Martin Jordan
artist
artist
Chapter Four
Martin and The Vulture and the Blood Moon
This is what happened to me in 1967. I was walking along a country lane in Essex on a sunny afternoon in autumn when I experienced a vision. I don’t know what triggered it as I wasn’t feverish, delirious or intoxicated and it had been a perfectly ordinary day on which I was returning home after a Saturday morning spent stacking bricks in a builder’s yard.
Leaves were dropping in the still air and I decided to stop and catch one before it touched the ground. It’s said to be lucky to catch a falling leaf and I tended to believe such things in 1967. Anyway, a breeze sprang up, branches swayed and leaves cascaded down in hundreds and thousands until the air seemed filled with them. I looked up and leaves became feathers, soft pale feathers on a King Vulture’s wing. Somehow I’d been transported to another place with this extravagantly ornate bird staring at me out of a huge pale eye. High above, two more of them circled before a rosy red moon.
‘That’s a blood moon,’ said a voice from somewhere and I examined it with interest, never having seen or even heard of a blood moon before.
A vision called The End of Everything
Awake
I was thinking about the dream, particularly the last bit. The vision remained clear and memorable but being awake it made no sense whatsoever. That’s how it is with dreams. While you’re having them they can seem profound but when you wake up and think about them, they’re nonsense: That’s when it’s easy to believe that dreams are mere ramblings, the mind having a tidy up, sweeping the detritus of the remembered and the imagined into a heap, assembling it randomly and putting it on ‘play’. But is that all there is to dreams?
