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Article 4
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THE ROOSTER AND THE TORTOISE: Something on the Masculine
I have been asked about my involvement with men's work, so here's a quick peak at part of an interview that should be out in 2013. As always, some of it i do hope is relevant to women, and so please take anything of use.
THE ROOSTER AND THE TORTOISE:
an Interview with Martin Shaw
"men's work is not about enforced separation between genders, it’s about depth and respect on the return - it’s about a love affair"
What is your interest with men's work?
Well, during its first experience overground (in the media) - in the late eighties and nineties - i was unconnected to it, i was in my teens and twenties and would have regarded it as a little strange, i do remember some of the media propaganda about naked white men bashing out of tune drums and weeping about their father issues. That wasn’t appealing.
Like a lot men of my age - around forty - i come from a background very sympathetic to feminism, so had a radar sharp detection for any sense of secretive groups of pissed off guys moaning about their wives, i wouldn’t and still wouldn’t want any part of that. To my regret i didn’t engage with any further investigation. I was suspicious, i suppose, of homophobia, or some nutty kind of Masonic set up.
So i was living outdoors, getting soaked in weather and holding a tent together through British winters, and involved with wilderness rites-of-passage work during the mens work most visible era - i say visible because it was cooking merrily underground for half a decade before Iron John and has continued in various incarnations every since.
However, i was aware and reading the work of some of its main teachers - Robert Bly, Michael Meade, James Hillman - so i received a kind of distant mentoring through the ideas - like thousands of other men.
I felt that the strong emphasis on the need for men to initiate men was actually a subtle point, and not very well handled. I would agree that there is a crucial point in adolescence where a boy needs a period exclusively under the guidance of older men, but that is not the only initiatory stage, there are many before and after that profoundly involve women.
So i felt that could have been communicated more fully and saved alot of confusion and hurt. Speaking to Robert about this years later he said if he wrote it again, he would have given over twenty pages to the grief of women at that point in adolescence when the son breaks certain intricate connections to their mother.
At that point it was less the emphasis on the masculine that really caught me, but a wider connection between myth and our lives - something with a similar scent was going on with Clarissa Pinkola Estes and Marion Woodman - who i also loved. So just that relationship between the images in stories and our everyday lives was mind blowing to me - more than specifically a gender issue.
I had an instinct for metaphorical language, and just loved the sophistication and deep intelligence of these men from across the water. Standing behind the American origin of these guys however, is an immersion in a European tradition - the fairy tale and its exegesis in the work of Marie-Louise Von Franz and Carl Jung. Bly was already fifteen years into leading the seminal mythopoetic conference, The Great Mother Conference, so the idea of him being opposed to the feminine was rather grotesque.
In reflection, it was this wider impact that took a hold, rather than entirely a reflection on the masculine. However, i wasn’t a father at that point, so as I absorb the joy and labour of being a parent, much of that work returns with even greater intensity.
The father is such a mysterious figure in modern families - so many of us are just trying to figure what on earth it looks like these days. Neither as the Saturnian figure of old or a kind of mother substitute. It’s felt a very corrupted image, distrustful.
Well, it can’t remain that way. Just can't. If a family is a like an old growth forest, something fundamental happens when you remove a big tree - there is an absence, and there are consequences, vaster than we can imagine. The whole bio-region changes. After twenty years experience of working with at risk youth, i can say candidly that the vast majority of the young men i work with have not only not grown up with a responsible male, they have rarely met one. That’s old news, but still shocking. I have many friendships and great admiration for many single mothers negotiating this terrain.
Of course, most of us would prefer an absence to a brute, which is the quickest and most demonstrative example of what’s been called an uninitiated man - a boy. So, right now, that is the overriding concern i have around the masculine. And to men who are not fathers i would suggest, to take these ideas towards whatever they are birthing, stewarding, or care-taking in their own lives.
Over the last six years or so i have worked side by side with Robert, Hillman, Malidoma Some, Daniel Deardorff, Robert Moore and many others at conferences and smaller events. Despite the inventive leaps that all these thinkers produce, it is clear that the nitty-gritty of men’s work is still done in small groups, with men risking some vulnerability, tasting the unique experience of sharing grief, living their desires, letting others go, shouldering more responsibility in their communities, being far more open to the feminine in themselves and in women, and developing the ability to praise what deserves to be praised.
This is slow work, and needs to be so, otherwise it lacks a certain groundedness, which appears to be part of this fathering business many of us long for.
So, to the surprise of my younger self, through men’s work i have found some of the most steadfast, playful, courageous men it could be anyones good fortune to meet.
And in doing so, have been forced, by example, to review my own inhibitions about the notion of fathering, and make a room in myself for the reality of a generous, warm-spirited masculine. It’s been a revelation.
In 2012, what are its concerns?
Well i can only speak of my own, and a few friends around me engaged with the same issues. Although men’s work continues in small groups, it doesn’t really have figures like Bly anymore to bring together the many different groups, and there is a woeful lack of books and ideas around to really create some sense of momentum. When it just becomes an old boys club you can count me out.
Although many hate to admit in, men respond to leadership, and there would have to be a move from a deep passivity into personal motivation to change this slumbering trend - especially from guys who have been involved in this work a long time. To teach it is a real art form; if you handle the material of story, ritual, wilderness work clumsily then you invite havoc. I remain hopeful of some coming through though. We would have to become as adept in spirit as we have in the business of soul for men's work to catch some urgency again.
But, many of the concerns of twenty years ago - the lack of initiation experience in a mature rather than faux fashion for young men for example - have increased in urgency.
A large amount of the men that entered these ideas in their forties are now in their sixties, and an ideal age to start getting involved with active mentoring - the kind they themselves would have longed for. A common mistake is that all the blessing occurs from the mentor down to the youth - but the mentor requires the blessing of the younger’s eyes and attention in the first place to get it started. Without that flow, nothing much will happen.
Three issues i find myself working through in my own life are:
Damaged Eros: The access to hardcore pornography through the internet is causing a massive interference to mens erotic imagination, and a lack of real relating to their flesh and blood partners. That’s something that has rapidly accelerated in the last two decades. I would suggest we need to stake some claim to our own passions again, to revive the old gods of imagination that stand behind sexual appetite and ingenuity - Dionysus, Eros, Pan. Porn chucks all that into some shadowy hinterland that we find hard to talk about. Shame and desire are weird but very common bedfellows. We enter relationships already ashamed of ourselves. I’m interested in a different approach.
External Work: The strand of mens work i am connected to - what is often called mythopoetic - is very engaged with relationship to an inner life - through myth, poetry, ritual and the wider arts. This is a huge step for many men. I feel that that awakeness, needs to be taken into an outer experience of caretaking some some area of the natural world. Plant according to the moon, cultivate difficult relationships, think carefully about what you abandon, find ways to display some real gallantry, pay attention to what is happening to the mountains and arctic ridge, invest in the outer world in some way that feels of service. Be visible for gods sake. There has been some admirable work creating ways out into the wilderness for young people, but far less on an integrated return - to engage in the ‘things of the world’. Something wakes up in man when he sees something beautiful and true crafted by his own hands flourish in the outside world.
I struggle with some of this myself, to be clear. Whilst i think the gathering of time for women just for the company of women, and men for men is important, i’m more interested finally in the coming back together to be directly engaged in the raising of wild, snuffling kids, protecting owls and whiskery field mice when they need it, crafting art, working hard on things that connect us to oak trees and star formations. Ultimately men's work is not about enforced separation between genders, it’s about depth and respect on the return - it’s about a love affair. And we get there by time apart - allowing longing as well as constant proximity into the experience. Something holy can break out in that absence.
Shaking your Tail-Feather, but Going Steady: Quite a few men i meet have either abdicated entirely from any kind of cohesive parenting, or they are are unsure of how it looks in a man, so they mimic the skills of the mother. Clue: women will always do it better. It’s old news that some men learn their emotional expression through women, because they haven’t seen the masculine range embodied. But there seems to be some damage in this - their feathers wilt, their coat lacks shine, they lack a certain decisiveness. So how could we get some of that back, whilst also displaying a greater commitment to our loved ones?
For this, i go back to the old stories, and the images within them. The god of the storytellers is Hermes - and storytelling is always a job of both parents - the father, just like it is the mother. Two totem animals of Hermes are the rooster and the tortoise - I would suggest we could focus on the steady diligence of the tortoise (who carries a house on its back remember), but not sacrifice the plumage, display and general panache of the rooster. To find a connection between those two animal powers could be a great step towards simply being a deeper human being.
The tortoise seems to be to do with the issue of trust. Some quiet steadiness, some resilience, not caught in the hysteria of the new. And then rooster - a place for the lover - that place not crippled by shame, that allows our funky little shape to howl its love-cry up to the yellow moon. In the Greek world this is relationship between the Puer and the Senex - the luminous boy who feels a little like god, and the old man who keeps a gnarled fist around their ankle as they float off towards the sun. Ensuring that neither quite wins over the other is the business of growing up i think.
I like this because it provides an image to work with (rather than just a concept) and an image from the animal world. What i’m not going to do is give a five point plan for ‘reclaiming the rooster’ - that’s to be figured out oneself, and those connections suffer when dragged into the thin light of the literal. In my own life i seem to gather the stories, friendships and challenging situations that call forth these seemingly opposed forces. I think an adult is someone who has absorbed and maintained certain tensions in their life and transformed them into something rather stylish. They know their own mind but are curious enough to change it.
copyright Martin Shaw 2012![]()
THE ROOSTER AND THE TORTOISE:
an Interview with Martin Shaw
"men's work is not about enforced separation between genders, it’s about depth and respect on the return - it’s about a love affair"
What is your interest with men's work?
Well, during its first experience overground (in the media) - in the late eighties and nineties - i was unconnected to it, i was in my teens and twenties and would have regarded it as a little strange, i do remember some of the media propaganda about naked white men bashing out of tune drums and weeping about their father issues. That wasn’t appealing.
Like a lot men of my age - around forty - i come from a background very sympathetic to feminism, so had a radar sharp detection for any sense of secretive groups of pissed off guys moaning about their wives, i wouldn’t and still wouldn’t want any part of that. To my regret i didn’t engage with any further investigation. I was suspicious, i suppose, of homophobia, or some nutty kind of Masonic set up.
So i was living outdoors, getting soaked in weather and holding a tent together through British winters, and involved with wilderness rites-of-passage work during the mens work most visible era - i say visible because it was cooking merrily underground for half a decade before Iron John and has continued in various incarnations every since.
However, i was aware and reading the work of some of its main teachers - Robert Bly, Michael Meade, James Hillman - so i received a kind of distant mentoring through the ideas - like thousands of other men.
I felt that the strong emphasis on the need for men to initiate men was actually a subtle point, and not very well handled. I would agree that there is a crucial point in adolescence where a boy needs a period exclusively under the guidance of older men, but that is not the only initiatory stage, there are many before and after that profoundly involve women.
So i felt that could have been communicated more fully and saved alot of confusion and hurt. Speaking to Robert about this years later he said if he wrote it again, he would have given over twenty pages to the grief of women at that point in adolescence when the son breaks certain intricate connections to their mother.
At that point it was less the emphasis on the masculine that really caught me, but a wider connection between myth and our lives - something with a similar scent was going on with Clarissa Pinkola Estes and Marion Woodman - who i also loved. So just that relationship between the images in stories and our everyday lives was mind blowing to me - more than specifically a gender issue.
I had an instinct for metaphorical language, and just loved the sophistication and deep intelligence of these men from across the water. Standing behind the American origin of these guys however, is an immersion in a European tradition - the fairy tale and its exegesis in the work of Marie-Louise Von Franz and Carl Jung. Bly was already fifteen years into leading the seminal mythopoetic conference, The Great Mother Conference, so the idea of him being opposed to the feminine was rather grotesque.
In reflection, it was this wider impact that took a hold, rather than entirely a reflection on the masculine. However, i wasn’t a father at that point, so as I absorb the joy and labour of being a parent, much of that work returns with even greater intensity.
The father is such a mysterious figure in modern families - so many of us are just trying to figure what on earth it looks like these days. Neither as the Saturnian figure of old or a kind of mother substitute. It’s felt a very corrupted image, distrustful.
Well, it can’t remain that way. Just can't. If a family is a like an old growth forest, something fundamental happens when you remove a big tree - there is an absence, and there are consequences, vaster than we can imagine. The whole bio-region changes. After twenty years experience of working with at risk youth, i can say candidly that the vast majority of the young men i work with have not only not grown up with a responsible male, they have rarely met one. That’s old news, but still shocking. I have many friendships and great admiration for many single mothers negotiating this terrain.
Of course, most of us would prefer an absence to a brute, which is the quickest and most demonstrative example of what’s been called an uninitiated man - a boy. So, right now, that is the overriding concern i have around the masculine. And to men who are not fathers i would suggest, to take these ideas towards whatever they are birthing, stewarding, or care-taking in their own lives.
Over the last six years or so i have worked side by side with Robert, Hillman, Malidoma Some, Daniel Deardorff, Robert Moore and many others at conferences and smaller events. Despite the inventive leaps that all these thinkers produce, it is clear that the nitty-gritty of men’s work is still done in small groups, with men risking some vulnerability, tasting the unique experience of sharing grief, living their desires, letting others go, shouldering more responsibility in their communities, being far more open to the feminine in themselves and in women, and developing the ability to praise what deserves to be praised.
This is slow work, and needs to be so, otherwise it lacks a certain groundedness, which appears to be part of this fathering business many of us long for.
So, to the surprise of my younger self, through men’s work i have found some of the most steadfast, playful, courageous men it could be anyones good fortune to meet.
And in doing so, have been forced, by example, to review my own inhibitions about the notion of fathering, and make a room in myself for the reality of a generous, warm-spirited masculine. It’s been a revelation.
In 2012, what are its concerns?
Well i can only speak of my own, and a few friends around me engaged with the same issues. Although men’s work continues in small groups, it doesn’t really have figures like Bly anymore to bring together the many different groups, and there is a woeful lack of books and ideas around to really create some sense of momentum. When it just becomes an old boys club you can count me out.
Although many hate to admit in, men respond to leadership, and there would have to be a move from a deep passivity into personal motivation to change this slumbering trend - especially from guys who have been involved in this work a long time. To teach it is a real art form; if you handle the material of story, ritual, wilderness work clumsily then you invite havoc. I remain hopeful of some coming through though. We would have to become as adept in spirit as we have in the business of soul for men's work to catch some urgency again.
But, many of the concerns of twenty years ago - the lack of initiation experience in a mature rather than faux fashion for young men for example - have increased in urgency.
A large amount of the men that entered these ideas in their forties are now in their sixties, and an ideal age to start getting involved with active mentoring - the kind they themselves would have longed for. A common mistake is that all the blessing occurs from the mentor down to the youth - but the mentor requires the blessing of the younger’s eyes and attention in the first place to get it started. Without that flow, nothing much will happen.
Three issues i find myself working through in my own life are:
Damaged Eros: The access to hardcore pornography through the internet is causing a massive interference to mens erotic imagination, and a lack of real relating to their flesh and blood partners. That’s something that has rapidly accelerated in the last two decades. I would suggest we need to stake some claim to our own passions again, to revive the old gods of imagination that stand behind sexual appetite and ingenuity - Dionysus, Eros, Pan. Porn chucks all that into some shadowy hinterland that we find hard to talk about. Shame and desire are weird but very common bedfellows. We enter relationships already ashamed of ourselves. I’m interested in a different approach.
External Work: The strand of mens work i am connected to - what is often called mythopoetic - is very engaged with relationship to an inner life - through myth, poetry, ritual and the wider arts. This is a huge step for many men. I feel that that awakeness, needs to be taken into an outer experience of caretaking some some area of the natural world. Plant according to the moon, cultivate difficult relationships, think carefully about what you abandon, find ways to display some real gallantry, pay attention to what is happening to the mountains and arctic ridge, invest in the outer world in some way that feels of service. Be visible for gods sake. There has been some admirable work creating ways out into the wilderness for young people, but far less on an integrated return - to engage in the ‘things of the world’. Something wakes up in man when he sees something beautiful and true crafted by his own hands flourish in the outside world.
I struggle with some of this myself, to be clear. Whilst i think the gathering of time for women just for the company of women, and men for men is important, i’m more interested finally in the coming back together to be directly engaged in the raising of wild, snuffling kids, protecting owls and whiskery field mice when they need it, crafting art, working hard on things that connect us to oak trees and star formations. Ultimately men's work is not about enforced separation between genders, it’s about depth and respect on the return - it’s about a love affair. And we get there by time apart - allowing longing as well as constant proximity into the experience. Something holy can break out in that absence.
Shaking your Tail-Feather, but Going Steady: Quite a few men i meet have either abdicated entirely from any kind of cohesive parenting, or they are are unsure of how it looks in a man, so they mimic the skills of the mother. Clue: women will always do it better. It’s old news that some men learn their emotional expression through women, because they haven’t seen the masculine range embodied. But there seems to be some damage in this - their feathers wilt, their coat lacks shine, they lack a certain decisiveness. So how could we get some of that back, whilst also displaying a greater commitment to our loved ones?
For this, i go back to the old stories, and the images within them. The god of the storytellers is Hermes - and storytelling is always a job of both parents - the father, just like it is the mother. Two totem animals of Hermes are the rooster and the tortoise - I would suggest we could focus on the steady diligence of the tortoise (who carries a house on its back remember), but not sacrifice the plumage, display and general panache of the rooster. To find a connection between those two animal powers could be a great step towards simply being a deeper human being.
The tortoise seems to be to do with the issue of trust. Some quiet steadiness, some resilience, not caught in the hysteria of the new. And then rooster - a place for the lover - that place not crippled by shame, that allows our funky little shape to howl its love-cry up to the yellow moon. In the Greek world this is relationship between the Puer and the Senex - the luminous boy who feels a little like god, and the old man who keeps a gnarled fist around their ankle as they float off towards the sun. Ensuring that neither quite wins over the other is the business of growing up i think.
I like this because it provides an image to work with (rather than just a concept) and an image from the animal world. What i’m not going to do is give a five point plan for ‘reclaiming the rooster’ - that’s to be figured out oneself, and those connections suffer when dragged into the thin light of the literal. In my own life i seem to gather the stories, friendships and challenging situations that call forth these seemingly opposed forces. I think an adult is someone who has absorbed and maintained certain tensions in their life and transformed them into something rather stylish. They know their own mind but are curious enough to change it.
copyright Martin Shaw 2012
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Article 2
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Bird-Spirit Thinking
...(the above isn't the book cover, just a visual reference whilst i was writing).
A chunk this week of the book i have been working on this last year - 'The Bird-Spirit King: myth as migration, a wild land dreaming'. As 'Snowy Tower' is now on White Clouds desk getting formatted for a Spring release, my attention this last week has been a slow read through and edit of what came from an autumn, winter and spring wandering the myth-lines of a quiver of local stories across Dartmoor. It's a very esoteric manuscript: three chapters on what i'm calling English Liminal Culture - from the Medieval wild woman to the ecstatic politics of Gerrard Winstanley. It feels a fitting conclusion to the Mythteller trilogy - which began with Lightning Tree.
PS - The family and I will be arriving in Northern California on New Years Eve no less, for good adventures, fellowship and to begin my program at Stanford University teaching Oral Traditions and Mythology. I am also in discussions with my old Point Reyes compadre Lisa Doron concerning a winter intensive (one weekend gathering per jan/feb/mar) up in PR. This is all very exciting, and the family are all looking forward to catching up with old friends. I will add info here the moment i have it.
The Winged King
Locals still tell of a story of the creation of much of Dartmoor’s landscape, of a time when King Arthur himself arrived on the moors and took on a malevolent dark spirit that lurked in its forests. Arthur is often said to come from the Royal House of Dumnonia, an ancient kingdom that would have included Devon as its centre. The two furies aimed at each other vast quoits (a kind of heavy ring of iron), brave Arthur solid on Blackystone rock, the spirit up to the north on Hel Tor.
Even in the pubs of Ashburton and Widdicombe they will tell you that the combat lasted days, weeks, even a month before the sheer strength of Arthur’s arm sent the dark one packing. Each of the hundreds of quoits hurled back and forth had, at the exact moment they hit the soil, transformed into the great lumps of granite that we know as Tors, in fact that mighty land as we know it today was actually forged in the intensity of the fight between Arthur and the foul creature.
What is also said is that from the day he left his body, Arthur’s spirit has entered into a chaw – a local name for a chough (which again is an English jackdaw) – that watches over the whole of Britain, trying to wake its deepest connections to its people, animals, and land mysteries.
That the ancient sovereign of Britain is to be found in the ribcage and beak and coak-black feathers of a bird is something we should pay great attention to.
So in this gathering of Devonian lore, this kistvean treasury of story, this call to olde England, this animistic nostalgia to create good meat for our children’s future bellies, I call on the feathered and sweet black wings of Arthur’s spirit to come again, with power – to the neuted hamlets of the rich, to towns drunk on Friday's pay-packet violence, to the travellers camp dotted bleak on coastal roads, to the golden house of fallen politics on the scat-black Thames.
Arthur is not sleeping in a hill, but a-roaming the lanes, blessing the ruts in a lonely Norfolk field, flying hard over the glitter of London, rustling the spook-trees of the Forest of Dean, endlessly nesting above any market square worth the name. He is looking for you. This longing of Arthur’s has sometimes been called The Hope of the West.
Make no mistake, the bird-spirit of the true king of Britain is still abroad.
Dangerous Talk
I sat eating steak and drinking with the writer Alastair McIntosh. We were in the White Hart bar in Dartington, just getting dark. It was mid-summer, we’d taught all day, and brown ale gently coaxed some hard thinking. Towards the end of the evening, the conversation got round to the idea of how to save notions of Englishness from the likes of the British National Party, that casual racism that so glibly provokes a distant nostalgia and then uses it as a crude but emotive tool. How to actually invoke the magical consciousness of England that sits so quietly under the lonely framework of concrete and pylons, something way before empire's troubled inheritance; to even briefly put down the wider notion of Britain and Ireland: the green lanes of beloved Ceredigion, or the Galway shore, or the forest of Caledon and focus on England.
England. We remember its old villages and hamlets – Buckland, Painswick, Ryhall, Ponsworthy. Names with stories attached. We remember the rebel spirit of Robin Hood, Emily Pankhurst, Bert Jancsh – feisty souled but also noble spirited, rather than the bilious kings and feudal lords that fill our history books.
We throw bone to the crows to celebrate the energy that rose up through the feet of Merlin when caught in dragonish prophecy, or the black faced Morris dancer today, gloriously amok in pheasant feathers, fierce staff gripped in paw. We call out in swelled voice to the Holly King – the wintering spirit, for the Wassail, for the Women of the Wells.
That’s a vast proposal in terms of storytelling – and one that I know would include Anglo-Indian, Anglo-Caribbean, Romany and many other rich seams in the mix. These stories are a great blessing to a land that has always been a country of immigrants. Ground I felt clearer on was simply following the myth-line that Devon stories evoke. Englishness is a big question and to approach it would take many volumes, but Dartmoor?
Yes, I know a little of what that place feels like – its grumpy and magnificent landscape. When we finally parted in the small hours of the morning, some seed was planted. A thicket of stormy tales spread across the flank of Dartmoor – that I knew. My feet had the ache-information of long steps across the fragrant grasses, my eye the views seen since a wee boy, my gut the charged stories of that tor, that pool, that gully. Yes, maybe something could happen with this. I will address some wilder aspects of marginal English culture, but it is in no way exhaustive.
Some of the stories i walked - almost half - did not wish to be written about, rather told in their original setting. So, discretion and honouring was required. A place radically informs the speaking of a story. The buffeting wind, the iron sky, the crumbling bark, the eager rivers gush, would all seep into the galloping horse of story-speech; they would nestle under the feathered syntax and in some way massage the way the words jostled their telling out into the crisp air. So the land witnessed some sparky-glimpses of itself in the mutual speech.
And talking of mutual speech,if you are going to go walkabout, it's always good to introduce yourself, in some humble, or grand, or strange but always sincere manner. It shrugs off some of the electrical pylons, quiz shows and airplane food that slides through us, and gets to some hoofed speech that old places seem to like.
The Rattle-House of Sound:
Beating the Boundaries
(From the study, looking up to the south moor)
I am in the hut. The warm hut of myself.
Where language is a herding magic, nine inky mares galloping loose on the bone-white page, an equine flood.
Up in the crag-world do you hear these whinnies? Let the loom of my tongue craft the wild bees furry speech. Black clouds I am a-lightning; I hurl rain-daggers into mud. Black clouds I am a-shire, loosening my muscle hoofed stomp.
The geese that flew for Parzival, I love. The hawk that claimed three drops of their blood, I love. The snow it fell on to, I love.
The hut is a rattle-house of sound. A croft for wolves. It stands in dark privacy. Deep nested, wine briared from the drifting snows. The floor is erotic dirt, the air is sweet like stored apples.
Walls are the big trees – Grimm’s trees, Siberian, enormous Irish voyaging stories. Bark shines wet, the roots are mad and deep. I ramble under the billowing skirts of love’s tall pines.
This twigged hump holds the vastness of a stag’s breastbone, a pirate’s cathedral, it is a smokey den of gaudy leaps.
Gawain’s bent head in the green chapel, I love. The heavy horse alone in the orchard, I love. The woman who lives at the edge of the world, I love.
Grasses hum with beehive. I break chunks of honeycomb and offer them up to Dartmoor.
The hut shudders with foamy energy, reaching northwards to coax the rivers – the Tavy, the Plym, the Erme, the Avon, the Dart, and The Teign. Brittle gods are amok in the tourists' sour heather.
I call the names under the names of old Devon - Broken Court - Breazle, Dark Stream - Dawlish, Great Wood - Cruwys Morchard, all shimmering in the leafy gramarye of this Kingdom of Dumnonia.
I carry green waves from the bright girdle of the sea, generous beer in a bronze cup for the spit-wind. I come in the old way.
I leave a hollowed out hoof filled with apple-blossom on the turf, I haunch the dream path of the adder up to Hay Tor, Lucky Tor, Hound Tor, Benji Tor, Yal Tor.
The dry-stone wall, I love. The moon over corn, I love. Branwen of the white breast, I love.
At forty years old, I bend my head. I come in my father's boots, and Alec’s, and Leonard’s, and Bryan’s. I carry dark bundles of my mother's hair, and Christine’s, and Monica’s, and Jenny's.
The blood holds Shaw, Gibson, Causer, Thackery. I come to walk the boundaries. I come to find a myth-line. This spreading turf is the moor – once a desert, a tropical island, a red wood forest.
I clamber flanks of bailing twine and rusting tractor engine to get nearer to your gurgled speech. I break the hard crust of snow with blue paws. I lace granite with whisky and milk. Within the stag’s bone there is a hawkish wine, in the glisten of the hare's paw lies the old singing.
Let the tusks of Dermot’s Boar get soaked in the wine of your education, Let your milk heavy udders splash hot into our story-parched mouth, Let the wild swan at dawn rise to meet Christ’s dark fire.
I ask for protection from the good power.
Let all stories hold, heal and nourish my small family. Let they be hazels for our mouths. Nothing but goodness – no fear, no meanness, no envy.
Copyright Martin Shaw 2012
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Merlin and New Recordings
http://soundcloud.com/mjp-shaw
is the link to some live recordings of prose-poem like folktales i have been working on. Please forgive my less than usual contribution to the blog - the Stanford residency begins just the other side of the new year, and bags are being packed, presents for loved ones prepared. Look out for a possible evening with myself and Coleman Barks at Stanford in february - will confirm when its nailed down.
Wishing you luck and warmth and companionship in this cold month - here's a few lines from one of the recordings - something of a battle speech from Merlin - something he lives to regret.
Well, viva peace! i say this christmas. More gadzooks, less humbug.
More soon,
Martin
Bard-come-a-Fire
(From Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Vita Merlini 1150.)
It was then, in that time
that Myrddin - our Merlin-
drew wisdom and laws
from the nettle-grass
and horse chestnut
blossom
of South Wales.
He issued seership and instruction
to the proud Demeti.
He had the bracken ear
the coltish tongue
the dark speech
required for such largeness of task.
His gleeful word
could school the temperament of young princes.
His curling language could lend a swan elegance.
Merlin.
Unflinching with truth.
Ordering a firm house in the roar of court.
Son of an incubus -
he still claims residence
to some inner animal.
And he is friend
to the Old-Man-in-the-Fur-Coat - the bear.
He has gathered red berries by the cold stream,
He has pressed his mind
through gorse and hemlock.
To the men his outer-being is calm :
but inside it rattles with knowing,
a ripping hail, a speech-blizzard carving up
the skull of his woken-ness.
Double-tongued is he:
faithful enquirer to
the wolf’s epiphany
and the politics of the long-house.
****
To Merlin, alone in his secret den,
This gut-black-power, this second sight
has brought him a new worry.
Peredur of Wales,
prince of the Venedoti of the North,
was drinking blood-buckets
from the veins of the peoples of Gwenddolau,
-Gwenddolau, king of the woad-country
in the far north.
Britain sags with the keening.
The bruised hills hold a mother's terror,
The tree line is a blood-comb
from war’s many bragging roosters.
The bone hills fire-up across the moor.
****
A battle is arranged, punctual.
Warrior-gear a gleam; straight turf and firm;
Under foot, no bog: A good killing map.
Merlin backs Peredur,
as does Rodarch, High Man of Cumbria.
Rodarch’s brothers come too --three boars
tusk-drunk for the fight, chanting low behind him.
The good seer, Merlin--smeared thick with dirt and rook blood
struts a tawny mile in front of the soon-to-dying men.
His task is to raise a hail-storm in their souls.
He calls out the enemy :
Let your hearts rip like bursting cliffs.
Let shit fill your veins
Let your cocks shrivel;
Let your balls be lumped coal that never sires
your bowels cluck with terror
at the sight of we western men
We handsome destroyers.
Let your eyes be as milk
and battle-blindness descend
leading you to the red pasture
of Welsh blades.
Let you feel good horror
at our bastard strength and our hoof-power.
Let our anvil bludgeon
loose your feeble brain-mush
as compost for our noble soil.
Have at them.
This black father, Merlin,
Hurls dark speech like warfare
and all his loving sons charge the field.
The three brothers of Rodarch,
electrified by speech
seek the field's deepest trouble,
to be witnessed aflame by their terrified men.
Fame will not come
to those that don’t.
But speech can be fragile; as any man knows
our best prayers may land this side of the river.
Copyright Martin Shaw 2012![]()
is the link to some live recordings of prose-poem like folktales i have been working on. Please forgive my less than usual contribution to the blog - the Stanford residency begins just the other side of the new year, and bags are being packed, presents for loved ones prepared. Look out for a possible evening with myself and Coleman Barks at Stanford in february - will confirm when its nailed down.
Wishing you luck and warmth and companionship in this cold month - here's a few lines from one of the recordings - something of a battle speech from Merlin - something he lives to regret.
Well, viva peace! i say this christmas. More gadzooks, less humbug.
More soon,
Martin
Bard-come-a-Fire
(From Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Vita Merlini 1150.)
It was then, in that time
that Myrddin - our Merlin-
drew wisdom and laws
from the nettle-grass
and horse chestnut
blossom
of South Wales.
He issued seership and instruction
to the proud Demeti.
He had the bracken ear
the coltish tongue
the dark speech
required for such largeness of task.
His gleeful word
could school the temperament of young princes.
His curling language could lend a swan elegance.
Merlin.
Unflinching with truth.
Ordering a firm house in the roar of court.
Son of an incubus -
he still claims residence
to some inner animal.
And he is friend
to the Old-Man-in-the-Fur-Coat - the bear.
He has gathered red berries by the cold stream,
He has pressed his mind
through gorse and hemlock.
To the men his outer-being is calm :
but inside it rattles with knowing,
a ripping hail, a speech-blizzard carving up
the skull of his woken-ness.
Double-tongued is he:
faithful enquirer to
the wolf’s epiphany
and the politics of the long-house.
****
To Merlin, alone in his secret den,
This gut-black-power, this second sight
has brought him a new worry.
Peredur of Wales,
prince of the Venedoti of the North,
was drinking blood-buckets
from the veins of the peoples of Gwenddolau,
-Gwenddolau, king of the woad-country
in the far north.
Britain sags with the keening.
The bruised hills hold a mother's terror,
The tree line is a blood-comb
from war’s many bragging roosters.
The bone hills fire-up across the moor.
****
A battle is arranged, punctual.
Warrior-gear a gleam; straight turf and firm;
Under foot, no bog: A good killing map.
Merlin backs Peredur,
as does Rodarch, High Man of Cumbria.
Rodarch’s brothers come too --three boars
tusk-drunk for the fight, chanting low behind him.
The good seer, Merlin--smeared thick with dirt and rook blood
struts a tawny mile in front of the soon-to-dying men.
His task is to raise a hail-storm in their souls.
He calls out the enemy :
Let your hearts rip like bursting cliffs.
Let shit fill your veins
Let your cocks shrivel;
Let your balls be lumped coal that never sires
your bowels cluck with terror
at the sight of we western men
We handsome destroyers.
Let your eyes be as milk
and battle-blindness descend
leading you to the red pasture
of Welsh blades.
Let you feel good horror
at our bastard strength and our hoof-power.
Let our anvil bludgeon
loose your feeble brain-mush
as compost for our noble soil.
Have at them.
This black father, Merlin,
Hurls dark speech like warfare
and all his loving sons charge the field.
The three brothers of Rodarch,
electrified by speech
seek the field's deepest trouble,
to be witnessed aflame by their terrified men.
Fame will not come
to those that don’t.
But speech can be fragile; as any man knows
our best prayers may land this side of the river.
Copyright Martin Shaw 2012
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Caw Blimey - the Crow Puppets, Books and More.
Exciting Musical Happenings for 2013:
https://soundcloud.com/crowpuppets
http://www.facebook.com/CrowPuppets
Are the links to a fantastic couple of musical storytellers, Crow Puppets. First one gets you to the strange, smokey den of their music, second to their Facebook page where by clicking 'like' you put your elbow of support towards their wild and elegant sound.
I'm not going to say too much about them, but let their music do the talking. They don't need my yakking. They seems to be their own kingdom - with fierce weather patterns, clumps of gold hidden on blustery, midnight hillsides, strange old men praying to gods no one remembers anymore. So there they are - moon pirates - catch em' while you can - they won't be a secret for long.
Books, Books: not all from this year
Ted Hughes: The Poetic Quest Ann Skea
Rowboat: Poetry in Translation (Issue no3) Editor Jay Leeming (and Katherine Rauk and Norman Minnick amongst others, all hugely gifted poets)
Dark Mountain Issue 3. Editor and collaborator of mine Paul Kingsnorth, another smorgasboard of writers and ideas.
The World of Storytelling: Revised and Expanded Edition Anne Pellowski
Dancing at the Devil's Party: Essays on Poetry, Politics, and the Erotic
Alicia Ostriker
Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition Frances Yates
Hummingbird Sleep: poems 2009 - 2011 (upcoming) Coleman Barks
Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology David Abram
Which leads me to announce, or whisper, because it hasn't quite gone through the books yet, but a collaboration with David Abram and myself the first week in July at Schumacher College, in the UK. We were up till the small hours last night with him on the phone from a crackly-lined New Mexico planning something so hair-raisingly exciting that we have trouble actually getting its essence into prose (needed for promotional uses etc). We may just utter a few feathered yelps and an eruptive twitter as dawn breaks.
More as i have it....
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Winter Retreat in San Diego Jan 25/26th
Hey folks,
don't want to interrupt the rustle of christmas present wrapping, but some news just in on a Southern Californian event for late January. Impressed with the child care and bagels angle - that gets some gold stars in my book.
FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT: Mike Dorfi mdorfi@cox.net
It will be held at Bard Hall, at First Unitarian Universalist Church in Hillcrest.
EXPLORING OUR LIVES THROUGH MYTH AND STORY
Friday and Saturday January 25th and 26th
(Child care will be available on Friday night)
Join the UNITARIAN UNIVERSALIST MEN’S FELLOWSHIP (UUMF) in an interactive lecture and workshop on storytelling and mythology, supported in part by the fellowship’s Program Enrichment Fund*.
Both Women and Men are invited.
This year, the UUMF has invited Dr. Martin Shaw to facilitate our exploration. Through Martin’s inspired storytelling, we will consider the stories we “carry” and the potentially universal themes embodied in them.
Our fellowship often uses mythology and stories to help us unlock our feelings and reach deep levels of sharing. We meet in small groups for discussions maintaining confidentiality which develops a trustworthy environment. We honor the right to reticence – no one is pressured to share, but all are invited to participate. These have proven to be powerful and useful techniques, offering profound opportunities to discover meaning in our lives.
Program Schedule:
Friday 7:00PM to 9:00PM. Through myths and story telling, Dr. Shaw will share the importance of stories in our lives.
Saturday– 8:30AM – 3:30PM. Bagels, juice and coffee will be available in the morning and lunch will be provided at noon. There will be small group discussions of the shared story as it relates to our own personal history.
About Dr. Martin Shaw Author and guide Martin Shaw has been described by Robert Bly as “a true master… one of the very greatest storytellers we have.” Based in Devon, in the UK, Shaw is Director of the Westcounty School of Myth and Story. He leads year long programs and wilderness retreats. He is available for lectures and workshops throughout the year. He is currently teaching a class (The Oral Tradition: Myth, Folklore and Fairy Tale) at Stanford University.
Dr. Shaw’s new book, A Branch From the Lightning Tree: Ecstatic Myth and the Grace in Wildness (White Cloud Press), is a collection of seven myths that he describes as “prophetic” and which speak to the challenges we face today.
*The UUMF has been generously endowed by present and past members to expand its role as a San Diego men’s resource. Our mission is to support men in the quest for lives of compassion, integrity, responsibility, and balance.
FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT: Mike Dorfi mdorfi@cox.net
UUMF at: http://www.firstuumf.org
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Raven
Greetings and a very happy and peaceful new year!
I am just settling into life up near Point Reyes, Northern California. To my surprise it is actually chillier here than in Devon, in the UK - although usually by mid day the sky is that wonderful, vast blue i associate with this part of the world. I look forward to leading the Oral Culture and Mythology program at Stanford from next week - i will also be doing working with myth, ideas and the living world up in Marin too - for all details email
j_c_bader@yahoo.com
So here's a little something (i put some of this up early last year) in deference to some of my new neighbors, the mighty Raven. Please eat this and not me!
Something more coherent when i have finished unpacking, recovering from colds, opening bank account, finding a set of wheels etc.
Black-Mouthed Raven
Raven carries fear under its wings, and is not afraid to drop handfuls here and there to get what it wants. It's preponderance for the flesh of the dead, and its willingness to gobble scat, make it an edgier presence in our heads to that of the rabbit or budgerigar. Its ink-black plumage, elongated Roman beak and patterning of honks and ghostly croaks make it a bird with a rep.
Beloved of the Norseman, the natives of the pacific north west, and the Greeks, it has surprising associations with the sun, rather than endless gloom and corpse-picking. As the story states - there is the old native Trickster tale of Raven actually bringing light to the world in a small box stolen from a big man of the Otherworld so humans could hunt fish and collect berries. Odin bent his great ear daily to the litany of genius gossip that Hugin and Mugin (his raven companions) would report to him of the world's occurring.
We know that an alpha-raven’s mouth turns black on the inside when taking a position of leadership (always by force) within a community, and that the followers' mouths tend to stay pink, unless making a bid for dominance. There seems to be no way round this black-mouth leadership, even in our most refined universities. Knowledge can quickly become a form of intimidation to bruise your way to tenure. This way physicality is no longer so crucial, even the solitary can think their way to stature rather than swing a fist or kick a football.
Initiation has always placed emphasis on colour. Black is always one with knowledge of the Underworld, of failure, of stuckness, or depression, fatality, listlessness. Whilst having endured all that, they have somehow turned it into a great song. The colour red is more showy, more to do with the young warrior, than the patient depth of black. This mouth colouring reveals much about relationship; that too much subservience around the leader cripples development to an individual.
Remember the painter Willem De Kooning's refusal to work in Arshille Gorky’s studio?, “nothing grows around big trees.” he said. Depends what kind of tree i would suggest. For animals, pack living often greatly assists survival, and they know well that leadership will require constant display, strategy, barracking, and generally large behaviour. It’s exhausting. But for initiated tribes people, much of the West is a pink-mouthed society, a society that runs from much of what initiation offers in the raising of an adult – becoming kin to nature, facing the Underworld, staying connected and debted to a cosmos. When we stay distant, protected, coddled, ironic, our mouths stay resolutely pink. We have not taken responsibility for the shaping of our lives, we are not in service.
Animals have always been magical to ancient peoples. Unless you specifically traced one, who is to say that the raven that honks above the ancestral bone-yard is not a perennial constant, present, unchanging forever? (referring to story not seen in this blog) They disappear into the lonely tree line, and maybe in and out of other worlds entirely.
The seemingly modern notion of a raven, or snake, or parrot, as inner-figures that also dig away at our logical, up standing mind, is not so modern. Recall the third century Origen (Origen 1982 :115):
“understand that you have within you herds of cattle, flocks of sheep…and that the birds of the air are all within you…You see that you have all those things that the world has.” This has been a vital step from them as a mere meal on legs or being a resource only for labour and feast. We also realise that there is plenty of order, logic and up standingness in the animal world. All kinds of habits and cautions. Real animal nature is not just a byword for sweaty exuberance.
The trouble with this animal association is that too rigid an interiorising robs the animal of its independent vitality, we risk degradation in too many attempts to assimilate something that we recognise, but that should in some ways remain ‘other’. Raven is a spiritus rector, a guardian deity, not as a mere symbol ‘representing’ my mysterious side. We have the task of losing some vanity. The living world is very skilled at providing that.
Although enjoying a kind of solitary ambience, ravens are effective team-players when hunting. Terry McEneaney, an ornithologist from Yellowstone Park, reports seeing a raven landing on the rim of an opsrey nest and stealing a fish. Whilst the osprey was agitated, another raven working in tandem sneaked in and stole an egg. There are hundreds of such accounts.
This seems to indicate some kind of forward thinking on behalf of the ravens. Professor Dieter Wallenschlager witnessed a raven feigning injury – dragging a wing – to incite a swan to attack, whilst again its mate rushed the nest and stole an egg. Whilst opinion ranges on how much forethought is required to pull this off, what is clear is mutual dependence from both birds on the anticipated outcome.
The Tower of London still clips the wings of its ravens because of an old superstition that if the ravens leave, then England will fall. It is a bird close to wolf-mind: it will deliberately lead wolves to prey and then it will guzzle the greasy left overs. It was said they did the same thing for old west country hunters: they would be left the guts when the deer was killed.
They have also saved human lives: Ginny Hannum tells the story of being stalked by a cougar and only by the repeated, attention grabbing behaviour of a raven just overhead, did she glance up, see the cougar and rapidly retreat.
But let us not be too caught in the complete rehabilitation of the terror-birds; let us not place them comfortably within a human relational range of behaviour. They are mystifying, smart, aggressive and strictly hierarchical; they don’t sit round on bean bags in talking circles - they have black-mouthed leaders who intimidate to get themselves to the top of the pile until they themselves are toppled. Ravens are into power. The raven expert Bernd Heinrich tells the story of watching a particular dead beech tree for some time, and noticing that a succession of dominant ravens in the group would all choose a specific perch when their time came as top-bird. There were many others to choose from, equally plush, but somewhere in the wider raven-mind of that group it became established that that was the power-perch and so that was it. After years of careful and sometimes painful observation, Heinrich also noted that leadership amongst ravens came with a cost. All leaders have large bodies which require more feeding, all leaders have to constantly display their grandiosity, which requires many battles, much blood on the snow. You can’t relax, there is no one for you to follow, you lead, always.
Raven carries the Nigredo black of the alchemist on its wings, beak, body. It is like some charcoal stain on the optimist's blue horizon. Fifty thousand years of gobbling scat and flesh, a constant at the battlefield, make it a companion to putrefaction. Black is strong medicine, even when denied that it is a colour at all. It is the robe of choice for any decent occultist; the black of night is the cover for illicit liaison; to be ‘in the dark’ is to be wandering, confused, un-settled; it is a hint of what could await at the moment of death.
At the same time, archaeology tells us that black is the place to go. It’s long been known in England that any place name with the word black in it – Black Meadow, Black Woods, Blackingstone Rocks – is a place worthy of digging. The reason? The darker coloured soil will indicate an old settlement – generations of fire ash, food remains, and general use.
To a certain eye, black means to dig deeper. To a certain eye, it offers reward.
Raven carries this rattle-bag of contrary wisdoms, invokes a cautionary wave or grimace as it sweeps over the jolly street party. We know who would be first to pluck out an eye if we were we to slip one rainy night on the step. And yet, some memory remains of this bird and a box of light and a pinprick hole to the Otherworld (ref to ancient notion from Pacific North-West that Raven brought light to the world). They certainly stirs up mixed emotions. Duende, duende.
Copyright Martin Shaw 2012
I am just settling into life up near Point Reyes, Northern California. To my surprise it is actually chillier here than in Devon, in the UK - although usually by mid day the sky is that wonderful, vast blue i associate with this part of the world. I look forward to leading the Oral Culture and Mythology program at Stanford from next week - i will also be doing working with myth, ideas and the living world up in Marin too - for all details email
j_c_bader@yahoo.com
So here's a little something (i put some of this up early last year) in deference to some of my new neighbors, the mighty Raven. Please eat this and not me!
Something more coherent when i have finished unpacking, recovering from colds, opening bank account, finding a set of wheels etc.
Black-Mouthed Raven
Raven carries fear under its wings, and is not afraid to drop handfuls here and there to get what it wants. It's preponderance for the flesh of the dead, and its willingness to gobble scat, make it an edgier presence in our heads to that of the rabbit or budgerigar. Its ink-black plumage, elongated Roman beak and patterning of honks and ghostly croaks make it a bird with a rep.
Beloved of the Norseman, the natives of the pacific north west, and the Greeks, it has surprising associations with the sun, rather than endless gloom and corpse-picking. As the story states - there is the old native Trickster tale of Raven actually bringing light to the world in a small box stolen from a big man of the Otherworld so humans could hunt fish and collect berries. Odin bent his great ear daily to the litany of genius gossip that Hugin and Mugin (his raven companions) would report to him of the world's occurring.
We know that an alpha-raven’s mouth turns black on the inside when taking a position of leadership (always by force) within a community, and that the followers' mouths tend to stay pink, unless making a bid for dominance. There seems to be no way round this black-mouth leadership, even in our most refined universities. Knowledge can quickly become a form of intimidation to bruise your way to tenure. This way physicality is no longer so crucial, even the solitary can think their way to stature rather than swing a fist or kick a football.
Initiation has always placed emphasis on colour. Black is always one with knowledge of the Underworld, of failure, of stuckness, or depression, fatality, listlessness. Whilst having endured all that, they have somehow turned it into a great song. The colour red is more showy, more to do with the young warrior, than the patient depth of black. This mouth colouring reveals much about relationship; that too much subservience around the leader cripples development to an individual.
Remember the painter Willem De Kooning's refusal to work in Arshille Gorky’s studio?, “nothing grows around big trees.” he said. Depends what kind of tree i would suggest. For animals, pack living often greatly assists survival, and they know well that leadership will require constant display, strategy, barracking, and generally large behaviour. It’s exhausting. But for initiated tribes people, much of the West is a pink-mouthed society, a society that runs from much of what initiation offers in the raising of an adult – becoming kin to nature, facing the Underworld, staying connected and debted to a cosmos. When we stay distant, protected, coddled, ironic, our mouths stay resolutely pink. We have not taken responsibility for the shaping of our lives, we are not in service.
Animals have always been magical to ancient peoples. Unless you specifically traced one, who is to say that the raven that honks above the ancestral bone-yard is not a perennial constant, present, unchanging forever? (referring to story not seen in this blog) They disappear into the lonely tree line, and maybe in and out of other worlds entirely.
The seemingly modern notion of a raven, or snake, or parrot, as inner-figures that also dig away at our logical, up standing mind, is not so modern. Recall the third century Origen (Origen 1982 :115):
“understand that you have within you herds of cattle, flocks of sheep…and that the birds of the air are all within you…You see that you have all those things that the world has.” This has been a vital step from them as a mere meal on legs or being a resource only for labour and feast. We also realise that there is plenty of order, logic and up standingness in the animal world. All kinds of habits and cautions. Real animal nature is not just a byword for sweaty exuberance.
The trouble with this animal association is that too rigid an interiorising robs the animal of its independent vitality, we risk degradation in too many attempts to assimilate something that we recognise, but that should in some ways remain ‘other’. Raven is a spiritus rector, a guardian deity, not as a mere symbol ‘representing’ my mysterious side. We have the task of losing some vanity. The living world is very skilled at providing that.
Although enjoying a kind of solitary ambience, ravens are effective team-players when hunting. Terry McEneaney, an ornithologist from Yellowstone Park, reports seeing a raven landing on the rim of an opsrey nest and stealing a fish. Whilst the osprey was agitated, another raven working in tandem sneaked in and stole an egg. There are hundreds of such accounts.
This seems to indicate some kind of forward thinking on behalf of the ravens. Professor Dieter Wallenschlager witnessed a raven feigning injury – dragging a wing – to incite a swan to attack, whilst again its mate rushed the nest and stole an egg. Whilst opinion ranges on how much forethought is required to pull this off, what is clear is mutual dependence from both birds on the anticipated outcome.
The Tower of London still clips the wings of its ravens because of an old superstition that if the ravens leave, then England will fall. It is a bird close to wolf-mind: it will deliberately lead wolves to prey and then it will guzzle the greasy left overs. It was said they did the same thing for old west country hunters: they would be left the guts when the deer was killed.
They have also saved human lives: Ginny Hannum tells the story of being stalked by a cougar and only by the repeated, attention grabbing behaviour of a raven just overhead, did she glance up, see the cougar and rapidly retreat.
But let us not be too caught in the complete rehabilitation of the terror-birds; let us not place them comfortably within a human relational range of behaviour. They are mystifying, smart, aggressive and strictly hierarchical; they don’t sit round on bean bags in talking circles - they have black-mouthed leaders who intimidate to get themselves to the top of the pile until they themselves are toppled. Ravens are into power. The raven expert Bernd Heinrich tells the story of watching a particular dead beech tree for some time, and noticing that a succession of dominant ravens in the group would all choose a specific perch when their time came as top-bird. There were many others to choose from, equally plush, but somewhere in the wider raven-mind of that group it became established that that was the power-perch and so that was it. After years of careful and sometimes painful observation, Heinrich also noted that leadership amongst ravens came with a cost. All leaders have large bodies which require more feeding, all leaders have to constantly display their grandiosity, which requires many battles, much blood on the snow. You can’t relax, there is no one for you to follow, you lead, always.
Raven carries the Nigredo black of the alchemist on its wings, beak, body. It is like some charcoal stain on the optimist's blue horizon. Fifty thousand years of gobbling scat and flesh, a constant at the battlefield, make it a companion to putrefaction. Black is strong medicine, even when denied that it is a colour at all. It is the robe of choice for any decent occultist; the black of night is the cover for illicit liaison; to be ‘in the dark’ is to be wandering, confused, un-settled; it is a hint of what could await at the moment of death.
At the same time, archaeology tells us that black is the place to go. It’s long been known in England that any place name with the word black in it – Black Meadow, Black Woods, Blackingstone Rocks – is a place worthy of digging. The reason? The darker coloured soil will indicate an old settlement – generations of fire ash, food remains, and general use.
To a certain eye, black means to dig deeper. To a certain eye, it offers reward.
Raven carries this rattle-bag of contrary wisdoms, invokes a cautionary wave or grimace as it sweeps over the jolly street party. We know who would be first to pluck out an eye if we were we to slip one rainy night on the step. And yet, some memory remains of this bird and a box of light and a pinprick hole to the Otherworld (ref to ancient notion from Pacific North-West that Raven brought light to the world). They certainly stirs up mixed emotions. Duende, duende.
Copyright Martin Shaw 2012
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The Healing Ground
Still settling into life in Northern California. One of the coldest winters the local folks can remember - for sure i have noticed a chill in the morning - that has had me at the thrift store digging scarves out of $3 boxes. Still, i can't help but feel wistful seeing when i see the white carpet down in the west country of England at the moment. Sledges and hot chocolate!
A suggestion and a poem. I am very much enjoying "Entering the Healing Ground" by the writer Frances Weller, and include my endorsement below - so my suggestion is to check it out! There's good eatin' in there - much truth and valuable glints of how to work into the fertile ground of grief - how it can become an offering to something vaster than ourselves. A great deal of joy is threaded through the prose.
"This book rings a shivering bell of hope: that, when lifted by ritual and fellowship, the moist ground of grief actually contains a treasury of gifts that are our ancestral birthright. In other words we start to become a real human being. We are no longer rigid islands of self sufficiency, but open to the soulful wonders that the animate world offers. Insightfully written, warm and with a wonderful poetic sensibility, the deep experience of Weller shines through. The work has honed something clear and valuable in his own character, and a delightful wisdom illuminates every page of “Entering the Healing Ground”.
Being amongst all this vitamin D infused sunlight in the depths of winter is a new experience, and of course, immediately turns me back towards the inner-weather we all carry regardless of whether we walk on sand, tundra or moss. Here is a strange old Irish story - The Horned Women - that i think carries some positively archaic residue in its saddle-bags. I'm enjoying working these old stories into something like the below - all the details are the same, there's just some playful turns of language embedded in the mix.
The Horned Women
Irish
In the storm
the heavy house is resting,
slumbered in the straining rain.
Above, Orion lopes about in his black-jungled heaven,
his triple starred belt, his hunter charms
fast moving over the weather, the house, the people.
But this is not his story.
Below, children are curled pink in blankets, servants doze with their thin hounds
by the twinkling peat.
Only the Big Woman of the house is awake,
working by candle -
nailed fast to her evening task, the carding of wool
Absorbed.
She is in the hut of herself.
Something wyrd
haunches through rain to the old door,
issuing a strident clamor -
part voice, part knock - a joining of energies - iron fisted and wetted jaw
“Open! Open!”
Big Woman calls; “who is there?”
A grizzled croak, tindered with soot;
“I am the Witch of the One Horn”
Suspecting a villagers trick, no more than that,
the mistress pulls open the oak,
and the being enters, carrying a pair of wool carders in her left hand,
and truly a horn, bone-white from her forehead, as if still in growth.
She slow-hoofs to the hearthside and starts carding the wool,
granite knuckled but finger nimble.
More battery on the door, another voice, silvered with water
“I am the Witch of the Two Horns”
This elegant wraith enters, with a wheel for spinning, a hand sparrow-quick for the task,
double horned a-glow from her skull.
Through the pitch-dark-slow time
twelve women glide in,
the last with twelve horns jutting
her brow, ornate and terrible,
Like the jaw of an Irish shark
a glinting Underworld crown.
Saying nothing to the Big Woman
they settle to their spinning and open to
a moon-vast language - a singing -
a dozen acres of cold speech
like frozen lumps cut from an icy lake
smelling of no color we could understand
anymore.
each tongue-sound lubricating the human air
into new shape, sluicing the known burrs and warmth
of speech with tributaries of startling cold star-streams.
This keening
drains the mistress,
makes tender the divide between here and
the Other Place,
keeps her giddy, weak, silent.
The Witches caw for food,
for cake. They love cake.
The Big Woman
takes the black air, making her way to the well to collect water for the mixing.
Alone, in terror, groping her white arm into the well,
all she has is a sieve to collect, which of course cannot hold the water.
Her tears drop into that ancient granary of silver.
A voice speaks from the shimmering hole;
“Yellow clay and moss will bind the sieve like plaster.” So she does.
She delivers the mix to the witches, who send her outside to stand in the dark.
They wander corridors and small rooms,
gather blood from every living thing
in the house and cherry the cake
with their findings.
All sleep on,
dank crusted with dreams.
***
Out by the well -
Again, the voice of the clear waters;
“When you come to the north face of the house, bellow out three times
“the mountain of the Fennian women - the Horned women - the Irish women,
and the sky over it is all on fire”.
At the northern point,
she brays hard three times the message.
From the door they burst, amok,
in terror, smeared with licks of wool
floating merry in the loose, cold air
around them, like soft sparks of light.
They flee.
Active now, awakened,
the Spirit of Well
offers the Big Woman instruction
from the her ghost-hole,
the glimmered-pit,
that reaches down,
down past slippery tree roots,
the spiked pits of faithless lovers, shingled dragon scales,
crumbling ritual gear of the Celts,
to that smoky conscience that grinds in the very heart
of the earth.
“These are ancient, ancient forces
you have allowed into your house.
You need to re-enter right away, this moment.
You need to carry a bold shoulder of power
to block the crackling flank of their magics.
Sprinkle on the threshold the water in which you have
washed your kiddies feet - the feet-water.
Take crumbs of the cake the Horned ones made,
with blood from your sleeping family,
Break the cake and place crumbs in their sleeping mouths,
this will break evil and restore them.
Two final hexes:
take their cloth and place it half in and half out
of a chest you then bind and lock tight.
Place a great cross beam across the doors,
that no pagan muscle can shift.”
***
Surely the baleful coven return.
Not immediate - but just when the Big Woman is moving to forgetting.
A batter-thrash on the door, the gurgling shriek, the twelve gathered
in the iron piss rain, cocked horns glinting and steamed,
circled bullies a chant with their demands.
The foot-water speaks;
“no entry for you. None.
I am scattered across this threshold. I have the power of
the loch, the river, the clouds, the dew, a women a-weep.
I will block such queer folk as you.”
The door speaks;
“a beam like iron strides my storied oak. I am a collision for
you wintery spirits with hearthfire power. I will outlast you
with this simple twig.”
The twelve send a thin keen
to the spirit of the blood bread,
their greatest power in the house.
“open this door, break beam and water,
spirit that holds the familied blood.”
“i cannot. My round shape has been brutalized,
crumbled, fed into the mouths of the children. Turning widdershins
your spell-cant, making your powers cockless.”
The shrieking ensemble
flail impudent in the growing storm,
do not immediately leave the scene,
try strange persuasions,
but this island of the strong door,
carries the Owl’s resoluteness,
the cut-truth of a Sligo Boars tusks,
A Dingle waves salty defiance,
and they can do nothing.
At some slow point before dawn they slip away.
In the yellowed light of morning comes safety.
the Big Woman leaves the house and twitches her nose
in the bruise-fresh air.
There is a mantle left
in the thick ruts of muddy hoofed departure -
no witching, just haste.
For five hundred years now the mantle has hung
on a rusty nail in the Old Place. As a reminder
of what we let in
when the house sleeps
and rain streaks the glass
and we stay anchored to our one, great task.
Copyright Martin Shaw 2013
A suggestion and a poem. I am very much enjoying "Entering the Healing Ground" by the writer Frances Weller, and include my endorsement below - so my suggestion is to check it out! There's good eatin' in there - much truth and valuable glints of how to work into the fertile ground of grief - how it can become an offering to something vaster than ourselves. A great deal of joy is threaded through the prose.
"This book rings a shivering bell of hope: that, when lifted by ritual and fellowship, the moist ground of grief actually contains a treasury of gifts that are our ancestral birthright. In other words we start to become a real human being. We are no longer rigid islands of self sufficiency, but open to the soulful wonders that the animate world offers. Insightfully written, warm and with a wonderful poetic sensibility, the deep experience of Weller shines through. The work has honed something clear and valuable in his own character, and a delightful wisdom illuminates every page of “Entering the Healing Ground”.
Being amongst all this vitamin D infused sunlight in the depths of winter is a new experience, and of course, immediately turns me back towards the inner-weather we all carry regardless of whether we walk on sand, tundra or moss. Here is a strange old Irish story - The Horned Women - that i think carries some positively archaic residue in its saddle-bags. I'm enjoying working these old stories into something like the below - all the details are the same, there's just some playful turns of language embedded in the mix.
The Horned Women
Irish
In the storm
the heavy house is resting,
slumbered in the straining rain.
Above, Orion lopes about in his black-jungled heaven,
his triple starred belt, his hunter charms
fast moving over the weather, the house, the people.
But this is not his story.
Below, children are curled pink in blankets, servants doze with their thin hounds
by the twinkling peat.
Only the Big Woman of the house is awake,
working by candle -
nailed fast to her evening task, the carding of wool
Absorbed.
She is in the hut of herself.
Something wyrd
haunches through rain to the old door,
issuing a strident clamor -
part voice, part knock - a joining of energies - iron fisted and wetted jaw
“Open! Open!”
Big Woman calls; “who is there?”
A grizzled croak, tindered with soot;
“I am the Witch of the One Horn”
Suspecting a villagers trick, no more than that,
the mistress pulls open the oak,
and the being enters, carrying a pair of wool carders in her left hand,
and truly a horn, bone-white from her forehead, as if still in growth.
She slow-hoofs to the hearthside and starts carding the wool,
granite knuckled but finger nimble.
More battery on the door, another voice, silvered with water
“I am the Witch of the Two Horns”
This elegant wraith enters, with a wheel for spinning, a hand sparrow-quick for the task,
double horned a-glow from her skull.
Through the pitch-dark-slow time
twelve women glide in,
the last with twelve horns jutting
her brow, ornate and terrible,
Like the jaw of an Irish shark
a glinting Underworld crown.
Saying nothing to the Big Woman
they settle to their spinning and open to
a moon-vast language - a singing -
a dozen acres of cold speech
like frozen lumps cut from an icy lake
smelling of no color we could understand
anymore.
each tongue-sound lubricating the human air
into new shape, sluicing the known burrs and warmth
of speech with tributaries of startling cold star-streams.
This keening
drains the mistress,
makes tender the divide between here and
the Other Place,
keeps her giddy, weak, silent.
The Witches caw for food,
for cake. They love cake.
The Big Woman
takes the black air, making her way to the well to collect water for the mixing.
Alone, in terror, groping her white arm into the well,
all she has is a sieve to collect, which of course cannot hold the water.
Her tears drop into that ancient granary of silver.
A voice speaks from the shimmering hole;
“Yellow clay and moss will bind the sieve like plaster.” So she does.
She delivers the mix to the witches, who send her outside to stand in the dark.
They wander corridors and small rooms,
gather blood from every living thing
in the house and cherry the cake
with their findings.
All sleep on,
dank crusted with dreams.
***
Out by the well -
Again, the voice of the clear waters;
“When you come to the north face of the house, bellow out three times
“the mountain of the Fennian women - the Horned women - the Irish women,
and the sky over it is all on fire”.
At the northern point,
she brays hard three times the message.
From the door they burst, amok,
in terror, smeared with licks of wool
floating merry in the loose, cold air
around them, like soft sparks of light.
They flee.
Active now, awakened,
the Spirit of Well
offers the Big Woman instruction
from the her ghost-hole,
the glimmered-pit,
that reaches down,
down past slippery tree roots,
the spiked pits of faithless lovers, shingled dragon scales,
crumbling ritual gear of the Celts,
to that smoky conscience that grinds in the very heart
of the earth.
“These are ancient, ancient forces
you have allowed into your house.
You need to re-enter right away, this moment.
You need to carry a bold shoulder of power
to block the crackling flank of their magics.
Sprinkle on the threshold the water in which you have
washed your kiddies feet - the feet-water.
Take crumbs of the cake the Horned ones made,
with blood from your sleeping family,
Break the cake and place crumbs in their sleeping mouths,
this will break evil and restore them.
Two final hexes:
take their cloth and place it half in and half out
of a chest you then bind and lock tight.
Place a great cross beam across the doors,
that no pagan muscle can shift.”
***
Surely the baleful coven return.
Not immediate - but just when the Big Woman is moving to forgetting.
A batter-thrash on the door, the gurgling shriek, the twelve gathered
in the iron piss rain, cocked horns glinting and steamed,
circled bullies a chant with their demands.
The foot-water speaks;
“no entry for you. None.
I am scattered across this threshold. I have the power of
the loch, the river, the clouds, the dew, a women a-weep.
I will block such queer folk as you.”
The door speaks;
“a beam like iron strides my storied oak. I am a collision for
you wintery spirits with hearthfire power. I will outlast you
with this simple twig.”
The twelve send a thin keen
to the spirit of the blood bread,
their greatest power in the house.
“open this door, break beam and water,
spirit that holds the familied blood.”
“i cannot. My round shape has been brutalized,
crumbled, fed into the mouths of the children. Turning widdershins
your spell-cant, making your powers cockless.”
The shrieking ensemble
flail impudent in the growing storm,
do not immediately leave the scene,
try strange persuasions,
but this island of the strong door,
carries the Owl’s resoluteness,
the cut-truth of a Sligo Boars tusks,
A Dingle waves salty defiance,
and they can do nothing.
At some slow point before dawn they slip away.
In the yellowed light of morning comes safety.
the Big Woman leaves the house and twitches her nose
in the bruise-fresh air.
There is a mantle left
in the thick ruts of muddy hoofed departure -
no witching, just haste.
For five hundred years now the mantle has hung
on a rusty nail in the Old Place. As a reminder
of what we let in
when the house sleeps
and rain streaks the glass
and we stay anchored to our one, great task.
Copyright Martin Shaw 2013
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Article 0
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Barks and Shaw Feb 15th California
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Collaborations: Coleman Barks and David Abram
News of collaborations - This Friday at the eye wateringly grand Memorial Church at Stanford University in Northern California with Coleman Barks (see flyer above) - two travellers tell of their dreams - poetry, stories, reflections, music, jokes. This event is FREE, so please spread the word and bring friends. Coleman's new poetry (as well as his Rumi translations) is deep, playful and very brilliant, so take to this opportunity to see a master at work. I would hope to see us in Devon later this year, so hold out UK compadres.
I'm deep into leading the Oral Traditions program at Stanford, and also excited about some upcoming work in March on the Depth Psychology M.A. at Sonoma State - they are doing great things there. Apologies if i have not responded to emails, each day brings some new kind of challenge (mostly good), that happily keeps me away from the computer screen! Underneath the Schumacher note is part of the epilogue to SNOWY TOWER, the upcoming new book on Parzival - this is to with place, story, and the arising of value. For such a book lover as myself, please don't confuse this as a diatribe against literature, it is more to do with shaking loose the habit for some storytellers of learning stories line by line from the page. That has its elegance to be sure, but i suspect the land itself is trying to tell us something if we can get our furry, winged ear down to its emanations. Which brings me to:
A Wild Land Dreaming: Living Language and the Erotics of Place
1-7 July 2013
SCHUMACHER COLLEGE, DEVON, U.K.
With David Abram and Martin Shaw
This course is open for bookings.
Reality shapeshifts. Underneath our definitions, prior to all our ready explanations, the world disclosed by our animal senses is a breathing cosmos — tranced, animate and trickster-struck. David Abram
This is the earthy fulcrum where stories of a place emerge – about that cave, that estuary, that Rowan tree. Not in the clipped tempo of a written sentence, but a galloping, roaming, rampant language that tears into the soul like the vivid colors of a jungle bird. Martin Shaw
Join renowned geophilosopher David Abram and master storyteller Martin Shaw for a venture into the heart of the ecological imagination.
Says David: “We’ll awaken our creaturely senses from their screen-dazzled slumber, calling upon the powers of story and word magic to stir the ancient eros between the human animal and the animate earth. And we’ll engage, too, the wordless silence of real encounter – listening close to the elemental energies surging around us and even through us, to the thudding of wings as they paddle the wind, to the gushing waters and the lichen-encrusted rocks”.
Over the course of a week, working both indoors and out in the many-voiced terrain, David and Martin promise to “delve deep into the forgotten intimacy between language and land, between oral poetics and the powers of place. We’ll explore our intense conviction that the psyche is not inside us, but rather that we live within the psyche; indeed that we dwell within a broad intelligence that is not ours, but is rather the earth’s. We’ll explore the conviction that our lives and our actions unfold in the depths of a material imagination that far exceeds all our human designs, and that with sufficient time and attention, an enchanted rapport can arise between one’s body and the breathing terrain — between a person and a place — such that we find ourselves in the grip of what tribal and bardic cultures might call a ‘wild land dreaming’.”
“This is hardly a new practice; for many millennia humans understood that it was necessary, now and then, to seek a fresh exchange with the living cosmos, and to craft from that exchange something so beautiful it feeds the stars and coaxes the hunkered moon up through the tangle of branches to launch itself across the pool of night.”
“In our own time, it’s the biosphere itself that needs the nourishment of both our fierce longing and our tawny panache. Modern humankind’s long estrangement from the land has brought forth monsters, and many still more dangerous are a’borning. The gathering storm staggers our imagination: reason alone will not get us out of this morass. But a keen sense for the shadowed magic that’s afoot – a story-sense tuned to the difficult wonder of the real – is a mighty useful compass for finding our way through, and a powerful tool for metamorphosis.”
Place and the Arising of Value
We could pull ourselves back from the page (or the computer screen) into the immediacy of where we actually live. Re- consecrate a relationship to the living landscape in front of us. You may want to give this boundaries for awhile. Say five miles. Anyone can find wild nature within five miles of their door if they are prepared to go small as well as big – probably five yards.
Maybe decide you are going to be like the archaic Seannachai, that you are going to be a cultural historian for the mythologies of place. Be like young Parzival, or Finn, or Mimmi le Blanc the wild girl, and sit under trees and by ghostly stretches of water and listen and watch. Get up close and personal again – face to face encounters, don’t rely on any book, including this one, to be a substitute.
When you start to absorb these revealing images – these stories of the waterhole, elder tree or visiting jay – don’t write them down. If you need to remember, walk them into your body, chant them in, dance them in. If a pencil hits paper then use it to draw the story, not to write it. Make a map of events. At small gatherings tell them, and remember, those gatherings don’t have to be for humans. Some of the most joyous tellings can be for hedgehog, wind or swamp.
As soon as the ink hits the line you have altered your relationship to the story. When you tell it you could end up groping for the memory of the linear arrangement of ink on paper rather than the bodily impulses of a truly impacted story. Another esoteric detail – use green ink for the map. Lorca claimed that black scares the little spirit-animals that want to burst through onto the page.
If you are another kind of animal then how does that get communicated in the telling of a story? Is that voice of yours a generous gurgle or thin and sharp like a buzzard's beak? Do you lope like a jackal or stay very still like a cat in a sun spot? Follow the energies of your own body in that regard, stay authentic.
As a wide-eyed romantic little kid, I liked nothing more than to follow my dad around on one of his long walks. He’s a big walker. So, much of my education in understanding stories relationship to place come from these walks. In a way we were beating the boundaries, establishing that five mile radius I’m talking about. He would show me an old stone archway, or a particular stretch of lonely beech trees or occasionally, with a long finger, point at far off Dartmoor.
To this day I could walk you the same route down tiny Devonshire lanes, and point out haunted Victorian lamposts, old tribal settlements beneath car parks, hidden trails down to the sea at Babbacombe and the very bench he and my mother sat on when he proposed marriage. There was an assemblage of the mythic and the anecdotal on these walks that were appropriately intermingled. It was a good mix up between wild nature and the intricacies of human culture.
Now as a father, I walk with my little daughter through the ancient stannery town of Ashburton to the river Ashburn. We drop coins under the bridge for the spirit Kutty Dyer who lives in its most shadowed recess. Or, as a family we hike up behind the town to the bottom of the south moor. As we gaze up at a pattern of fields and then open moor, stories race down to meet us. All the tapestry of local folklore encircle – women riding in bone carriages, snowy hoof prints way up on the roof of Widdicombe church, elves scaring away property developers.
We arch out and see the rutted tracks that monks took between the four abbeys, the ewes on the lower hills birthing lambs under sullen yellow clouds, honey suckle on the banks of the summering lanes, the tractor sweating hard and pulling trailers mad with hay, fist-freezing snow across a corrugated iron shelter filled with mud flecked goats. And underneath it all, the great animal Dartmoor dreams, and sends us its muscled stories. We, gazing from behind the farmer's gate, glimpse our inheritance and are silenced.
So something like that waits for all of us - Blake found it in the east end of London. Get into walking. For my first year outdoors, I would often cover ten to twelve miles a day. It was always interesting. Being unable to drive really helped. Beat your boundary lines, offer your libations. Imagine that we are all going to turn up at your door sometime soon. Take us for a walk, show us the inner-story of the place you live in. All myth tellers know that there will come a point in an evening of celebration and story when the hosts will turn to the stranger and ask them to sing a song from their home place. For the English this can provoke an embarrassed rendition of Monty Python's “always look on the bright side of life”. We turn the loss into a joke. But what is soaked in the labour of stewarding your place – the ploughing, thatching, crofting, ferrier songs? The songs of the fishermen, leaving before dawn from Brixham harbor? That could be a rich grounding.
Where is all this leading? Ultimately, slowly, it may set us in a very authentic set of values. Not enforced by government or chapel, but by a revolution of the heart. The heart opens through investment – through tender feeling and hard work brought into relationship with a landscape of story and place entwined.
A little warning. To take all this on can initially create a rather worthy type of character. Wandering around in a jacket made of nettles, shirts dyed in vats of their own urine and muttering songs about Widdicombe fair to passing cars. A little unreal. It doesn’t have to be that way. That gets polished down over time.
So let’s not give up ambition, or that nutty part of us which loves the smile of another human's eyes. A little conflict is sexy. But, as Gary Snyder says, be famous for five miles. Be famous to thin stretches of grass between abandoned buildings, be famous to that nest of starlings just over the hill. That’s a kind of feathery heroism, and is a sweet gesture to our desire to be witnessed in this world.
There is no quick route into any of this, and few clear steps. It’s a job for life however, and in times like these how often do you hear that? As the elders say: “If you haven’t been fed become bread”.
Sometimes this rooting in place has to be less physical and more imaginative. Some places are the last place we should be. Life is often rough. If that’s the case, then look for the “hidden country” – the dream time. This is a place of snowy tundra, Irish fishing villages and turbaned magicians, dark eyed girls living in hollow trees, chanting leopards, and Tibetan astrologers wandering the dragon lines of an ancient Scottish glen. Till you find your physical ground, then abide there when you can. I lived there for years and years.
In the old country they say that next to this earth is the Land of the Sidhe – the fairy. To get there you will have to cross clay. Beyond that is the Many-Colored Land. There you cross water. Next is the Land of Wonder, for this fire. But beyond all of those is the Land of Promise. To get there you travel on the sweet breath of story. I will meet you there.
copyright martin shaw 2013
I'm deep into leading the Oral Traditions program at Stanford, and also excited about some upcoming work in March on the Depth Psychology M.A. at Sonoma State - they are doing great things there. Apologies if i have not responded to emails, each day brings some new kind of challenge (mostly good), that happily keeps me away from the computer screen! Underneath the Schumacher note is part of the epilogue to SNOWY TOWER, the upcoming new book on Parzival - this is to with place, story, and the arising of value. For such a book lover as myself, please don't confuse this as a diatribe against literature, it is more to do with shaking loose the habit for some storytellers of learning stories line by line from the page. That has its elegance to be sure, but i suspect the land itself is trying to tell us something if we can get our furry, winged ear down to its emanations. Which brings me to:
A Wild Land Dreaming: Living Language and the Erotics of Place
1-7 July 2013
SCHUMACHER COLLEGE, DEVON, U.K.
With David Abram and Martin Shaw
This course is open for bookings.
Reality shapeshifts. Underneath our definitions, prior to all our ready explanations, the world disclosed by our animal senses is a breathing cosmos — tranced, animate and trickster-struck. David Abram
This is the earthy fulcrum where stories of a place emerge – about that cave, that estuary, that Rowan tree. Not in the clipped tempo of a written sentence, but a galloping, roaming, rampant language that tears into the soul like the vivid colors of a jungle bird. Martin Shaw
Join renowned geophilosopher David Abram and master storyteller Martin Shaw for a venture into the heart of the ecological imagination.
Says David: “We’ll awaken our creaturely senses from their screen-dazzled slumber, calling upon the powers of story and word magic to stir the ancient eros between the human animal and the animate earth. And we’ll engage, too, the wordless silence of real encounter – listening close to the elemental energies surging around us and even through us, to the thudding of wings as they paddle the wind, to the gushing waters and the lichen-encrusted rocks”.
Over the course of a week, working both indoors and out in the many-voiced terrain, David and Martin promise to “delve deep into the forgotten intimacy between language and land, between oral poetics and the powers of place. We’ll explore our intense conviction that the psyche is not inside us, but rather that we live within the psyche; indeed that we dwell within a broad intelligence that is not ours, but is rather the earth’s. We’ll explore the conviction that our lives and our actions unfold in the depths of a material imagination that far exceeds all our human designs, and that with sufficient time and attention, an enchanted rapport can arise between one’s body and the breathing terrain — between a person and a place — such that we find ourselves in the grip of what tribal and bardic cultures might call a ‘wild land dreaming’.”
“This is hardly a new practice; for many millennia humans understood that it was necessary, now and then, to seek a fresh exchange with the living cosmos, and to craft from that exchange something so beautiful it feeds the stars and coaxes the hunkered moon up through the tangle of branches to launch itself across the pool of night.”
“In our own time, it’s the biosphere itself that needs the nourishment of both our fierce longing and our tawny panache. Modern humankind’s long estrangement from the land has brought forth monsters, and many still more dangerous are a’borning. The gathering storm staggers our imagination: reason alone will not get us out of this morass. But a keen sense for the shadowed magic that’s afoot – a story-sense tuned to the difficult wonder of the real – is a mighty useful compass for finding our way through, and a powerful tool for metamorphosis.”
Place and the Arising of Value
We could pull ourselves back from the page (or the computer screen) into the immediacy of where we actually live. Re- consecrate a relationship to the living landscape in front of us. You may want to give this boundaries for awhile. Say five miles. Anyone can find wild nature within five miles of their door if they are prepared to go small as well as big – probably five yards.
Maybe decide you are going to be like the archaic Seannachai, that you are going to be a cultural historian for the mythologies of place. Be like young Parzival, or Finn, or Mimmi le Blanc the wild girl, and sit under trees and by ghostly stretches of water and listen and watch. Get up close and personal again – face to face encounters, don’t rely on any book, including this one, to be a substitute.
When you start to absorb these revealing images – these stories of the waterhole, elder tree or visiting jay – don’t write them down. If you need to remember, walk them into your body, chant them in, dance them in. If a pencil hits paper then use it to draw the story, not to write it. Make a map of events. At small gatherings tell them, and remember, those gatherings don’t have to be for humans. Some of the most joyous tellings can be for hedgehog, wind or swamp.
As soon as the ink hits the line you have altered your relationship to the story. When you tell it you could end up groping for the memory of the linear arrangement of ink on paper rather than the bodily impulses of a truly impacted story. Another esoteric detail – use green ink for the map. Lorca claimed that black scares the little spirit-animals that want to burst through onto the page.
If you are another kind of animal then how does that get communicated in the telling of a story? Is that voice of yours a generous gurgle or thin and sharp like a buzzard's beak? Do you lope like a jackal or stay very still like a cat in a sun spot? Follow the energies of your own body in that regard, stay authentic.
As a wide-eyed romantic little kid, I liked nothing more than to follow my dad around on one of his long walks. He’s a big walker. So, much of my education in understanding stories relationship to place come from these walks. In a way we were beating the boundaries, establishing that five mile radius I’m talking about. He would show me an old stone archway, or a particular stretch of lonely beech trees or occasionally, with a long finger, point at far off Dartmoor.
To this day I could walk you the same route down tiny Devonshire lanes, and point out haunted Victorian lamposts, old tribal settlements beneath car parks, hidden trails down to the sea at Babbacombe and the very bench he and my mother sat on when he proposed marriage. There was an assemblage of the mythic and the anecdotal on these walks that were appropriately intermingled. It was a good mix up between wild nature and the intricacies of human culture.
Now as a father, I walk with my little daughter through the ancient stannery town of Ashburton to the river Ashburn. We drop coins under the bridge for the spirit Kutty Dyer who lives in its most shadowed recess. Or, as a family we hike up behind the town to the bottom of the south moor. As we gaze up at a pattern of fields and then open moor, stories race down to meet us. All the tapestry of local folklore encircle – women riding in bone carriages, snowy hoof prints way up on the roof of Widdicombe church, elves scaring away property developers.
We arch out and see the rutted tracks that monks took between the four abbeys, the ewes on the lower hills birthing lambs under sullen yellow clouds, honey suckle on the banks of the summering lanes, the tractor sweating hard and pulling trailers mad with hay, fist-freezing snow across a corrugated iron shelter filled with mud flecked goats. And underneath it all, the great animal Dartmoor dreams, and sends us its muscled stories. We, gazing from behind the farmer's gate, glimpse our inheritance and are silenced.
So something like that waits for all of us - Blake found it in the east end of London. Get into walking. For my first year outdoors, I would often cover ten to twelve miles a day. It was always interesting. Being unable to drive really helped. Beat your boundary lines, offer your libations. Imagine that we are all going to turn up at your door sometime soon. Take us for a walk, show us the inner-story of the place you live in. All myth tellers know that there will come a point in an evening of celebration and story when the hosts will turn to the stranger and ask them to sing a song from their home place. For the English this can provoke an embarrassed rendition of Monty Python's “always look on the bright side of life”. We turn the loss into a joke. But what is soaked in the labour of stewarding your place – the ploughing, thatching, crofting, ferrier songs? The songs of the fishermen, leaving before dawn from Brixham harbor? That could be a rich grounding.
Where is all this leading? Ultimately, slowly, it may set us in a very authentic set of values. Not enforced by government or chapel, but by a revolution of the heart. The heart opens through investment – through tender feeling and hard work brought into relationship with a landscape of story and place entwined.
A little warning. To take all this on can initially create a rather worthy type of character. Wandering around in a jacket made of nettles, shirts dyed in vats of their own urine and muttering songs about Widdicombe fair to passing cars. A little unreal. It doesn’t have to be that way. That gets polished down over time.
So let’s not give up ambition, or that nutty part of us which loves the smile of another human's eyes. A little conflict is sexy. But, as Gary Snyder says, be famous for five miles. Be famous to thin stretches of grass between abandoned buildings, be famous to that nest of starlings just over the hill. That’s a kind of feathery heroism, and is a sweet gesture to our desire to be witnessed in this world.
There is no quick route into any of this, and few clear steps. It’s a job for life however, and in times like these how often do you hear that? As the elders say: “If you haven’t been fed become bread”.
Sometimes this rooting in place has to be less physical and more imaginative. Some places are the last place we should be. Life is often rough. If that’s the case, then look for the “hidden country” – the dream time. This is a place of snowy tundra, Irish fishing villages and turbaned magicians, dark eyed girls living in hollow trees, chanting leopards, and Tibetan astrologers wandering the dragon lines of an ancient Scottish glen. Till you find your physical ground, then abide there when you can. I lived there for years and years.
In the old country they say that next to this earth is the Land of the Sidhe – the fairy. To get there you will have to cross clay. Beyond that is the Many-Colored Land. There you cross water. Next is the Land of Wonder, for this fire. But beyond all of those is the Land of Promise. To get there you travel on the sweet breath of story. I will meet you there.
copyright martin shaw 2013
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Article 2
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Encountering Fairy: Time With the 'Other Crowd'
This week an excerpt from from my far-but-upcoming book 'The Bird-Spirit King: Myth as Migration, a Wild Land Dreaming'. This is a section from a commentary on an old Dartmoor story about a mid-wife being called into a storm to help birth a fairy child.
Looking forward to telling stories and sharing ideas this Friday night in Point Reyes (check Point Reyes Books for details) - an evening in the local Presbyterian church begins at 7. Also a happy return to the folks at Numina in Santa Rosa early next month (see above). Time is flying over here in the sunshine state. It was great to collaborate with Coleman last week - and plenty of time to talk poetry, gossip, music and the state of the nation (not clear at 2am in a Palo Alto hotel room). We are cooking ideas for the future.....Anyway, onwards....
ps- We have just 4 places left for this years UK School of Myth year course - get in touch with Tina today at
www.schoolofmyth.com for the high adventure.
Night as Invitation, Night as Taboo
Faerie culture in Britain – that is the belief in supernatural beings who inhabit eerie recesses of the countryside – has remained strong for many thousands of years. Although in modernity these stories seem to be whimsical - a kind of metaphor for the poet’s imagination - it wasn’t always this way. As recently as the 19th Century, hair raising accounts of encounters on lonely lanes with such entities were common place. For a recent account of such beings, read Malidome Some’s “Of Water and the Spirit”; a startling account of initiation within the Dagara people of West Africa. It quickly becomes apparent that to tribal cultures world wide (and in pockets of English rural life) that there are windows to immense energies that have been knocking around on the earth for as long as we have. It’s a crowded scene.
Earlier in this book, we addressed the notion of Gaston Bachelard that inside every house there is a hut, hidden in the consciousness of the dweller. Houses are thick with memory: teeming constructs of family time, rarely named loneliness, felt securities, reveries that grow more pronounced, habitual, by the stability of the surroundings. Our house can help us forget about fascism, or starving Ethiopians, or birds falling stone dead out of the sky. We clunk around down below in the cellar of reflection, our memories often dry of emotion but the scenes still vivid. Or we wander the circular stairs at night, with candle and nightcap, to our celestial dream tower. Fairy tales tell us that in such a tower - which lives within us - is a tiny old women, ancient, who weaves on a spindle by moonlight. All little girls understand this. But these dream ascensions or sooty cellar reveries are familiar, daily. It is quite another thing to have the courage to suddenly open the door to the bright rain and the fairy rider.
The Fay Ones, Seelie Court, Gentry, Other Crowd, whatever name we give them, arouse many different opinions about what they could be. Some claim them as the dead walking, some a kind of earthed angel, others, spurred on by Puritanism, claimed they can only be demonic in origin - but probably the widest claim is that they are an independent energy that has abided in and around the natural world for as long as anyone can remember. Within any community there will often be one or more sensitives who appear to have some contact with them.
Victorian drawings of quaint little creatures with wings do not always prepare people for either the wider folklore, or indeed the experience, of meeting one of these beings. Seneca Indian medicine men and Tungus shamans take that realm extremely seriously. Indeed, their doctoring skills are often reliant on bartering and assistance from those very areas.
Certain types of vision quests are specifically designed to make direct contact with the elemental powers. The results of which can be hair raising and intensely testing. Unless it seemed entirely appropriate, this is not normally the focus of a wilderness fast, in fact could seem something of a distraction. Spook has its unhelpful glamour.
Humans are not the only ones with song-lines. In Ireland, an old cottage may have a corner knocked out if it is thought to interfere with one of the fairy procession lines. It’s simply not worth the ensuing trouble.Folk lore insists they will nip babies away and place changelings in the cot, leave gold that is worthless, draw you into endless revelry whilst you gradually lose your senses. But much of this is village talk, not forest wisdom, and comes not necessarily from those with direct experience.
Our story begins at night. Night always carries its liminal invitation. Edge become blurred, routes home we swore we knew blind in the daylight, suddenly lead our feet some other way. Many of us have experienced this up on the moor. We remember that night used to be regarded as the ending of clock time altogether – it was another kind of thing completely. A time for storytelling, a time for ritual, a time when the spirits took full advantage of those blurred edges and created all sorts of mischief. To wander alone at night in Tuscan culture indicated you were either a sorcerer or a prostitute.
In their farming communities, even into the 20th Century, the world of clock and minute time was a distant notion. Time was dictated by the village bell, heard in the distant fields; at noon for lunch, or a ringing the hour before sundown to bring all home to the hearthfire. To linger would have been “Chi va di notte cerca la morte - who goes out at night looks for death”. Although the family would often leave for work at different times, as darkness arrived the group would almost always be placed around the table for supper. This ‘hinge’ time, with its strange texture, would be met by the dishing out of food, drink and general conversation. When night's grip became inescapable, the desire for human companionship became even more pronounced with the veglia, the gathering by the fire, the telling of stories, the singing of songs, the setting of riddles. Whilst family cleaned the dishes and emptied the table, the grandmother would be flattered and coaxed into telling a story, even though mildly protesting at first. This is good protocol as all storytellers like to be asked. As the folklorist Alessandro Falassi reminds us, no one wants a reputation as the kind of storyteller who “needs a coin to start, and ten to stop” - that moment when an invitation becomes an imposition.
But the whole ritual of the busyness of table, the pleading with the elderly storyteller, the stoking of the fire, the collective settling for the tale, all were partially protective devices, familiar and loved rhythms, to ward off the swift shadowing of the corn field, the stables, the courtyard. Out just beyond the farm were sometimes abandoned fields or pig pens in disrepair; these were soon seen to have fallen into the atmosphere of the forest and also not to be lingered in.
The whole situation with darkness was much edgier than we often imagine. There was not the whole hearted exorcism of the dark that a strip light offers; the storytelling time by lantern or candle was dappled, shaded, a back and forth. The real brightness was to be held in the liveliness of the table and the warmth of the assembled group. There were still dark corners. Whether in Tuscon or a village off the Norwich Road, occasionally an eye would nervously go to the chimney – an entry point for witches. Often the hearth fire was loaded with secret magic devices to keep such beings out, the story being such a device. The hearth and the scene I described, seen in variety all over the world, was truly an axis-mundi for the small group surrounding it.
An opening into the otherly dimensions of darkness began when I was little more than a child. At around thirteen, I made my way home down a small path next to a stagnant stream, overhung occasionally by willow trees. The name of this old pathway was Melancholy Walk. At night it was not a walk I enjoyed, but I was keen to visit my friend Oliver Hibble whose family lived at the end of it. This night was particularly dark. As I walked I looked firmly ahead at the first distant street lamp and clearly remember singing songs under my breath to keep my nerves at bay.
I had just reached the part where willows overhung the path and dangled into the still, brown waters of the stream. The wet branches blocked out the distant light. What I remember next was a kind of low gurgling laugh right in both my ears, and then being lifted by my shoulders several inches – so I was on the balls of my feet. The grip was crazy strong. I knew for certain there was no one else on that desolate path. I shot forward faster than I have ever run, was instantly out of the grip of whatever it was, past that first street light, up the cobbled hill, past St. Gilbert's primary school, past the Green Man pub, like a streak of lightning up the narrow alley that led onto Radcliffe road and up to home. Oddly, I don’t think I spoke to them about it at the time. I just couldn’t bear it. To speak it was to incant it all over again. To keep making it real.
At that young age I became aware that things occasionally happened when the day darkened. The movement from imaginings into a genuine psychic experience is very real, very tangible, for those who experience it. It didn’t feel like something was out there, there was something out there, and I got nailed by it. It is an odd strand of Western arrogance to believe that everything ‘unnatural’ that occurs is somehow a psychological response to some shift in the mind, as if that was the centre of all consciousness.
It is an illuminating detail that the Faerie requires a human midwife. We hear from many cultures the idea that the Otherworld is as interested in us as we are in it, and we detect something of that here - that we have a skill that is of use to them. And what a skill: to guide a being from the watery realm of the belly out into spluttering life. We often pray for a celestial or divine intervention, could it be that we occupy the dreams and concerns of the gods, spirits and devas? Do we have something to offer them? Are we a dream of the gods?
So this is a sweet scene of the traffic going the other way. Rather than the image of the artist suddenly lifted by magical inspiration (the source of which could be a spirit) and birthing a great play or painting, we see a woman helping one of these otherly beings birth a most precious arrival, a faerie baby.
Copyright Martin Shaw 2013
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Wilderness, Myth, and the Life Not Yet Lived - Santa Rosa Sat March 9th
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