Field Notes from the North Window: On the Discovery of the Conversational Griffins

By Mirin of the North Window, Author of The Anthology of Poems for When the World Tilts Slightly

I have long held that poetry is not merely a matter of arranging words into pleasing formations. It is a method of navigation. A poem behaves rather like a compass that has developed strong opinions about where one ought to go next. A metaphor, given sufficient time and adequate disregard for the poet’s other commitments, will become a map without asking permission.

This is why I am not only a poet of MirMarnia but also, somewhat against my better judgement, an explorer.

My poems have a habit of pointing insistently at places that do not yet exist, then waiting with insufferable patience whilst I go and verify whether they have appeared. This is rarely convenient. It has never once been cheap.

My latest inconvenience began with a poem that was intended to concern itself with the tilt of the world. Balance. Perspective. The usual reliable subjects. Instead, the lines kept circling something else entirely: a garden by the sea, a ring of ancient stone, a quietness that was not quite silence but had clearly decided to become something more significant. The poem tugged at my sleeve with the persistence of a river child after a coin. Eventually, as one does, I gave in and followed it.

That is how I found the Circle of Stone Griffins.

At first sight they appeared entirely ordinary, as statues go. Weathered. Impressive in the way of things that have been standing in salt wind for several centuries. Faintly aloof, in the manner of those who have witnessed rather too much of history to bother being startled by any further addition to it. They faced one another in a perfect ring, as though locked in a long-running debate about whose wings had been carved with the greater precision. Behind them the sea performed with considerable theatrical enthusiasm. Sailing vessels passed without a second glance.

I stepped into the centre of the circle and felt the air change.

It was not a breeze. It was something older and considerably slower, the kind of shift one feels in very deep water or very old rooms. That was when I understood. The griffins were speaking.

Not in sound. Not in anything so obliging as disturbance of the ordinary air. Their conversation moved the way deep tides move: vast, patient, unhurried, with an absolute indifference to whether one was ready to follow it or not. I caught only the faintest impressions of what passed between them. The curvature of time. The folding of dimensions. The particular stubbornness of particles that refuse to behave according to any established theory. Whether the threads that bind all living things constitute a form of music or merely an extremely long-running argument.

It was the sort of conversation that requires several centuries to complete a single thought. I did not feel qualified to interrupt.

I stood in that circle for what felt like hours but was probably, in the estimation of the griffins themselves, no more than a polite geological moment. In that time, I understood something that has since caused a small but persistent academic storm in the three scholarly societies unfortunate enough to invite me to lecture.

All stone statues are thinking.

They are simply thinking at a pace we have never had the patience or the stillness to notice. We walk past them, we admire the workmanship, we occasionally complain about the weathering, and all the while, they are engaged in intellectual discourse that makes our own seem rather breathless and brief.

This discovery has placed me, somewhat unwillingly, at the centre of a new field of enquiry. I have been asked to present papers. I have been asked to revisit sites and produce detailed transcriptions, which is a considerably harder task than it sounds when the subjects are communicating on a geological timescale. I have been asked whether the gargoyles on the East Tower of the Riverward hold opinions about the weather.

They do. They find it dramatic and largely unnecessary.

The matter of importance is this. We must cease dismissing statues as silent objects, decorative remnants of craft and ambition, monuments to the briefly living. They are not idle. They are not vacant. They are engaged in the slow, immense, ongoing intellectual life of MirMarnia, participants in conversations that were old when our grandmothers’ grandmothers were new.

Stand quietly enough in their presence, and you may feel it: that deep, cold patience, that vast and unhurried regard.

Or you may simply write a poem that becomes a map, that becomes a discovery, that becomes a responsibility you never intended to acquire.

Such is the life of a poet. Such is the life of an explorer. Such is the life of someone who has learned, rather too late, to listen to stone.

Mirin of the North Window