NEW STORY RELEASE: Paths Across the Sea - The Voyage of Mikoro and Dari

When stranded in an impossible world, there is no shame in seeking what you need in other worlds instead.

 

Alienated and traumatised even before the COVID-19 pandemic, that has been my only recourse through this horrendous period. And today, at the time of the year when the boundaries between worlds are at their thinnest...

 

...I bring back something to share.

 

A story.

 

 

Paths Across the Sea is the tale a hyperactive fluffy pink-haired cat girl, a tiny explorer, and their journey together on a rabbit-shaped ship across a vast sea of stories. Join Mikoro and Dari on their wholesome and heartwarming quest through a wide range of worlds, some of which you might well recognise from literature, mythology and video games. You never know – you might just find yourself on an exploration into the very nature of stories, journeys, and reality itself.

 

I have launched a new website to host this story, with more of my large written works set to appear there in the months ahead. Paths Across the Sea is now available to everyone, free of charge at the following link:

https://www.aichaobang.com/

 

This story is the first of its kind I have published and very unlike my typical writings. So for those who might be curious, here is a little more about how it came about.

 

 

On Mikoro and Dari

Dari, Mikoro, and those around them are the original characters of a handful of independent writers and artists I am today very pleased to call my friends. I first came across them in a series of chance encounters during the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic, and was shocked to find myself inspired by them on a scale I have only very rarely experienced.

 

My involvement began with a short story starring Dari the shrunken explorer, which I plan to add to the website at a later date. After that one thing led to another, such that in the late autumn of 2020 I was kindly invited, indeed encouraged, to write a little more for Dari, Mikoro and their friends. It appeared the universe wished me to as well, for over the following months this prospect took on a life of its own. And now, exactly one year later, Paths Across the Sea is the result.

 

The individuals responsible for Mikoro, Dari and their friends are remarkable artists and upstanding characters in themselves, and I am deeply thankful to them for their constant encouragement and support throughout this project. Full credit is afforded to them in the Acknowledgements within the text itself.

 

 

On the Voyage

Paths Across the Sea is a mythic journey. My role in writing of it was less one of creation, more one of connection; less a productive process, more a shamanic exercise; less a matter of coming up with stuff to call my own, more a matter of faithfully expressing what the realities wanted to be written. And that is all I shall say on my part in bringing it forth.

 

Paths is a story about stories. Some of Mikoro’s and Dari’s encounters might be familiar to you depending on your own encounters: in myths, from the Irish Táin Bó Cúailnge to the Japanese creation cycle; in literature, from Swift to Bulgakov; in video games, from The Legend of Zelda to World of Warcraft; or in philosophy, from the Chinese classics to the rulesets of modern academia. These, along with so many other stories, together constitute the mythosphere or narrative seas in which the humans of this world swim, and whose archetypes and assumptions, whether they are aware of them or not, shape their realities and are shaped by their actions in turn.

 

Stories matter. The present crisis of humankind on Earth can be read as a crisis in humans’ sense of themselves as narrative beings. Fluid, contingent, created stories are taken for absolute truths; those who live in only a single story are too easily trapped in it just as a fish has no concept of water. And when captured by those who would wield them to manipulate and abuse, stories offer nigh-limitless destructive power.

 

What would happen if all people had the chance to swim in healthier stories than those of a superior us and inferior them, or of dominion over nature, or of rigid categories of humans each behaving in fixed ways? What are the stories, ancient or recent, that have shaped how you imagine such vitally important things as home or family, work, nature, freedom, history, knowledge, sex, or morality? Do those stories work for you? Are you at home in them? What other understandings might be possible?

 

You might be happy with your current understandings, or you might feel something’s not right with them. But whether you choose one or another is not the point. Rather, it is surely only by coming to know different stories, by journeying through them, that you can meaningfully be said to have a choice at all – can your story, that is, truly be your story.

 

If that’s all a bit much for you then don’t worry. You’ll find plenty of cake, cows, stars, ships, battles, cuddles and Mario Kart in this adventure too.

Paths Across the Sea now available here: https://www.aichaobang.com/

 

THAMES: 17) The High Pastures

 

Through a haze of cloud, milky sunshine washes the plains of the high Thames. It is an early October morning, and the reason it is early is that from here on, out the back doors of Oxford, the riverlands grow so remote that getting in and out becomes a four- or five-stage operation, of almost as many hours, on increasingly patchy public transport.

 

The ancient common of Port Meadow, stretching far up the west flank of Oxford.

More cows graze by the river close to the northernmost point in its course. If you like cows you’re in the right place with this one.

Gone are the towns and cities, the castles and palaces, the towers of exclusion which lord over the middle Thames. Here there is green as far as the eye can see, with only a smattering of small craft – tugs, canoes, and the iconic narrowboats – puttering from lock to lock. This expedition, having shoved through the English capital with its industrial relics, political struggles and crowded illusions of modernity, then through the long parade of past and present privilege-nests that hold the middle river, has at last broken out to the high countryside, the remnants of the English bush, where the infant river emerges from its cradle.

 

Peace at last then? Not quite. The picture-postcard daydream of the upper Thames, in which it trickles serene through grassy meadows and hamlets of beige Cotswold stone, belies a volatile flow loaded with pent-up grievance. Concertinaed through bunched-up meanders and straining in the fetters of its locks, the young river here is as liable as any reach downstream to drown these low-lying plains in remorseless floods. And as the water, so too the humans who have written their stories in it – for even out here, stories of strife and struggle whisper from the reeds.

 

The ruins of the Godstow nunnery, on the outskirts of Oxford, is one of that city’s more mythically-charged installations.

The goal of this section is the New Bridge, which typical of English naming conventions is the oldest bridge on the Thames. It is there that the river meets a tributary whose name reaches right into this country’s present moral calamity. You’ll have heard of it: the Windrush.

With the end in sight, it’s time to step this expedition up a gear. The remaining sections, starting with this one, are all twenty-kilometre hard slogs over open country. Anyone thinking of tackling this for themselves should plan with full respect for weather and seasonal conditions, in particular rainfall, flooding, and hours of daylight, as well as preparing good footwear, sensible clothing, and well-organised travel and/or local accommodation arrangements. Sufficient food and drink, especially water, are vital; there are occasional pubs on or near the river, but also long stretches in between with absolutely nothing.

 

As we shall see, you’ll also find plenty of large animals in these parts. Be nice to them. Brexit wasn’t their fault.

 

Upstream from Osney Bridge in west Oxford: the upper limit for large watercraft and effective gateway to the Upper Thames.

Notice the increase in scale since the previous section.

Start: Osney Bridge (nearest station: Oxford)

End: Newbridge (no settlement, just a bridge with a pub at each end; about five buses a day stop by the Rose Revived pub on a Witney-Abingdon route)

Length: 21.7km/13.5miles

Location: Oxfordshire – City of Oxford, Vale of White Horse, West Oxfordshire

 

Topics: Port Meadow, Godstow, miles and miles of cow meadows and sheep meadows (Wytham Foothills, Farmoor Reservoir, Bablock Hythe and Northmoor Meadows), Newbridge and the River Windrush

 

THAMES: 16) Nightmares of the Spires

A crossing for oxen, they called it. Good enough, right? Who doesn’t like oxen? They go nuuo. Watch them mooch across the river. Touch them, if you really want. Build your civilisation around all the stuff they do for you. Was that not enough?

 

Apparently not, because then they just had to go and do this.

 

“I have an idea, let’s pack our settlement with as many limestone phalluses sticky-up bits as we possibly can. Wouldn’t that be cool?”

So they did, and now everyone thinks they’re special.

So rose the dreaming spires, as they were so irritatingly immortalised in the poetry of Matthew Arnold, and in their image the oxen-ford – one of so many – became the den of one of the oldest and most prestigious institutions of all humankind. To this day the crackling magnetism of its erudite pinnacles strikes awe into throngs of aspiring participants and visitors from all the inhabited corners of this world...

 

...for most of whom its name, with its scholarly romance, is all but synonymous with that of the settlement which hosts it.

 

Here, then, is Oxford: principal city – only city – of the upper Thames, and capital both of its wealthy shire and of the English literary imagination.

 

Has anyone actually counted the spikes in this place? Is it possible within one lifetime?

But we aren’t here for the romance. This critical expedition up the Thames (‘or Isis’, as they call it here) has proceeded upon the principle that the more highly a place’s power pierces the sky, the heavier the anvil of scrutiny onto which its ear must be brought down. And here, at the very peak of the procession of the Privilege Forts of the middle Thames, we confront – just look at it – the most practised and proficient sky-shredders of all.

 

What is Oxford, really? Is there not, beneath the glamour and fancy masonry, a Thames town like any other? An Oxford of wars and riots, of massacres and plagues, of industrial hope and ruination, of brutal exclusion and injustice? The people of this city would be the first to tell you that the university is not all that Oxford is, and has in fact been an almighty pain in the arse for its mere mortal populace at times. And as for that university, for all its polished dialects and lengthy bibliographies, should we not expect that it is but one more creation of the English, with all the dreadful tendencies they have displayed when they get their hands on power?

 

As the palaces and castles on the way up here have well demonstrated, you don’t typically make it this big in this country without perpetrating some awful level of colonial, gendered and/or class-based violence. Do the spires stand shameless in that pattern? Or dare they claim exemption from it?

The river downstream near Abingdon. A world away from the spires, yet ever in their shadow.

With its enormous weight in books, films and other popular media, Oxford projects the expectation of its atmosphere of enchantment across its surrounding countryside. But the length of river that links it to Abingdon, though never far on the map from the grand city or its satellites, feels like the remotest reach so far on this journey. Perhaps its magic has deteriorated along with its country? Or was it always more illusion than reality? Either way it is time to traverse it, and so complete the middle Thames passage.

 

Upstream from Abingdon Bridge, the start of today’s section, on a fog-filled late summer’s morning. At right is the Nag’s Head pub on its namesake river island.

Start: Abingdon Bridge (nearest station: miles away, take the bus to Stratton Way from Oxford or Didcot Parkway instead)

End: Osney Bridge (nearest station: Oxford)

Length: 15.2km/9.5 miles

Location: Oxfordshire – South Oxfordshire, Vale of White Horse, City of Oxford

 

Topics: Abingdon outskirts, Nuneham Courtenay (with Lewis Carroll, and the forced removal of an entire village), Radley (with Radley College), Sandford-on-Thames (with the ‘Sandford Lasher’), Oxford suburbs, Oxford – City and University