Prac Crit

Ablutions for Midsummer

by Rachael Boast

Interview

by Holly Corfield Carr

On my way to meet Rachael Boast at her home in Bristol, I realise I am cycling through most of the second line of her poem ‘St Anne-in-the-Woods’ (‘Chapel Way, Pilgrims Wharf, Angels Ground’ are all streets in the south east of the city) from her second collection Pilgrim’s Flower. I’m visiting her riverside flat in late November so the Tower Belle, one of Bristol’s summer booze cruisers, isn’t scheduled to glide by her window but when it appears in ‘The Glass-hulled Boat’ in Void Studies, it starts up the ‘slap of the wake / of a parallel life’. As a fellow Bristol resident, I often encounter in Rachael’s poems a strange familiarity but, as a reader, I feel that ‘slap of the wake’ like a familiar strangeness rolling under all her poems. As I secure my bike at the river’s edge, I lose a few moments watching the water negotiate the river’s last big bend before it heads into the canals and culverts of the city centre. Rachael’s poems are busy with poets (Coleridge, Akhmatova, Rimbaud make regular appearances across her three collections) and I’m almost expecting Rimbaud’s giddy ghost to row into view.

As soon as Rachael has welcomed me with a cup of tea, we are back out the door and up into a thin wedge of woodland behind her block of flats. For a long time, neither of us talk about ‘Ablutions for Midsummer’ or writing or poems or at all and, by the time we do, there’s a sense we’re walking back over the same route we’ve already taken. We start our interview as we arrive at Rachael’s ‘encampment’, a little structure built from fallen branches in the middle of the wood. We talk about routine and neighbours and weather and health while Rachael tidies away some leaves from the floor and weaves back in some split twigs. After we return to the warmth of her flat, we tilt our discussion towards the poem and, in particular, that travelling refrain – ‘Over and over the moon washes her fragments’ – breaking and mending itself as it folds over the line break. We read it aloud again and again during the course of our conversation, as if a poem might be something to attend to with the repetitive, reparative care of wickerwork.

‘Ablutions for Midsummer’ was written over a hundred miles away from Bristol at Eagle Rock in Dartmoor, witnessing a different ‘river in spate’ and talking with other ‘speaking leaves of the wood’, moving around another ‘hinge of the valley’ and, as Rachael says in the interview, it belongs to that place entirely. That place, though, regardless of geography, is organised around the physical activity of writing (and whatever has to happen before the writing happens) which, for Rachael, involves the daily management of pressure in the body. This is the poem as a place of repetition and repair, where re-writing and re-reading is walking the same route beside a parallel self who is already out and about ‘seeing what I hadn’t seen, hearing / what I hadn’t heard.’

It isn’t until I come back to my bike and cycle back down the river, that I see the whole place as Rachael sees it, vibrating and brilliant in the bateau ivre’s wake and each poem a fully parallel place, alive and waking.

HCC

Do you do this every day?

RB

I just need it, whenever I get to it. Just for a space where things aren’t synthetic but sympathetic! Or to get to the nearest Post Office! On the road at the top, up there. This narrow strip is all that’s left of the old King’s Wood.

HCC

Do you ever write poems while you’re walking along here?

RB

I might find the odd line out here but I don’t tend to write in my head – I like indulging the pre-verbal state of the ‘poem’, the ringing of images, then maybe I’ll sit down and write what follows. But I’ve written a lot of poems about this area. Wherever you are, there’s the material. Almost there!

HCC

How did we climb to such a height so quickly? I’ve forgotten I’m in the centre of Bristol.

RB

The alternative Avon Gorge! Here we are. This is the camp. It used to be a two-sided thing but I pulled it down and moved it over here. There’s a seat and there’s a seat and there’s another, and that’s a table, of sorts.

HCC

So room for the poet and an audience of three. And it is so precisely the size of you. The top of your hat is brushing the roof. It’s made to fit!

RB

There are little details I’m pleased with. This is holding all these branches in place, just because that branch there secures this perfectly. And so on. If you stand outside and give the whole structure a good shake, it’s solid. I’ve woven it all so tightly it won’t come down. I didn’t break a single piece of living wood to make this. It’s all been collected.

HCC

How long did it take you to make this?

RB

A few months or so just coming up and doing the odd half hour and fussing about with it. Thinking ‘that shouldn’t be there, that should be balanced on that, what’s happened there? Get rid of that.’ I’ve recently added a third ‘wall’ to create a more definitive doorway, and a fourth – the ceiling.

HCC

So in a way you’re just rearranging this part of the wood.

RB

Rearranged in repetitive patterns using repetitive physical movements. But it’s an act of making like any other act of making, complete with its own particular symbolism.

HCC

That’s poesis, right? This is the ‘something made’.

RB

It is almost as if the weaving of the branches of trees corresponded to the process of writing the poem, the branches being lines, or to the drafting process in general, getting rid of non-functional features of the structure – be it a poem or a place like this. Maybe I’m making, in W.S. Graham’s words, a ‘constructed space’. And doing this in order to construct more things inside that space.

HCC

Ah! A kind of nest of nested making. A proper nest!

RB

And this big rock is my table. You can write on it – with a scrap of slate.

HCC

Real labour has gone into this, Rachael. This is really heavy.

RB

The camp is going to change minutely as the wood rots. That’s interesting in itself. Perhaps decay is another form of labour.

HCC

As it rots it might also strengthen itself as it settles into a shape. You’ve reminded me of Wordsworth’s poems that have those incredibly specific titles like ‘Lines Written with a Slate-pencil upon a Stone, the largest of a heap lying near a deserted Quarry, upon one of the Islands at Rydale’, which are suggestive of arduous acts of composition – writing these long poems on the bumpy surface of a rock on a hillside – but which, in the first rain, would be gone. And now our light is fading so we should be gone too!

RB

Are you going to be alright coming down this way? What I do is I put my feet sideways and find some grip on the rocks and the roots, where they show through. There’s a rock-hold there.

HCC

So much of this journey up to your camp has been about difficulty. This is a difficult place to get to. It’s kind of a walk but it’s also kind of a climb. How does this set you up for writing? Do you have to go to a difficult, inaccessible place to access language?

RB

It’s related, I think, to the medical situation. My daily grind requires a lot of stamina and so I’m used to working with difficulty. When you turn difficulty over you have something powerful or remedial in some way. The health issues are inseparable from the writing. Poetry is putting a lot of pressure on language. If you feel, physically, under a lot of pressure, that has a corresponding consequence. It’s doing what I can with the little space there is, with a feeling of constant constriction. It’s the same with poetry. Whatever your materials are, put whatever pressure is needed on that material.

HCC

And that’s the same with your encampment, too. You’ve got your upright sticks and they restrict and guide the shape of the structure.

RB

I really don’t know quite what to call the space. I wouldn’t call it a ‘den’ or a ‘camp’, really. ‘Encampment’ is good. Maybe there’s another name.

HCC

Do you know the writer Hannah More? She was a writer and campaigner who lived in Bristol in the late-eighteenth, early-nineteenth century. She constructed a little shelter in her garden out of branches which she called her ‘root house’. She decorated it with periwinkles and honeysuckle and went up there to drink tea and write. Maybe ‘root house’ is a good name?

RB

Ah, I remember now, your PhD is on poetry in caves! ‘Root house’ it is then. It makes me think of balconies. It’s outside but part of the domestic space so it’s between, or both. The same with the idea of the root house. It’s outside but you’ve made an inside that isn’t quite a house; it’s a space to camouflage myself in, as is language – a provisional space, neither here nor there.

HCC

Or at least, perhaps, with some permeability between outside and in? You’ve been describing all sorts of processes that sound like a lot of hard work: dragging rocks, putting pressure on language until it fits, looking at things until you’re camouflaged by them.

RB

I think the hard work is cleaning those doors of perception, to use Blake’s idea. That’s the hardest bit because the poems are already there. Like two stones rubbing together which end up polishing each other, there’s a lot of pressure involved in the process. It’s the way I’m made. The problem with my condition, Ichthyosis, is that the skin grows twenty times quicker than it should. It then dries and constricts so I’m walking around in a pressure chamber. I ignore it the best I can because I’m used to it so my tolerance of discomfort is pretty advanced. It’s not a choice. I can’t be physically comfortable. It’s a permanent situation. When you apply that kind of pressure to a creative practice, you find meaning in the difficulty.

HCC

So, it’s a productive pressure?

RB

Or an alchemical pressure, yes. Like ingredients in a crucible, you turn the flame up and see what happens. Either the crucible breaks and you’ve got to start again or you’ve made something beautiful and precious. I first encountered alchemy in a biography of Rimbaud when I was a teenager. I was having a catastrophic time and I remember thinking that if I follow this process, things will fall into place. And that’s my practice. Transmute. Transmute. Transmute. Anything is material. Your own body is material. The universe is in every cell of the body so if you can access it you’ve got the most amazing material.

HCC

You’ve spoken about Arthur Rimbaud and he, alongside Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Anna Akhmatova, provide useful models for your writing.

RB

Coleridge had terrible health problems too! Going on holiday with the Wordsworths didn’t help and they eventually parted company. At Loch Katrine, Coleridge was trying to dry his boots out in an oven and they burnt. Then he had to walk for miles in burnt boots until he reached Fort Augustus where he was able to buy a new pair. And I now remember – having forgotten whilst at work on ‘Ablutions for Midsummer’ – that ‘page after page turning / on a rhyme, repeating the word water / over and over again’ was at some point lifted from an earlier poem, ‘Loch Loch’, which was published in Markings in 2009 but wasn’t included in Sidereal. There is a real Loch Lochy near Spean Bridge, one of the places Coleridge walked through at that time.

HCC

Yes! I feel like I sometimes meet Coleridge, walking around in his burnt boots, in your writing. Are the spectres of these poets – Rimbaud, Coleridge, Akhmatova – still walking about in your new work?

RB

They are, yes. I read their poems and I’m away. This time of year, November, always brings back a memory of being absorbed in writing a long piece on ‘Christabel’ for the Bristol Festival of Ideas, A New Lyrical Ballads project. It was, in my own life, both a terrible and a vital time, so I engaged with the task pretty thoroughly. I then wrote a second one because I wanted to convey, in a poem, information about his taste in dressing gowns: silk, and covered in hieroglyphs! The poems that are written in the footsteps of Akhmatova come quickly and hardly need much editing. It’s like inhabiting someone’s empty shell. It’s a strange aspect of empathy.

HCC

Or putting on their burnt boots? These three voices have also plotted a trajectory in your previous collections. We were in the heavens of Sidereal and then we were in the earth of Pilgrim’s Flower and, for me, quite specifically in Bristol, and then with Void Studies and Rimbaud we headed into a nothingness, perhaps under the earth. Where are you taking us next?

RB

The void of Void Studies isn’t a negative, by the way, nor any form of nullification – quite the opposite. It relates to the notion of the abyss in the Cabala, a place to cross over. I’ll be venturing into similar in-between places in the next collection, this time focussing on the theme of the body in pain. I did think for a time that after Void Studies I couldn’t go any further with what I was doing with language. I had always wanted to write that book – not knowing what it was – and it took many years to be able to – twenty or so – and when it was done I thought ‘now what?’, or rather, ‘why?’ After a pause, the first poem I wrote was ‘Hotel Raphael’, about the feeling of watching a black and white film and then pausing it to have a bath, closing my eyes, opening them, then being radically shocked by colour! Talking of coincidence, after doing some research, the Archangel Raphael is the patron saint of lemon trees. I started writing the book, as a book, when we moved into this new flat and I inherited a lemon tree. When these things happen I just think I’m on the right track, intangibly supported.

HCC

And you’re not trying to give that indeterminate or intangible thing a name?

RB

I’m trying to step back and allow things to happen without interfering with my own limited ego. I think poetry is a form of empathy. A narcissist stares into the mirror; a poet goes through it. And I take that analogy from Jean Cocteau’s Orphée. I’d like to be able to write in a way that gets past the self. I’ve also been thinking I need to be a bit more useful to other people. From what I’ve written so far, it’s not obvious there’s a serious physical problem. I could probably be a little more open about that. I do think there’s an interesting connection between physical pressure and poetry as language with pressure applied to it.

HCC

So before now, then, this pressure might have been part of the process but external to the poem – or is that process, do you think, legible in your poems?

RB

They don’t explicitly reference the process but the way they are structured replicates the pressure. So the process is legible, yes. My favourite form, the sonnet, for instance, is a little pressure chamber, it’s been said. You’ve got these limitations, the fourteen lines, the need for a volta, and the principle that the poem addresses two contradictory ideas without attempting to reconcile them. The sonnet doesn’t answer the problem but the act of writing the sonnet to those constraints does. Some problems can’t be solved on their own level. You need a third transcendental principle for a solution – which is the act of writing to your best ability, allowing an otherness to turn fancy into imagination.

HCC

In Void Studies, you used a very rigid form that you pushed everything into again and again. Not a sonnet but just ten lines in five couplets.

RB

Yes, or possibly eleven lines, and that was a more extreme form than the sonnet. There, I think, the pressure applied to language felt greater. And more exhilarating.

HCC

Although in the final section of Void Studies, in the sequence ‘Poems of the Lost Poem’, you do return to the sonnet and as I’m flicking through the book towards that final sequence, I start to see the dark shadow of the full sonnets through the page and they line up with the size of the five couplets that have come before. You were maybe writing sonnet-shaped things all along, filling in the gaps until the poems are these heavy blocks, tight with pressure.

RB

Yes! And asymmetrical. There are twenty-two poems in the first section, twenty-two in the second and then eleven in that last sequence. And those numbers run throughout the first three books. And I’m not going to repeat myself in the next. I’ll try and divert my interest into repetition in a subtler way!

HCC

Can we perhaps talk a bit about repetition, actually? ‘Ablutions for Midsummer’ feels, to me, a poem with repetition as its engine. There’s the rhythm of Alice Oswald here.

RB

Well it was written in her neck of the woods: Dartmoor, at ‘Eagle Rock’. There is an Oswald influence on it, certainly, and Sappho as well, for obvious reasons – the first line or so could be a Sapphic fragment. I could get quite a few Sapphic fragments out of this poem! But then that’s how the process began with what would become Void Studies back in 2009, as a ‘Book of Fragments’.

HCC

After our walk to your root house I was thinking of what it means to write outside and how we might do this and I was reminded of Alice Oswald’s practice, the way she writes from memory. In A Sleepwalk on the Severn, she says she’s ‘recording all this in my nightbook’ and I had wondered what this ‘nightbook’ might be, whether it was a real book or a voice recorder or something but I think it might be her memory.

RB

Oh that’s wonderful!

HCC

I know! I am slightly disappointed that there might not be an actual Night Book that I could, perhaps, go and read but I’m very intrigued by the idea of memory as a kind of dream journal and even more so to find out you’ve been working in your ‘nightbook’, in a way. Writing outside and writing while walking where walking is a mnemonic aid is a way of getting the poem into your body. Writing in this way is repetitive.

RB

And this relates to the idea of ablution. That process and the fact that there is an ambiguity at the end of ‘Ablutions for Midsummer’ where I try to end the poem but the speaker says they’ll be back and will presumably do the same thing again. There’s a line in a poem in Pilgrim’s Flower, ‘Homage’ – ‘homage means going / back to the same place until it knows you’ – and this is what I mean by nature’s sentience.

HCC

So is it that you know when a poem is complete when you go back to it again and again until there’s a moment of recognition? Almost as if it’s about when the poem knows you.

RB

It’s about the moment you become sufficiently camouflaged, yes! I have to ask what the poem wants to be. It seems to be a matter of your own will and something else – something that isn’t personal but transpersonal – and finding how to cooperate with that. Repetition is something you think might provide a fixedness but it actually leads to indeterminacy in this poem.

HCC

I was wondering about your drafting process. In the earlier drafts that you’ve shared with me, the place of this poem is more specific, more ‘known’. In the first and second drafts, it is ‘Coombe Wood’ rather than ‘the wood’. And the whole poem seems anchored down to Eagle Rock in Dartmoor, with that question ‘How else could I come back to this house / on the rock overlooking the moor’. How close to that particular place is the poem? And in removing those markers, ‘Coombe’ and ‘Eagle Rock’, are you letting the poem float a little more from its moorings?

RB

It’s 100% rooted in that place. I think I wanted to simplify the language. There are no proper nouns in this poem so just: wood. That’s all that is needed. We named the wood. The wood didn’t name itself. I was dilly-dallying for some time with that but it came right in the end.

HCC

Dilly-dallying and redrafting have been important to the writing of this poem though. You said that there are more drafts than you’ve let me see here.

RB

After the second draft, the poem settled into its form but it was more a case of where the repetitions happened. I had to take something out but then this would affect the symmetry so then I would need to go back in and change where the repetitions were placed. Eventually, what was miraculous for me was the line in the middle – ‘over and over again. Over and over again’ – which was originally two parts of other lines and came together by accident. And then ‘flying sparks of rain over and over again’ should have led straight into ‘the moon washes her fragments’ but this allows the poem to begin to end because it’s not a strict repeat, leading into that ‘I’m glad this doesn’t last’. The ending is indeterminate because this process is not finished yet and whatever ablutions are required to clear your vision are to be repeated.

HCC

To see as Blake saw? So when did you have that moment of recognition? What draft number were you on?

RB

Seven, eight… nine, I think.

HCC

I noticed that even into those later drafts, the ‘river in spate’ is a goddess. How long was the river a goddess before it was a river?

RB

She was a goddess until about two days before it was finished because I just looked at it and thought there needs to be a way of saying this without saying it. It needs to be there in the poem already. Like everything else, half-said.

HCC

Ah! I had a strange experience in reading this poem in terms of half-heard, half-read and maybe half-misread things. Even on the second or third read, words were still slipping about in the water of this poem and I started to read anagrams and shadows of other poems under the surface of this one. I read ‘the moon washes her fragments’ and wobbling underneath ‘fragments’ was the word ‘garments’, a near-anagram that seemed so tenable that the two words sort of swilled together for me. And the same with ‘My mind is bracken’ I read ‘broken’ which seemed so much more likely after the repetition of ‘fragments’. Even when I discovered ‘in spate’ meant the river was flooding, I misread ‘in spite’. It felt like the poem was, in its repetitions, playing with recognition and half-recognition, just rearranging the surface as I moved through it.

RB

I can see you kind of dream-reading your way through Coleridge’s idea of the ‘Primary Imagination’ when you said that. I’m thinking of the phrase, right at the end of chapter thirteen of the Biographia Literaria, ‘repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM’! The maxim ‘as above so below’ means the above (the infinite) is replicated in the below (the finite) and that’s a form of Repetition. The act of making is a form of Repetition. And of course, his ‘willing suspension of disbelief’; you read the poem and then had to read it again, suspending your disbelief.

HCC

Yes! I realised that I was reading ‘her fragments’ with total familiarity, as if I might too ‘wash my fragments’ of an evening.

RB

That’s lovely! The literal image here is that I’m standing on the balcony and there’s a stream by the edge of a field and the moon’s reflecting in it and the movement is breaking up the moonlight. And in washing, in the act of the ablution, there is the connotation of preparation. The poem is about being in a place where you have the opportunity to correct or collect yourself. Broadly, it’s a poem about healing.

HCC

And that balance of correction and counter-correction is all there in the language.

RB

It’s as I was saying up in the root house, if you keep going back to a place and getting to know it you are engaging in an act of homage, which is essentially an empathetic act, like a reverse or correction to damage, almost an apology. The same for drafts of a poem: paying homage, deepening your connection with the poem by going back to it, over and again.

HCC

And is this another attempt at healing? Making your root house is an act of mending, stitching a patch in the environment?

RB

I remember my astrology teacher saying to me that ‘nothing goes unnoticed in the metaphysical realms’ and I’ve never forgotten that phrase. In terms of small actions, there is a noticing that happens, every action there’s a reaction. A repetition in the finite mind.

HCC

You’ve reminded me of T.S. Eliot’s description of Coleridge as being ‘drugged by metaphysics’ and it can’t be a coincidence that the final line of your first draft of ‘Ablutions for Midsummer’ is ‘drugged by the air’?

RB

That’s Dartmoor for you! W.S. Graham was drugged by the air too. And, yes, I have been spotting Coleridge connections. In ‘The Constructed Space’ Graham uses the phrase ‘fixed and dead’. Turn to the last page of chapter thirteen of the Biographia Literaria and what have we got? Not to mention all those albatrosses. Or Polar regions. There’s surely an admiration going on… Anyhow, that line about being drugged by the air never survived into the final poem but I do want to use it somewhere.

HCC

So we’ll have to keep our eyes keen for that in a future poem? And, as you’ve said, this is how ‘Ablutions for Midsummer’ started in the first place, growing out of a line from your earlier poem ‘Loch Loch’. Is this how lots of your poems begin, nested inside another poem? This sounds like the space of your root house again, a constructed space in which to construct?

RB

This is related to the healing aspect of the writing which comes out of looking at something long enough that you’ve forgotten you’re looking and you are as much the thing you are looking at; you belong. Poetry is a practice of camouflage so that I am not separate from the language.

HCC

And that is your encampment, right? That’s your root house. You’re inside it, you’re disappearing inside the form of it but you can see out through the meshing of the structure.

RB

Exactly. When I first submitted a proposal for a PhD at St Andrews, I was interested in whether poetry could cure certain nervous tensions. If a certain patterning in rhythms, like prayer, or mantra, might harmonise and change energetic bodies; I wanted to see if poetry could make a physical difference to my situation – or at least make me more comfortable in my discomfort. In the end I wrote a thesis on The Book of Job.

HCC

Looking at ‘Ablutions for Midsummer’, then, what is the rhythm that informed the writing?

RB

I wrote this poem overlooking the moor and earlier that day having walked through that moor. I walked and I thought ‘I’m missing something’ so let’s do this walk again. I walked that walk three times every day for a week. So I internalised that and constructed this corresponding linguistic place which is the poem.

HCC

Which seems to be a place of turning, too. Each time we have that refrain of ‘over and over again’ it sits in a different part of the sentence, nudging the rest of the line further over the line break so we’re turning back sooner each time, heading back just to head out again.

RB

Yes and I liked the way that each repetition leads to a different place. The first instance of the refrain leads to ‘where yesterday / I walked on’ but in the repeat takes us to ‘where the dark wood / listens into itself’ which is what I’m doing. I’m listening in. That first instance is still ego-based. It’s me. It’s where I was yesterday but by the time we arrive at the repeat, I’ve disappeared. It’s camouflaging the self in the landscape.

HCC

And in your first draft, that first instance reads ‘Some other self went walking today’. There’s a real distinction between yesterday’s walk and today’s repetition of it but by your final draft, that fracturing of the self is healed over. It’s implicit as another thing half-said but already walking away from you.

RB

And that other self disappears into the landscape until there is no separation between you and the landscape. There is no longer a question of self and other which is why I talk about camouflage, and I suppose why I built the root house. It’s not about annihilation of the self but it’s about trying to realise that the self is not an individual thing. It’s a provisional idea, like all the other ideas we have.

HCC

This reminds me of Kathleen Jamie’s reaction to being called a nature poet – ‘It’s all nature’, is I think what she’s said on several occasions.

RB

Aye. It’s not annihilation. It’s integration. I’ve recently started going again to a meditation class and during a breathing exercise – counting one to nine and back, one to six and back, one to three and back, and pause and reverse – I noticed I was arriving at a zero; I’d seemed to glimpse this place which is the place I’m trying to reach in my writing too.

HCC

This place of the zero is the space of rest and emptiness but it’s also the place of turning, right? Jen Hadfield writes in ‘Daed-traa’ about how she would ‘go to the rockpool at the slack of the tide / to mind me what my poetry’s for’ and the sea must seem very still at that moment which is also the moment of the most pressure. It is a moment full of all the energy that is needed to make a body of water change direction.

RB

And all the energy needed to make a poem come right!

Ablutions for Midsummer

by Rachael Boast

Eagle Rock, Buckland in the Moor

Over and over the moon washes her fragments
in the water, moving downstream as she does so,
following the foxglove wall to where yesterday
I walked on, seeing what I hadn’t seen, hearing
what I hadn’t heard, alert to the stresses
falling into water-paths excited by stone,
echoing the above into the below
as they move towards the hinge of the valley,
the river in spate, page after page turning
on a rhyme, repeating the word water
over and over again. Over and over again
the moon washes her fragments in the water
moving downstream as she does so, following
the foxglove wall to where the dark wood
listens into itself. A slab of cloud holds
in the shape of an anvil hammered by nothing
into nothing. My mind is bracken, catching
the flying sparks of rain over and over again.
The moon washes her fragments in the water
but this doesn’t last. I’m glad it doesn’t last.
How else could I come back to this house
on the rock overlooking the moor, listening
to long waves of air releasing another shower
from the speaking leaves of the wood?

First Published by Prac Crit.

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