It’s a covering, a cloak, or perhaps just a towel. Or a cappa ‘cape’, or pluviale ‘rain coat’ (if you prefer in latin). But whatever name we give it, it is still only a covering. Like skin. Or the hull of a boat. Cope.
Any kind of covering will do, to throw over us when we need a howl, and for protection; from the weather, from the wet, from everything outside and whatever may be alive and kicking there. Whatever outside that is strange and different. The scary. But I can cope with scary on the fear/excitement boundary if the covering holds. If it doesn’t leak. If it is impermeable. If it is only imagination.
Except in the real world it does leak. In fact, these last sixty years it has been leaking all the time. This is the realm of fear.
Mr Fox was on holiday. On a sunny and warm morning he looked down into the calm sea waters over the side of the boat. Together with his friend Harry Otter and wife and daughter, the four of them watched the plentiful shoals of fish slowly moving under the water. The fish suddenly scattered as a single long predator darted in among them.
“Time to go”, said Harry Otter.
Mr Fox turned away to help with the preparations to leave. “I’ll do the anchor”, he said.
“Look there’s a snake”, Harry Otter’s daughter suddenly shouted.
Mr Fox and Harry Otter turned back to look. A small thin adder was swimming on the smooth surface of the sea, its slim head raised out of the water. Later Mr Fox considered his several alternative explanations how it got to be there. Perhaps it fell from the mouth of a large bird of prey. He had seen one gliding besides the surrounding cliffs and in and out of a pine wooded area. Perhaps the bird had its nest there and the adder was a lost meal for its young.
The snake disappeared under the hull of the boat. A few minutes later the anchor was raised and all was ready for their departure. Then a sharp cry came from down below.
“The snake is in the boat”, Harry Otter’s wife screamed.
As equally improbable Mr Fox thought later was the fact that Mrs Otter had found it. By all rights the snake shouldn’t have been there of course. How could there be a hole in a boat he thought – however small the snake was, it made no sense for it to have been there. However it came to be there in the boat – unless it leaked, past believing – it made even less sense that it had been discovered Mr Fox thought. It should have gone into immediate hiding beneath the decking. To emerge at night, and slide between the covers where each of us slept. Or lie in a coil waiting to be trodden on in the dark.
Later they watched the sun set, and then the full moon cross the night sky, and the sun rise on the next day into a cloudless sky.
Fear arises, to harm or to heal, whichever way the augury turns.