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

 

THAMES: 15) 'Thames or Isis'

River Thames or Isis, the maps read now. What does it mean? Two names at once? Or are you expected to choose one or the other, like, say, chocolate or pistachio ice cream, or a red suitcase or a blue suitcase?

 

Is it the Isis now? Or still the Thames? Is this still the same river?

 

The river itself is silent on this matter. What the names really tell us about are the humans who come up with them, and here they tell us that there is a set of humans who do things differently from the rest. So differently, at that, that even the water, the source of all that they are, takes on an alternate meaning in their presence.

 

River Thames or Isis. They tell us, in other words, that we encroach on the core domains of the Oxford English. And that, the Oxfordese tribes would have us believe, is special.

 

Abingdon. At population 40,000, this largest of Oxford’s moons has achieved stable orbit – for now – by drawing on that city’s economic and intellectual atmosphere while exerting one very much its own.

The river at Clifton Hampden, one of several villages that shelter in the bush along the Thames's-or-Isis's meanders.

Is that difference substantial, as far as the river is concerned? As we draw into Lewis Carroll and Philip Pullman territory, should we expect to find people nosing around in colourful boats that aren’t from around here, no doubt garbed in suspicious hats and coats? Are there glimpses of rabbits darting into holes in the undergrowth, pocket-watch in one paw and bottle of dubious fluids in the other? What is this mystique about the Oxfordshire leisurelands? By what high otherworldly air are they supposedly set apart from the long procession of downstream Privilege Forts which, in flowing through them hereafter, the river must find merely mundane?

 

Or is it all a magic show, a masquerade of dialect and illusion? Might it be mere disguise for what’s really just a continuation of this valley’s nests of wealth and power, here as there seeking creative ways to write the suffering of those they exclude out of the story?

 

How different is it, really?

 

At one level the Oxfordshire Thames would seem to bear much in common with the fare so far. There are lengthening slogs across farm fields; white pleasure-cruisers, lazing past with invariably white passengers; and no fewer than three straight cuts, dug through where they – their monks, their merchants – couldn’t be bothered to put up with the water’s wilful twists and bends.

 

But at another level, perhaps one does begin to detect a few kinks in the cosmic fabric. The settlements here are secretive, hidden behind farm fields or curtains of bush. As at their Dorchester concentration point, the fields in question have been especially fertile in their yield of clues to thousands of years of habitation gone by. The long progress through these agrarian margins is intermittently disturbed by the metallic sheen of cutting-edge science and technology: the satellite belt of research and development installations that swirl in close orbit of Oxford University. And in the spaces in between you stumble through a field of much smaller asteroids, each unique in shape. Those are the bizarre native rituals peculiar to each village or sub-tribe, the likes of Poohsticks and Bun-Throwing and Morris Dancing which, just perhaps, can only be made sense of under a Carrollian suspension of the limits of everyday belief.

 

Little Wittenham Bridge. This unassuming footbridge held international significance as the site of the World Poohsticks Championships until 2015.

A suspicious tree arrangement spotted in the rustic middle distance between the Didcot power station and the Culham nuclear fusion research centre. You can’t be too sure of anything in a landscape like this.

A world unto itself then? A place where the imaginary is real, and the real – that is, COVID-19 failure, Brexit-induced food shortages, and most lately this country’s monstrous and agonising betrayal of the Afghans – is all consigned to rude imagination?

 

At times like these regular attention is drawn to the warnings of one who offered some of the clearest visions on how truth and reality wither in the authoritarian shadow. It so happens that this bit of floodplain is also where George Orwell – who it might be noted, took a river’s name as his own – at last had his bones laid to rest. It’s doubtful his less corporeal parts get much rest these days, whatever the enchantments called up by such nomemancy as Thames or Isis.

 

The confluence with the River Thame is the start of today’s progress, and the lower extent of the River Thames or Isis naming convention.

 

Start: Confluence with the River Thame, near Dorchester-on-Thames (nearest station: miles away, take the X39 or X40 bus from Reading or Oxford instead and walk in from the stop on the Dorchester Bypass)

End: Abingdon Bridge (nearest station: miles away, take the X3 or X13 bus from Stratton Way to Oxford or Didcot Parkway instead)

Length: 14.5km/9 miles

Location: Oxfordshire – South Oxfordshire, Vale of White Horse

 

Topics: Little Wittenham, Clifton Hampden, Sutton Courtney and Culham, and Abingdon. Is it special?

 

THAMES: 14) Settling Point

Is time like the river? There are places where it feels less like a flow, with one age succeeding another, than an accumulation of all ages together.

 

 

Witness the Oxford Plain. Through an agrarian spread of yellows and greens the river ribbons blue. Here upstream of Wallingford it bends, and in that bend is a tiny village which, at first glance, might as well be any other.

 

Dorchester-on-Thames, not to be confused with its better-known namesake the provincial capital of Dorset, is a tiny settlement of 1,000 people. Little houses. Sheep in fields. Aside from a peculiarly large church, what is there to set it out in the shadows of the vast structures of power and privilege that line this valley?

 

Look closer.

 

Are those not some noteworthy earthworks (at right)? And where are these views coming from on the flat Oxford Plain?

Hill forts. How about it then.

In fact this subtle riverbend is one of the richest historical treasure-troves in the Thames valley. Six millennia of continuous human habitation are written in the shape of its landscape, from the ramparts and ditches everywhere you look to the coins, bones and grave goods that practically erupt from its gravel. It took the English some time to realise it. They’d wrecked much of it through gravel quarrying by the time that they did. But once they did, the Dorchester bend became one of the most prized archaeological zones in the country.

 

These are deep memories it harbours. Most of them long precede the English nation. They precede even its precursors. They go all the way back to a time when far, far away, Gilgamesh and the Egyptian pyramids were happening; and when here on the very fringes of the story of humanity, the migrants who wandered out this way got out their flint hand-axes and, for the first time, whacked down the stakes of this island-peninsula’s earliest permanent settlements.

 

A landscape in time, not just in space. The shape of this land is the product – and continuation – of the stories of about six settlements that succeeded each other on and around the Dorchester bend.

Doubtless life in these earliest societies to put down roots here would have been full of struggles. But had it yet gone so fundamentally wrong as we find it today? Was this then, as it is now, a land of abuse? Had the masculine power fantasy, which should never have existed, been invented yet? Whatever diseases afflicted them, was it in them yet to come up with such staggering political and cultural mis-reactions as they have for COVID-19 today?

 

Regrettably that’s not a theoretical question.

 

And because this is the middle Thames, we have to ask: what of their forts? The Iron Age fort on the hill, and fort in the bend; the Roman fort just beneath where the village is now: were these, already, Privilege Forts? Or were these forts for everyone?

 

There’s simply too much in the way to answer these questions now. Nonetheless, let’s take a few steps into a landscape where perhaps there’s less to impede those ancestors’ touch on your skin than anywhere else in this part of the country.

 

Start: Wallingford Bridge (nearest station: Cholsey – ten minutes by bus, or take the X39 or X40 from Reading for approx. thirty minutes)

End: Confluence with River Thame, near Dorchester-on-Thames (nearest station: miles away, take the X39 or X40 bus to Reading or Oxford instead)

Length: 8km/5 miles

Location: Oxfordshire – South Oxfordshire

 

Topics: Wallingford Castle Meadows, Benson, Shillingford, and thousands of years of settlement at Dorchester-on-Thames