and then, with a full set of runes, it was impossible not to try casting them, divinating, using wood to shape my future.

This is how ritual grows organically, when it is not imposed from above, but when it grows from the ground up, a seed that is dropped by natural happenstance, that rises organically, and hardens into something big. I felt a loosening in my mind from the grip of rationalism, a new openness to the spiritual. The websites said that Algiz represented learning, a connection with a deeper communication with the non-human, which felt appropriate, because that’s exactly what wood, and this tree, was doing for me.

Then came the storms. Several days before, with red warnings from the Met Office, the boaters group on Whatsapp starting buzzing with anxiety. Would our ropes hold, what would happen if they didn’t? The first storm of the tropical cyclone was to hit us with winds of up to fifty mph then another, storm Eunice, predicted to be hardest winds since the Burns Day storm of 1990. I had no idea what the impact of these winds would be, but one boater expressed it in a way that hit home – it would be like travelling your boat down the motorway at a speed of up to a hundred miles per hour.

There was a strange energy to those days: half flurried activity, half suspenseful anxiety. I carried my coal bags up to the roof and leant them against the solar panels. I took a long line of rope and fed it through the windows, over the roof and under through the kitchen, again and again, tying the panels down. I tied springlines to my stern, tightened the ropes so that the wind wouldn’t shake their mooring pins out of the muddy, marshy bank. I taped up the windows, left open for the rope, I brought in all the flower pots, and then I sat, watched Newsnight, and waited.

The first storm hit, and we had a day of sickening lurching, swinging and deep juddering. The wind would roar, subside, and return with renewed strength. The river went wild, white horses storming downstream, one boater swears she saw a goose flying backwards past her window. It was the first time I had ever sat through a storm, used to retreating inside, into security, stability, but here I was tossed about on an energy that felt as close to the wrath of god as I’d ever care to be. I could hear the dead trees in the forest beyond the floodplain clacking against the boughs of other trees. The black poplar was corkscrewing, waving its upstretched arms in an anchored pirouette. But we both made it through the first storm.

Then came a day of innocent smiling sunshine, birds tweeting, everything back to better, as if we were being gaslit by the weather. At dusk, the river was set like glass, nothing moved; the calm before the storm was bordering on unbearable. Whilst checking the ropes on the solar panels, I stood on the roof and saw the poplar tree, this time with a deep pang in my chest. Black Poplars don’t last much longer than two centuries, and this tree was so tall, its trunk so thick, that it must have grown for that many years. A few decades before, another poplar had stood by its side, but it had come crashing down, and was now rotting slowly above its roots. With all this old and new significance, I realised what I was feeling was more of a sense of shared concern, empathy ,kinship, love. I felt a desperate sense that this tree might not survive the storm, that the shape of the landscape might no longer have its silhouette, that Algiz, this new route into landscape and meaning, belonging, home, knowledge, love and care, would suddenly come crashing down. But my concern was not simply altruistic – if it fell my way, its toppermmost branches would come crashing down on my roof, shattering the solar, stabbing holes in my windows. One way or another, tomorrow, our fates were entwined.

So I went to sit beneath the tree, my back against a hollow in its base, looking up into the webs of mistletoe and branches. I never know quite how long is necessary, or what exactly one should do, to imbue a moment with significance, so I just waited, said a prayer out loud to the tree, a hangover from that catholic upbringing, and hoped we both made it through the day. As I walked away, nervous, to try and get some sleep before the storm, this didn’t seem quite enough, so awkwardly, self-consciously, I walked back and kissed its bark. A ritual was born, and though it was uncomplicated, unadorned with pomp or pageantry, in its significance of love, its expression of close kinship, I thought then, and still think to this day, maybe a kiss is enough.

***

Nick Hayes is an illustrator and the author of The Book of Trespass and The Trespasser’s Companion. Read more about Nick and his work on his website.

The illustration at the head of this piece is by Charlotte Rowley, who works mainly with papercut, lino print and watercolour. Click the image to see the full illustration. See her work on Instagram.

Nemesis, My Friend by Jay Griffiths is out now.