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Article 2
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In praise of foxes, hermes and mythic dis-information
Whew.
Just out the other side of a nine day teaching intensive - first with my compadres at the School of Myth, and then onto seven days with the wild and erudite David Abram. It was grand. Coleman Barks rolls in to Devon in just over a week - look out for us at the Thursday night of the Quest festival in Newton Abbot, and i'm leading a Mythteller short workshop there on the saturday.
Something brand new for 2014. "THE GREEN TEETH OF THE EARTH, THE BLUE TENT OF SKY: Reawakening the Ecological Imagination" - from April - July next year at Schumacher college - guest teachers include Tony Hoagland, John Gouldthorpe and Stephan Harding and a couple more to be announced - (not all beardy men BTW).
Places are limited, and i suspect will go fast. Here's the link:
http://www.schumachercollege.org.uk/courses/Ecological-Imagination
I am also pleased to say that i've been offered a visiting fellowship at Schumacher, and that i happily accept - there are some wonderful eruptions of the imagination happening at the place. Mythology as the heart of ecology - Ole!
Here's some thoughts about foxes, mythic dis-information and wild Hermes.
Down in Devon, a great trickster is fox. I met fox the first time not in the wild, but in the sprawl of south London – its first trick. It was about 4.30 in the morning and I was leaving my small shared flat in Brockley to spend a day fasting and walking in Epping Forest, about an hour outside of the city. As I turned the key in lock I heard a slight sound in the dark, and there it was. A male fox – a dog, reynard, or tod fox. It had a glowing brownish red coat, black legs and ears, resplendent tail with a swish of white at its tip. Given the tail as well, it seemed about four foot long. It rotated its ears and sniffed.
There were a good few moments of eyeballing where I tried to take in as much as I could of its atmosphere before it strolled – not bounded – slowly round me and further into the small garden. The walk I was on was preparation for a four day fast, which meant that from that turn in the lock till my dusk return I was in a tacit sort of ritual – that I would experience a flood of information about my life; a sort of tacit hall of mirrors. To see a wild animal, least of all the fox, within several seconds of it beginning, was quite a moment.
The day was long, bewildering and tiring. I had started to resent the lack of food and my mind was a buzz with conflict, about as far from being ‘at one with nature’ as it is honestly possible to get. I was sheltering under an elm from sheets of rain, when suddenly, a fox burst from the undergrowth with a still twitching squirrel in it’s mouth, elegantly flashed past and was gone. That woke me up, grounded me, and got me past the twitching squirrel of thoughts that I’d been carrying. I followed the fox trail and got lost, only finding a road some time on. Later that day, in a café in Liverpool Street Station, whilst tearing chunks from a burger and shoveling down fries, I turned over the meetings with town and country fox in my mind. I still am. Over the years, fox has been a frequent but distant visitation.
Fox knows about giving dis-information, ask any Devon farmer. When hunted it will deliberately run through a flock of sheep, just to break the flow of its scent to the hounds, creating confusion. When hunting it will hide in a bush and mimic the anguished squeal of a rabbit, often bringing out a nursing mother or old buck to see what is happening. Their death usually. Still, rabbits are smart too, so the fox only has a minute or two till they get used to its voice and start to ignore it. Fox plays the same trick imitating baby lambs, with ewes wandering off towards the sound and the fox. Up in the Snowdonia valleys, I have sat at night sipping tea on a dry stone wall and heard this eerie game.
Fox is a great storyteller, and good with character roles, as we have just seen. They have a five octave range and up to twelve different sounds to produce when adult. Like the fairy, they despise iron – the gamekeepers say they can smell it. If caught in an iron trap, they, unlike a dog, will make no sound of complaint, but steadily gnaw through their own limb rather than be caught. They’re tough that way.
Fox loves spreading rumors about its strength and genius. To this day, locals will claim that when fox kills a goose, it slings it over its back and trots off – impossible but wonderful. Another great storyteller, Shakespeare, recognized kin when he saw it and gives 31 praises to fox scattered through his work. A very old piece of Devon folklore is the notion that when fox is troubled by fleas they take a piece of wool in their mouth and starts to step slowly into a stream. As they get deeper, the anxious fleas crawl through the fur and eventually end up on the wool when only their head is above the water. Once all are on, they drop the wool and are free of the itching.
Fox’s cunning is such that they have a somewhat ambivalent reputation – in the myth-world they frequently steals coyote’s food, or nips off with the sun, or outwit the wolf. The Japanese love the fox – called kitsune - and celebrate its intelligence, magical juice and, mythically at least, its long life. Really powerful foxes are in possession of nine resplendent tails. For a fox to become a human all it has to do is place a human skull over his own face. One final piece of vital information from the Japanese is this: any woman encountered alone, at either dusk or night, could be a fox. That explains a lot.
Myth is full of dis-information as a ritual tool – remember that story of Bluebeard? A youngest sister marries a man with a long, flowing, dark blue beard. A powerful man. He has to go traveling and offers her the run of the castle. He encourages feasting, company, cheer, good times. He gives her a heavy ring of keys to each room – but just that one thing. Do not. Under any circumstances. Use the key that opens the room underneath the castle. Of course, she can’t help herself, is magnetized to use it. Inside the locked room she finds a floor awash with blood, and many other old wives of Bluebeard hanging like smoked meat on hooks from the wall.
Remember Finn MacColl? He meets Finegas, a hermit waiting by the bank of a river, waiting, as it was prophesied that he would catch the salmon of knowledge in the Boyne. When eventually he catches it, the hermit sets young Finn to roasting it – but just one thing. Do not. Under any circumstances. Eat even the tiniest morsel of the fish. Of course not! The last thing on my mind. Whilst roasting this fish, Finn blisters a thumb on the bubbling skin, brings it to his mouth and absently tastes the fish. In a second he takes on all the knowledge that the hermit was waiting to receive. But when the hermit returns, he reveals that he deliberately went away for this very moment to occur.
Remember the story of the Handless Maiden? When the maiden’s husband is called to war she sends him the happy news that she has conceived a child. On the way to the battle front the messenger is lulled into a sleep by a dark spirit who contorts the message to it being that she has birthed a changeling – half dog. The king bears up well, sends his love back and to ask for whatever she requires. The message is again distorted; he’s furious and demands the heart and tongue be ripped from the maiden as proof that the woman is dead. From this awful news the maiden and child have to go into hiding, and the king spends seven years wandering the deep forest looking for them.
The key that Bluebeard gives his wife opens the door to seeing the hidden horror of her husband; the instruction not to taste the Salmon is to invite the possibility that Finn will, the slandered message of her husband leads to her ultimately growing her own hands back, and his wandering in the woods weathers him into an appropriate husband. The dis-information often comes in a way that on an immediate level seems ghastly, but in the biggest picture is vital for the wider unfolding of the story.
Mythic dis-information is a very clever way of understanding humans. It knows that we don’t often respond to strict orders, and that the results of our choices are rarely black and white – all three of the above stories hold paradox within them. Like fox, these dis-informers break their scent, pretend to be another kind of animal, story, piece of information. Whether we wander out into the jaws of fox or slink off on some other route, within myth, it is always in service for the wider stream of the story and the growth of the individuals within it. It’s rarely all good and rarely all bad.
Like fox scenting the iron of the trap, it understands the multiplicity of truth – those snapping jaws are the straight ahead, one answer, get to the point, three step perspective of literalism. The thing to remember is the intention behind it – within these stories, it is to lead towards a kind of sacred education, an ending of naivety, a greater capacity for life. It is in service to life. That is key – when dis-information falls out of a mythic ground - it can become simply deceit.
In much of my twenties, any time spent around the fire with native elders was rarely spent in the ‘straight talk’ of the West, or any kind of elevated ‘spiritual’ language. Any question asked was rebuffed, rebooted, turned on its head, fell into silence, scuffed, cuffed, flew three times round the room and was answered two hours later in an entirely different conversation. They were quite rightly suspicious of straight instruction, something that hadn’t turned softly in the psyche a little, rather than just leapt from brain to brain - there would be no wildness present in an answer like that.
To the literal mind, myth itself is a profound form of dis-information. There can be no truth in its images - a hedgehog standing on a rooster, playing the bagpipes? Try to be serious! But the image, with its wayward intelligence, distrusts the societal rush to the concrete picture and uses the brilliance of metaphor to disable (at least briefly) the triumph of logic. Logic is not the enemy however, but a welcome guest at a wider card game.
We remember that fox is a wonderful storyteller. A king amongst storytellers, and of dis-information, is Hermes. Hermes was born of a love affair between Zeus and Maia, a mountain nymh. He was born in his mother's cave and pretty much was born hungry. As he gazed from the cave he saw the many cattle of his half brother, bright Apollo. How many of us have stood in the shadows gazing at our bright brother’s wealth? Using a strange backward trail of thinking, he steals fifty and tucks them away nearby. Remember, he was only hours old, not even a toddler. When his mother speaks to him he feigns baby talk – gaga, boo boo, walla walla.
Apollo, of course, discovers the missing cattle and drags the baby to Zeus for a reckoning. Rather like filing a police report, bright Apollo gives Zeus the facts. If Apollo gives the facts, then Hermes gives the story. Well, a story. A story of mad imagination, possible slander, elevated language, gutter-humor and ever ramping up the drama. Hermes makes no attempt to link it to the literal, rolling his eyes and laughing as the story gets hotter and more speculative. Zeus is beside himself with laughter, and recognizes that ‘another’ kind of truth is presenting itself to him, that in amongst the dis-information of literal statistics, baby Hermes is revealing a depth to the situation that Apollo can only dream of.
So amen and hootzpah! to the fox, alive alive in the greeness of it all.
Copyright Martin Shaw 2013
Just out the other side of a nine day teaching intensive - first with my compadres at the School of Myth, and then onto seven days with the wild and erudite David Abram. It was grand. Coleman Barks rolls in to Devon in just over a week - look out for us at the Thursday night of the Quest festival in Newton Abbot, and i'm leading a Mythteller short workshop there on the saturday.
Something brand new for 2014. "THE GREEN TEETH OF THE EARTH, THE BLUE TENT OF SKY: Reawakening the Ecological Imagination" - from April - July next year at Schumacher college - guest teachers include Tony Hoagland, John Gouldthorpe and Stephan Harding and a couple more to be announced - (not all beardy men BTW).
Places are limited, and i suspect will go fast. Here's the link:
http://www.schumachercollege.org.uk/courses/Ecological-Imagination
I am also pleased to say that i've been offered a visiting fellowship at Schumacher, and that i happily accept - there are some wonderful eruptions of the imagination happening at the place. Mythology as the heart of ecology - Ole!
Here's some thoughts about foxes, mythic dis-information and wild Hermes.
Down in Devon, a great trickster is fox. I met fox the first time not in the wild, but in the sprawl of south London – its first trick. It was about 4.30 in the morning and I was leaving my small shared flat in Brockley to spend a day fasting and walking in Epping Forest, about an hour outside of the city. As I turned the key in lock I heard a slight sound in the dark, and there it was. A male fox – a dog, reynard, or tod fox. It had a glowing brownish red coat, black legs and ears, resplendent tail with a swish of white at its tip. Given the tail as well, it seemed about four foot long. It rotated its ears and sniffed.
There were a good few moments of eyeballing where I tried to take in as much as I could of its atmosphere before it strolled – not bounded – slowly round me and further into the small garden. The walk I was on was preparation for a four day fast, which meant that from that turn in the lock till my dusk return I was in a tacit sort of ritual – that I would experience a flood of information about my life; a sort of tacit hall of mirrors. To see a wild animal, least of all the fox, within several seconds of it beginning, was quite a moment.
The day was long, bewildering and tiring. I had started to resent the lack of food and my mind was a buzz with conflict, about as far from being ‘at one with nature’ as it is honestly possible to get. I was sheltering under an elm from sheets of rain, when suddenly, a fox burst from the undergrowth with a still twitching squirrel in it’s mouth, elegantly flashed past and was gone. That woke me up, grounded me, and got me past the twitching squirrel of thoughts that I’d been carrying. I followed the fox trail and got lost, only finding a road some time on. Later that day, in a café in Liverpool Street Station, whilst tearing chunks from a burger and shoveling down fries, I turned over the meetings with town and country fox in my mind. I still am. Over the years, fox has been a frequent but distant visitation.
Fox knows about giving dis-information, ask any Devon farmer. When hunted it will deliberately run through a flock of sheep, just to break the flow of its scent to the hounds, creating confusion. When hunting it will hide in a bush and mimic the anguished squeal of a rabbit, often bringing out a nursing mother or old buck to see what is happening. Their death usually. Still, rabbits are smart too, so the fox only has a minute or two till they get used to its voice and start to ignore it. Fox plays the same trick imitating baby lambs, with ewes wandering off towards the sound and the fox. Up in the Snowdonia valleys, I have sat at night sipping tea on a dry stone wall and heard this eerie game.
Fox is a great storyteller, and good with character roles, as we have just seen. They have a five octave range and up to twelve different sounds to produce when adult. Like the fairy, they despise iron – the gamekeepers say they can smell it. If caught in an iron trap, they, unlike a dog, will make no sound of complaint, but steadily gnaw through their own limb rather than be caught. They’re tough that way.
Fox loves spreading rumors about its strength and genius. To this day, locals will claim that when fox kills a goose, it slings it over its back and trots off – impossible but wonderful. Another great storyteller, Shakespeare, recognized kin when he saw it and gives 31 praises to fox scattered through his work. A very old piece of Devon folklore is the notion that when fox is troubled by fleas they take a piece of wool in their mouth and starts to step slowly into a stream. As they get deeper, the anxious fleas crawl through the fur and eventually end up on the wool when only their head is above the water. Once all are on, they drop the wool and are free of the itching.
Fox’s cunning is such that they have a somewhat ambivalent reputation – in the myth-world they frequently steals coyote’s food, or nips off with the sun, or outwit the wolf. The Japanese love the fox – called kitsune - and celebrate its intelligence, magical juice and, mythically at least, its long life. Really powerful foxes are in possession of nine resplendent tails. For a fox to become a human all it has to do is place a human skull over his own face. One final piece of vital information from the Japanese is this: any woman encountered alone, at either dusk or night, could be a fox. That explains a lot.
Myth is full of dis-information as a ritual tool – remember that story of Bluebeard? A youngest sister marries a man with a long, flowing, dark blue beard. A powerful man. He has to go traveling and offers her the run of the castle. He encourages feasting, company, cheer, good times. He gives her a heavy ring of keys to each room – but just that one thing. Do not. Under any circumstances. Use the key that opens the room underneath the castle. Of course, she can’t help herself, is magnetized to use it. Inside the locked room she finds a floor awash with blood, and many other old wives of Bluebeard hanging like smoked meat on hooks from the wall.
Remember Finn MacColl? He meets Finegas, a hermit waiting by the bank of a river, waiting, as it was prophesied that he would catch the salmon of knowledge in the Boyne. When eventually he catches it, the hermit sets young Finn to roasting it – but just one thing. Do not. Under any circumstances. Eat even the tiniest morsel of the fish. Of course not! The last thing on my mind. Whilst roasting this fish, Finn blisters a thumb on the bubbling skin, brings it to his mouth and absently tastes the fish. In a second he takes on all the knowledge that the hermit was waiting to receive. But when the hermit returns, he reveals that he deliberately went away for this very moment to occur.
Remember the story of the Handless Maiden? When the maiden’s husband is called to war she sends him the happy news that she has conceived a child. On the way to the battle front the messenger is lulled into a sleep by a dark spirit who contorts the message to it being that she has birthed a changeling – half dog. The king bears up well, sends his love back and to ask for whatever she requires. The message is again distorted; he’s furious and demands the heart and tongue be ripped from the maiden as proof that the woman is dead. From this awful news the maiden and child have to go into hiding, and the king spends seven years wandering the deep forest looking for them.
The key that Bluebeard gives his wife opens the door to seeing the hidden horror of her husband; the instruction not to taste the Salmon is to invite the possibility that Finn will, the slandered message of her husband leads to her ultimately growing her own hands back, and his wandering in the woods weathers him into an appropriate husband. The dis-information often comes in a way that on an immediate level seems ghastly, but in the biggest picture is vital for the wider unfolding of the story.
Mythic dis-information is a very clever way of understanding humans. It knows that we don’t often respond to strict orders, and that the results of our choices are rarely black and white – all three of the above stories hold paradox within them. Like fox, these dis-informers break their scent, pretend to be another kind of animal, story, piece of information. Whether we wander out into the jaws of fox or slink off on some other route, within myth, it is always in service for the wider stream of the story and the growth of the individuals within it. It’s rarely all good and rarely all bad.
Like fox scenting the iron of the trap, it understands the multiplicity of truth – those snapping jaws are the straight ahead, one answer, get to the point, three step perspective of literalism. The thing to remember is the intention behind it – within these stories, it is to lead towards a kind of sacred education, an ending of naivety, a greater capacity for life. It is in service to life. That is key – when dis-information falls out of a mythic ground - it can become simply deceit.
In much of my twenties, any time spent around the fire with native elders was rarely spent in the ‘straight talk’ of the West, or any kind of elevated ‘spiritual’ language. Any question asked was rebuffed, rebooted, turned on its head, fell into silence, scuffed, cuffed, flew three times round the room and was answered two hours later in an entirely different conversation. They were quite rightly suspicious of straight instruction, something that hadn’t turned softly in the psyche a little, rather than just leapt from brain to brain - there would be no wildness present in an answer like that.
To the literal mind, myth itself is a profound form of dis-information. There can be no truth in its images - a hedgehog standing on a rooster, playing the bagpipes? Try to be serious! But the image, with its wayward intelligence, distrusts the societal rush to the concrete picture and uses the brilliance of metaphor to disable (at least briefly) the triumph of logic. Logic is not the enemy however, but a welcome guest at a wider card game.
We remember that fox is a wonderful storyteller. A king amongst storytellers, and of dis-information, is Hermes. Hermes was born of a love affair between Zeus and Maia, a mountain nymh. He was born in his mother's cave and pretty much was born hungry. As he gazed from the cave he saw the many cattle of his half brother, bright Apollo. How many of us have stood in the shadows gazing at our bright brother’s wealth? Using a strange backward trail of thinking, he steals fifty and tucks them away nearby. Remember, he was only hours old, not even a toddler. When his mother speaks to him he feigns baby talk – gaga, boo boo, walla walla.
Apollo, of course, discovers the missing cattle and drags the baby to Zeus for a reckoning. Rather like filing a police report, bright Apollo gives Zeus the facts. If Apollo gives the facts, then Hermes gives the story. Well, a story. A story of mad imagination, possible slander, elevated language, gutter-humor and ever ramping up the drama. Hermes makes no attempt to link it to the literal, rolling his eyes and laughing as the story gets hotter and more speculative. Zeus is beside himself with laughter, and recognizes that ‘another’ kind of truth is presenting itself to him, that in amongst the dis-information of literal statistics, baby Hermes is revealing a depth to the situation that Apollo can only dream of.
So amen and hootzpah! to the fox, alive alive in the greeness of it all.
Copyright Martin Shaw 2013
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Coleman Barks, Martin Shaw and others, Quest Festival, Newton Abbot, July 25th
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AFTERNOON EVENT, THIS SATURDAY, GREENHILL ARTS, MORETONHAMPSTEAD, 2-4.30
Hello sun-baked Dartmoor wild cats. I will be myth-telling and working through some new ideas on saturday afternoon up at Green Hill Arts in Moretonhampstead. It's a grand spot. This event has been something of an accidental secret, so i'm sending smoke signals and carrier-jackdaws to spread word. 2-4.30 pm - with Chris Salisbury.
http://www.greenhillarts.org/events/62/95/Widdershins-Mythic-Storytelling-with-Martin-Shaw-and-Spindle-Wayfarer.html
HOPE TO SEE THERE! They have a fine public ale-house nearby for post-story continued discussion, and general catch up.
http://www.greenhillarts.org/events/62/95/Widdershins-Mythic-Storytelling-with-Martin-Shaw-and-Spindle-Wayfarer.html
HOPE TO SEE THERE! They have a fine public ale-house nearby for post-story continued discussion, and general catch up.
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Praise for Earthlines, Cinderbiter tomorrow
Firstly: Some praise for issue 6 of EarthLines magazine - Editor and author Sharon Blackie joyfully wrestles a crofting life replete with honeybees, lambs, wayward weather, fruits and polytunnels, into a shape of such generosity that she also, somehow, finds time to craft such a fine magazine - bringing so many vibrant new writers out into the world. That's brave and it's inspiring.
Take Sylvia Lindsteadt's "The Mole-Tunnel and the Mind: Digging for our Underworlds"....
"when we plug our own depths, the parts of ourselves that are wild and fecund, that are mole-tunneled, where snakes sleep and shrews scurry, where starlight peeks down despite the odds, we become only half-alive. Part of us has become sick. The psyche has its own chthonic ecology, rooted in the world...
....i can pinpoint, down to a single sprawling play, the moment in which my true voice started to emerge as as a writer; there was a strange woman in that story, with great-blue heron feet, a spinning wheel threshed with storm, a house made of bones and lined with jars of tongue. When i saw her i knew something had changed. I knew it had begun."
Or Laura Burns "Speaking Bodies, Storied Land" on horses -
"Shades of chestnut, russet, amber, oyster-grey, sorrel and mahogany burn the sunlight back on itself. Heads twitch and rise, frozen still for a second, before looping back down to the wet earth....A frisk of mane. A stamp or a shuffle. Rhiannon, Horse-Queen, Equine-Witch, maybe you would know what they speak of. I am not so sure with their language."
There's just two examples of real full-moon speech, centered in image not just endless abstraction. These womenROCK.
In other issues, Dartmoor's own Tom Hirons sometimes throws troublesome words about:
The wild god reaches into a bag
Made of moles and nightingale skin
he pulls out a two reeded pipe,
Raises an eyebrow
And all the birds begin to sing.
I think Tom is out where the buses don't park. If he offers you wine, take only a sip.
So, look, subscribe today to this great magazine, there's revolution coming from the croft.
___________________________________________________________
Tommorrow i shall be telling this story at the Green Hill arts centre on Dartmoor. It's an old Hebredian/Scots story i call Cinderbiter. Here's a few opening lines from my written version - out soon in Poetry International magazine from San Diego. The oral version tomorrow will pay little attention to this, and go its own way - but there you go.
Cinderbiter
from the northern folktale: Assipattle and the Muckle Mester Stoor Worm
The grey churn, the salted bruise, the green bridle;
the seal-proud comb around Scotland’s skulled coasts.
Near it there is a farm.
A resolute tump; the gull-shrill wind beats like medicine for a gummed ear.
The family bent sow-low to the ground, praying to the seed-gods,
all arrogance sliced clean with poverty’s cleaver;
the trance of field-work claiming all up to the silvered line of the shore.
All but one.
Years before, the mother of the hut squatted out seven sons -
sprouts, cubs, little hefties suckling on the soured teat;
sullen blonds wrapped dead-tight in the family inhibition.
All but one.
Six sons, dulled by necessity--butchered by weather.
In the frosted dark, six sons line up with father
to yoke themselves to earth-labour,
to kiss the cold of Saturn’s cross.
--Crook-backed, scoured like rounded loaves.
****
But the seventh sleeps by the fire's embers,
so smeared by ash he seems more magpie than boy,
locks hedgehog thick with ash;
His mind, loosened
by the flame’s incanting.
The boy is underground, adrift
in the poet’s dark roots of silence.
Gilled, adept at the sea’s pressures,
Crab-firm in the indigo black.
Stories come
Squatting like lumps of coal
darkly-bright in the Viking currents.
The green teeth of the sea flower him with sagas
He befriends the bannocked moon.
He is lifted, giddily over high desert
Three years in the twigged circle of a condor.
His slow heart sends a drum-thump
through the tangled combustions of history.
Rain-dancing through time,
He is a god-torch, flickered on the cave wall, his haunch
rich with prophetic ochre.
And everywhere the snow falls.
****
Lazy, they say, watching his slow, tidal breathing.
They who crack the earth, day in, day out,
They who snake by in their gritty dedications.
They whose hands know the rough licks of cattle,
Whose eyes know the hills pearled with rain.
They whose arms are blue
under the lambing snow.
There is an egg of hate, fat amongst his wheat-yellow siblings
They long to string him up in the red barn;
to hasten his passage through this life.
They are a rough crowd for the bard.
Every night, he stirs, becomes immense,
looming in front of the land-blasted family.
Myth telling.
Stories lurch out beyond the ken of local knowledge
Sun on their backs, desert baked.
Prophetic spurts come rapid
from his travelled jaw.
A mangling
word-byre.
Tundra snow and jaguar teeth
spill onto the floor
of the fire-flecked hut.
He swears when his time comes
he will rise with the hero-energy.
Father leans forwards with proud fists
and scatters the grandeur.
Says a serpent will lick the underside of the moon
before that happens
All cackle, and relax gladly into the familiar atmosphere of hurt.
The ebony lump drifts off.
There is always a killing to do round the farm.
Copyright Martin Shaw 2013
Take Sylvia Lindsteadt's "The Mole-Tunnel and the Mind: Digging for our Underworlds"....
"when we plug our own depths, the parts of ourselves that are wild and fecund, that are mole-tunneled, where snakes sleep and shrews scurry, where starlight peeks down despite the odds, we become only half-alive. Part of us has become sick. The psyche has its own chthonic ecology, rooted in the world...
....i can pinpoint, down to a single sprawling play, the moment in which my true voice started to emerge as as a writer; there was a strange woman in that story, with great-blue heron feet, a spinning wheel threshed with storm, a house made of bones and lined with jars of tongue. When i saw her i knew something had changed. I knew it had begun."
Or Laura Burns "Speaking Bodies, Storied Land" on horses -
"Shades of chestnut, russet, amber, oyster-grey, sorrel and mahogany burn the sunlight back on itself. Heads twitch and rise, frozen still for a second, before looping back down to the wet earth....A frisk of mane. A stamp or a shuffle. Rhiannon, Horse-Queen, Equine-Witch, maybe you would know what they speak of. I am not so sure with their language."
There's just two examples of real full-moon speech, centered in image not just endless abstraction. These womenROCK.
In other issues, Dartmoor's own Tom Hirons sometimes throws troublesome words about:
The wild god reaches into a bag
Made of moles and nightingale skin
he pulls out a two reeded pipe,
Raises an eyebrow
And all the birds begin to sing.
I think Tom is out where the buses don't park. If he offers you wine, take only a sip.
So, look, subscribe today to this great magazine, there's revolution coming from the croft.
___________________________________________________________
Tommorrow i shall be telling this story at the Green Hill arts centre on Dartmoor. It's an old Hebredian/Scots story i call Cinderbiter. Here's a few opening lines from my written version - out soon in Poetry International magazine from San Diego. The oral version tomorrow will pay little attention to this, and go its own way - but there you go.
Cinderbiter
from the northern folktale: Assipattle and the Muckle Mester Stoor Worm
The grey churn, the salted bruise, the green bridle;
the seal-proud comb around Scotland’s skulled coasts.
Near it there is a farm.
A resolute tump; the gull-shrill wind beats like medicine for a gummed ear.
The family bent sow-low to the ground, praying to the seed-gods,
all arrogance sliced clean with poverty’s cleaver;
the trance of field-work claiming all up to the silvered line of the shore.
All but one.
Years before, the mother of the hut squatted out seven sons -
sprouts, cubs, little hefties suckling on the soured teat;
sullen blonds wrapped dead-tight in the family inhibition.
All but one.
Six sons, dulled by necessity--butchered by weather.
In the frosted dark, six sons line up with father
to yoke themselves to earth-labour,
to kiss the cold of Saturn’s cross.
--Crook-backed, scoured like rounded loaves.
****
But the seventh sleeps by the fire's embers,
so smeared by ash he seems more magpie than boy,
locks hedgehog thick with ash;
His mind, loosened
by the flame’s incanting.
The boy is underground, adrift
in the poet’s dark roots of silence.
Gilled, adept at the sea’s pressures,
Crab-firm in the indigo black.
Stories come
Squatting like lumps of coal
darkly-bright in the Viking currents.
The green teeth of the sea flower him with sagas
He befriends the bannocked moon.
He is lifted, giddily over high desert
Three years in the twigged circle of a condor.
His slow heart sends a drum-thump
through the tangled combustions of history.
Rain-dancing through time,
He is a god-torch, flickered on the cave wall, his haunch
rich with prophetic ochre.
And everywhere the snow falls.
****
Lazy, they say, watching his slow, tidal breathing.
They who crack the earth, day in, day out,
They who snake by in their gritty dedications.
They whose hands know the rough licks of cattle,
Whose eyes know the hills pearled with rain.
They whose arms are blue
under the lambing snow.
There is an egg of hate, fat amongst his wheat-yellow siblings
They long to string him up in the red barn;
to hasten his passage through this life.
They are a rough crowd for the bard.
Every night, he stirs, becomes immense,
looming in front of the land-blasted family.
Myth telling.
Stories lurch out beyond the ken of local knowledge
Sun on their backs, desert baked.
Prophetic spurts come rapid
from his travelled jaw.
A mangling
word-byre.
Tundra snow and jaguar teeth
spill onto the floor
of the fire-flecked hut.
He swears when his time comes
he will rise with the hero-energy.
Father leans forwards with proud fists
and scatters the grandeur.
Says a serpent will lick the underside of the moon
before that happens
All cackle, and relax gladly into the familiar atmosphere of hurt.
The ebony lump drifts off.
There is always a killing to do round the farm.
Copyright Martin Shaw 2013
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Parzival - book and play, on the way.
The sky is a wonderful slate gray down here in Devon as i pack the motor to take the drive up to the last ever Dark Mountain festival a few hours towards London. Clouds scud quickly by, and it feels like the temperature is starting to drop, just a little, at night. I'm looking forward to seeing old friends, digesting strange thoughts, and maybe hearing a little music. I'll speak tomorrow morning, and then head onto the big skies of Norfolk, and those wonderful red brick cottages.
It feels like it's been a busy summer - i.e. i'm a little bushed - and i just have a week or two's dreaming before working with former writer-in-residence at the Globe theatre Peter Oswald (husband of Alice Oswald) over the autumn to turn Parzival into a play for first showing in July 2014. More as i have it. We are doing the writing at the wonderful Sharpham House where we are artists-in-residence for the falling leaves time. Harry Burton (just about to direct Lee Evans and Sheila Hancock in "Barking In Essex" in the west end) will be coming in to direct.
It's also looking very likely that there will be a return to Northern California and Stanford for Jan-April, so we look forward to catching up with compadres in the bay area, Marin and beyond. Trust me, i spend a great deal of time doing dishes, paying bills and the school run - it's not always this jet-set.
On the subject of Parzival - above is sneak preview of the cover of 2014's Snowy Tower - designed by the great Christy Collins over at White Cloud. I really cannot wait to have this book in my hand. There's been a lot of white appearing in my beard in the five years of working on it. Here's a few words from Coleman Barks forward:
We hardly knew it, but we have been needing this story to return to us. It is one of the truly magnificent, most generously freighted, stories of our civilization. As you experience Martin Shaw's handling of the medieval epic Parzival, you enter the great myth of your own life. The great loves, the wound that won't heal, the lost brother we finally find, the grail that keeps leading us on. As a child Parzival was called “Beautiful Face,” and you may find your own beautiful original face here.
This work is the wide-sky-waking of a spring dawn, brilliantly revived and refreshed. Startling feminine characters appear: Cundrie, Segune, Condwiramurs. This is not just a story for men. It has been simmered around wilderness fires, told and re-told for years before being brought into print. It is the pagan imagination underneath European civilization that makes this myth so elegantly, chaotically, and dangerously alive. Only Martin Shaw with his new, exfoliating idiom could have made this vision clear.
Here's something from it about horses - i would have put a variant of this on the blog maybe 18 months ago. The scene i am working out of is Parzival arriving on another mans horse at the castle of Condwiramurs, the woman who will be the great love of his life. Earlier, he dropped the reigns and let the horse lead the way.
THE HORSE LEADS THE WAY
What does it look like for a horse to take the reigns in our life? Maybe we are less controlling, less manic, more open to the opportunity of the day. Rather than charging from meeting to meeting, we take a slower road, a less visible, more rambling route. We visit ruined chapels in France, grind our own coffee beans, make a point of always catching the dusk.
Letting the horse lead the way could lead to unusual decisions in the eyes of the world. Suddenly a pay-rise isn’t the end all if it means a stressed out, dislocated life from friends and much loved animals and trees. The ties to our inner-life grow stronger, the trance of the dollar starts to dim. We value spaciousness, curiosity and quality hay to chew on, no more junk.
And what of the beast he rides? It is hard to conjure an animal with a more pronounced relationship to us. They have been at the forefront of tribal expansions, the steady plough of the soil, a gift fit for a queen. They come at a price - hard to break in, but once that is achieved, they can become an ally for life.
The Celts had often been a semi-nomadic people and so particularly venerated the horse. Even as recently as the last century, there was the crying of the mare ceremony in Herefordshire (Welsh border), and there still is the mari lwyd ceremony in Glamorgan. At the first of these, reapers left a small patch of corn in the field and shaped it roughly into a horse. The reapers then tried to cut the horse by artfully aiming their sickles at it. The greatest and most accurate of the reapers sat in a place of honor opposite his master at the harvest feast. The skill of the reapers arm, the spirit of the corn and the magic of the horse were all held in ceremony.
The mari lwyd involves a kind of jovial shape-shifting. A group of wassailers – singers of magical songs - would move through a hamlet or village and amongst them was a man whose face was covered by the mask of a horse. It is wise when confronted by this archaic scene to load them up with red beer and good bread.
Horses are also to do with sound and movement. Under the floor of a 17th Century house in Bungay in Suffolk, forty horse-skulls were found, incisors resting on oak or stone. The reason? Acoustics. The skulls gave the dancing feet a greater resonance, lyricism, power. A true British contemporary nomadic culture, the Gypsies, had a ban on eating horse meat – it would seem to evoke madness. In the 19th Century, the Gypsies used them to check that their owners were really dead. A servant would lead the horse to the side of the grave for several days, make sound and call the deceased three times by their name and ask them to come to dinner. Any good gypsy would have been up and out of the soil in a second.
In hidden parts of Scotland there would be secretive gatherings of the Horseman’ s Society – a horse cult who would certainly have been branded witches if made public. As an initiate you were led blindfolded to an alter – usually a bag of corn – by two initiated men. Lain upon the alter would be bread and whisky, and standing behind them would be the head-horseman, the equine magician. They were lead a tricky path while blind, which served two symbolic purposes – one was that it showed the ups and downs of a man’s life, and the second was that it was the contrary process of a young horse's training; if you did not obey instructions then you would feel pain – the magic fell apart if the ritual was not accurate. They then made a long and poetic oath to the society, culminating in these words:
And if I fail in any of these obligations that I go under at this time or hereafter, I ask to my heart’s wish and desire that my throat may be cut ear to ear with a horseman’s knife, my body torn to pieces between two wild horses and blown by the four winds of heaven to the uttermost parts of the earth; my heart torn from my left breast and its blood wrung out and buried in the sands of the sea-shore.
George Ewart Evans 1
At a certain point the initiate would be given what is called the horseman’s word. It is tempting to presume that this was some word that could be whispered into the horse’s ear for a result of instant compliance. But here is the twist. The word is never revealed to the horse.
The word was, in Evan’s words, “lived rather than used”. It was a binding psychic anchor that reached back through many remote cultures to the primordial root of magic and trust that abided with humans and horse. It was not about dominion but relationship, kinship, totem, earth magic, seasonal incantation. It was a carrying of magical privacy.
The horse also holds relationship to some fierce and proud feminine goddessess - Epona, Artemis, Diana, Hecuba, Hegate>. People have lived and died for these names I so casually list.
The old ploughman lived with their beasts, the clydesdale, the percheron, the haflinger, the chestnuts, the Gypsy cobs, often sleeping in the bothy above the stables. Their dreams and the horses formed a tangle. Many of these men carried the ability to ‘jade’ a horse. You had to be careful with this, as, if viewed, you quickly would be branded a horse-witch. It was the gift to stop a horse completely in its tracks – to seemingly paralyze it.
Jading was to do with a particular odor the horse detected, which you then subtly invoked if you wanted it to halt, or twisted its head skillfully away from the scent if you wanted it to move. Done well, to the astonished observer, it seemed miraculous.
Martin Shaw copyright 2013
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Sharpham House artist-in-residence autumn 2013
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Article 2
Due to many thousands of miles in airplanes and much teaching it's been a few weeks since i last got to the blog. A fond mention to the Minnesota Mens Conference, up in the Northern woods. Always a delight to experience that kind of genial fellowship, and to witness a great revival of enthusiasm and investment from the men present. After seven years service i'm stepping down from the leadership - primarily for a break - but know i'll see all your irascible faces again. Maybe sooner than you'd like! It's a great conference with a splendid future.
So here's a few lines from the life of Finn MacCool i'm working on, and then a larger piece on the bardic schools to make up for my tardy absence.
Finn on his way to Tara:
It was Samhain.
The land combed red and bronze-gold.
Air sharp with frost,
the crunch of leafy humus under foot.
Time of autumn beef and red ale,
the silver canopy of the rain,
a thick cloak with bronze clasp.
A fire that holds embers all night.
Time for the bard to tune his harp,
for spitted ox, a keg,
blue fingers as kindling is gathered,
a friendly hound, a bed.
Finn as a Boy
Finn alone.
Became a great listener,
curled in the yellow gaze
of lonely sunshine,
ear bent to the
Thousand voiced wind.
Competitor to the reed-croak
of the jackdaw,
his raw speech warbled its twigged praise.
Rough skinned from thickets,
and sharp tufts of nettle,
knees blue from long hours
padding the watery trails of the otter.
A lover of the briar
and the quiet croft,
low-shaken apple trees
and the sap of the alder.
Flakes of snow
had crowned his blond curls,
as he perched
ever-long by the icy pool.
He had shivered through seasons,
Had plowed his little ship
through the flowered singing
of the grove, over the tips of
the slim, white branches that crested his house.
The house of many doors.
Many escapes.
His amiable gaze
would settle on whatever
beast made it through
the rough hedge of his walls.
The solemn horse,
the cow of rich-milk,
the spider on the leaf,
the lightning-swift fly.
His loneliness was a strange bliss.
The green sway
of the hawks bough,
the mottled oak shadow,
the star-proud lintel of night.
The Great Plough Tail and the Circle of Gwydion:
The Ancient Bardic Schools
The great bardic schools of Ireland were an extraordinary bridge between orality and literature. For a start, they were run by lay people not clerics. Although flourishing for a time alongside monastic institutions their roots went deeper, already being regarded as utterly ancient by the time of St Patrick.
The business of the schools was mainly: history, law, language, literature. The history would have been that of their own country, as was the law, language and literature. Running quite opposed to the rest of Europe and its clinging onto Roman law – by now a rotting corpse in a foreign land – they encouraged and repeatedly polished the diction of their own tongue, till it was truly an art form. Speculation remains on the sympathetic teaching of Greek and Latin too – possibly with the arrival of Gallic scholars in Ireland in the 5th Century, in flight from the barbarian invasions.
Night and darkness generally was an ally in the schools. Students would be given a subject at the very edge of their abilities – perhaps something on Concord, Quartans, Termination, Syllables and Union –
each subject with its own obtuse set of inner-instruction. The student would be separated from the group and take to his bed, turning the conundrum around and around in his head. The next day too, they stayed in darkness until, at a specific point, lights were brought in and they then, and only then, committed it to writing. It had to take root in the brain and be retained there orally before the hand moved ink across the parchment. They then gave a kind of presentation to the master-poet who chided, advised or approved, before they finally got to shuffle off and eat something.
In the fertile darkness, surely we see a remnant of some druidic practice. A turning within, a reliance on the old oral stability of mental mnemonic to hold the images in place. A shutting down of any secular distraction into the totality of knowledge that lies underneath the apparently innocent task. The bardic secret. A grappling of poetry’s hazels in the ebony cloak of privacy. It is easy to imagine the young student drifting in and out of dreaming as they allowed the task to become luminous, far past book smarts and into the terrain of inner-awakening. This was an entrenched practice, a constant resource and discipline. In an institution that gradually become far more domestic and court orientated (poetry for the approval of nobles) I would suggest these nocturnal journeys kept intact an older, wilder route back to the experiential and mystical origins of bardic practice. Night was a gateway to inner-wildness, inner-spaciousness.
The school was not so much about a geography or grand house (often a hut or home) but focused around the charisma and knowledge of the Ollamh, the big man, chief-poet. Their influence radiated out in all four directions, and when they circuited Ireland amongst kings and nobles, the school, for all intents and purposes, went too. They were intellectually fierce, opinionated and full of the pomp their status conferred. On visiting a dignitary, it was not unheard of for an Ollamh to remind their host of their own standing as being like a kind of king or bishop (Corkery 1998 :32). The word bard was actually used for a lower rank of untrained poet, the word they all aspired to was to be a fili. A bard in Ireland was more raggle-taggle; a wandering jongleur, teller of tales, maybe, heaven forbid, a singer of songs. There were heavy fines incurred for trained students tarting their gifts in such a way. This naughty underbelly of performing rogues became known as ‘bad fellows’ when they wandered England, or filous in France.
However, payment for the more noble strand could prove difficult too, even with the amount of praise they rained down on their employee's head. If they arrived en masse, they brought with them an enormous cauldron entitled ‘The Pot of Avarice’. With this they grandly emphasised the need for payment in gold and silver, or, at the very least,food. This cauldron was made of pure silver, and supported on the points of nine spears. There they would stand at the entrance to the compound. We can see them now, dusk settling, chill in the air, the great cauldron glowing silver in the gloom, the line of poets standing in the mist. They would pass a poem down the line, man by man, stanza by stanza, to demonstrate their recall and honed poetic tongue. A brisk encouragement for praise, a bed, or payment.
Over in Wales, and preserved or rediscovered or made up, by Iolo Morgannwg (or Edward Williams, Welsh antiquarian – 1747-1826), we hear of a bardic astronomy: constellations of stars with names like:
The Circle of Gwydion
The Grove of Blodeuwedd
The Hen Eagle’s Nest
The White Fork
The Woodland Boar
The Conjunction of a Hundred Circles
This is all thrilling material, especially when aligned with Morgannwg’s revealing of the bardic dividing of the seasons, ancient chronologies and descriptions of poetic trials. It is less thrilling when we realise that The Barddas, from where this language arises, is certainly a forgery, a fake, either by Morgannwg or texts he studied, that were themselves bogus. It is less thrilling when we realise that he was actually doing jail time in a Welsh prison when he started to gather the fragmentary materials from which his heady imaginings created the above, and more.
But this is far from just a calculated attempt to deceive. Indeed, he and another forger, James Macpherson (the ‘Ossian’ poems) did more to preserve some notion of the bards than anyone since possibly the Middle Ages. Who knows what was going on in their heads when they wrote this down, certainly much creativity and imagination. The trouble comes when the artist tries to place the effervescent results of their producing into a space and time that is not authentic. No matter how much we hunger for union and fullness in these old fragments, a devised ‘whole’ such as Iolo attempts to provide, tends to a fictitious atmosphere – for obvious reasons.
Many of the serious controversies in Robert Graves' “The White Goddess”, come from him taking Morganwg’s utterings as inherited knowledge. A lively poetic sensibility works at a different tempo to the kind of snail-paced scholarship required if you are to produce game-changing statements about goddesses within European mythology. In a strange way “The White Goddess” has continued a tradition of historically wobbly, but conceptually vigorous ideas that that could include this brief ‘holding of the flame’ by Morganwg and Macpherson. Later in this book I will include at least one other character that seems to be part of this on-going imaginal tradition.
Geoffrey of Monmouth, when composing his History of the Kings of Britain, claims to have come into the keeping (or loan from the Archbishop of Oxford) of a book in ‘the British language’ (probably Welsh) that gave extensive details of major figures from Brutus to Cadwallader. It is from this document that he supposedly mines all kinds of facts and detail – although again, there is a great speculation that the book never existed and was a device for Monmouth’s florid imagination to run riot. We begin to detect a pattern.
These days both men – Macpherson and Morgannwg - would probably have happy careers as writers of fantasy, or even be regarded as ‘channellers’, and make a living that way. When something beautiful has been lost, but a residual consciousness remains, we will accept even a mimic of that beauty. What makes the work of Iolo really complicated is that he did copy some authentic documents that are now lost, which means, like any great lie, there are hidden fragments of the real within it.
I suspect that what many of us long for in the figure of the bard is not the courtly reciter of the post-Norman world, but the older, more mystical, nature-connected figure of the primordial earth, a world that by its very nature is, as Robin Williamson says, made of the ‘quality of mist and starlight’; something profoundly druidic, magical, but also hard to access in modern times. This very figure was already being promoted rather clumsily by 14th and 15th Century bards in an attempt to stop a steady decline in interest of the form. Some academics insist that their speculation is the root of what we now regard as ‘fact’ about this earlier stage.
For anyone interested in orality, literature, and the wildness inherent in both, the later bardic world is problematic. One, for its frozen quality – wildness and creativity grow steadily more absent after its chief concern becomes the history of court and nobles. We get far less of an ecstatic nature stream pouring through the compositions (this is why we get so excited about Taliesin, although he is another figure under fierce debate) and more stodgy praise of dignitaries, whilst shaking the money tin for another round of drinks. Poetry is rarely vital when tenured.
Secondly, their diminishing of local dialect in favour of a unified, unwavering tongue is absolutely at loggerheads with the bio-regional flavour of this book. We need more burrs and rasps in language, not less. It may have been necessary at the time to create a clear Gaelic art form that was internationally recognised, but that time is not this time. The regional voice reveals trails back to the soil. We could go down to the specific – to dirt, twigs, streams, family roots, geographic understanding, the spontaneous and natural, than up and general – honouring wealth, status, stilted poetry, the status quo. We need to take our praise back to the natural world, not offering it to the ‘land’ owner.
We have been cut from our home ground so many times we eventually find ourselves ‘out of our mind’ – our thinking extending out into silvery lakes, jaguar teeth and dandelions – not just caught in the skull.
Whilst we honour the early stories of reciting by memory 60,000 lines of verse, and the practice of darkness as a way towards luminous awakening, as well as the love of language and also its use as dark speech – a form of verbal combat, it would be appropriate to return to an original source of the bardic inspiration, the land. When we get caught up entirely in the recreation of flowing robes, badly played harps, and forged histories, it all starts to feel like a clumsy theatre, and surely we are missing the point. Still, the word bard has vitality to it, energy, it’s still potent, and so could respond to a re-visioning with the move back to forest consciousness, moor consciousness, ocean consciousness at its centre.
Copyright Martin Shaw 2013
So here's a few lines from the life of Finn MacCool i'm working on, and then a larger piece on the bardic schools to make up for my tardy absence.
Finn on his way to Tara:
It was Samhain.
The land combed red and bronze-gold.
Air sharp with frost,
the crunch of leafy humus under foot.
Time of autumn beef and red ale,
the silver canopy of the rain,
a thick cloak with bronze clasp.
A fire that holds embers all night.
Time for the bard to tune his harp,
for spitted ox, a keg,
blue fingers as kindling is gathered,
a friendly hound, a bed.
Finn as a Boy
Finn alone.
Became a great listener,
curled in the yellow gaze
of lonely sunshine,
ear bent to the
Thousand voiced wind.
Competitor to the reed-croak
of the jackdaw,
his raw speech warbled its twigged praise.
Rough skinned from thickets,
and sharp tufts of nettle,
knees blue from long hours
padding the watery trails of the otter.
A lover of the briar
and the quiet croft,
low-shaken apple trees
and the sap of the alder.
Flakes of snow
had crowned his blond curls,
as he perched
ever-long by the icy pool.
He had shivered through seasons,
Had plowed his little ship
through the flowered singing
of the grove, over the tips of
the slim, white branches that crested his house.
The house of many doors.
Many escapes.
His amiable gaze
would settle on whatever
beast made it through
the rough hedge of his walls.
The solemn horse,
the cow of rich-milk,
the spider on the leaf,
the lightning-swift fly.
His loneliness was a strange bliss.
The green sway
of the hawks bough,
the mottled oak shadow,
the star-proud lintel of night.
The Great Plough Tail and the Circle of Gwydion:
The Ancient Bardic Schools
The great bardic schools of Ireland were an extraordinary bridge between orality and literature. For a start, they were run by lay people not clerics. Although flourishing for a time alongside monastic institutions their roots went deeper, already being regarded as utterly ancient by the time of St Patrick.
The business of the schools was mainly: history, law, language, literature. The history would have been that of their own country, as was the law, language and literature. Running quite opposed to the rest of Europe and its clinging onto Roman law – by now a rotting corpse in a foreign land – they encouraged and repeatedly polished the diction of their own tongue, till it was truly an art form. Speculation remains on the sympathetic teaching of Greek and Latin too – possibly with the arrival of Gallic scholars in Ireland in the 5th Century, in flight from the barbarian invasions.
Night and darkness generally was an ally in the schools. Students would be given a subject at the very edge of their abilities – perhaps something on Concord, Quartans, Termination, Syllables and Union –
each subject with its own obtuse set of inner-instruction. The student would be separated from the group and take to his bed, turning the conundrum around and around in his head. The next day too, they stayed in darkness until, at a specific point, lights were brought in and they then, and only then, committed it to writing. It had to take root in the brain and be retained there orally before the hand moved ink across the parchment. They then gave a kind of presentation to the master-poet who chided, advised or approved, before they finally got to shuffle off and eat something.
In the fertile darkness, surely we see a remnant of some druidic practice. A turning within, a reliance on the old oral stability of mental mnemonic to hold the images in place. A shutting down of any secular distraction into the totality of knowledge that lies underneath the apparently innocent task. The bardic secret. A grappling of poetry’s hazels in the ebony cloak of privacy. It is easy to imagine the young student drifting in and out of dreaming as they allowed the task to become luminous, far past book smarts and into the terrain of inner-awakening. This was an entrenched practice, a constant resource and discipline. In an institution that gradually become far more domestic and court orientated (poetry for the approval of nobles) I would suggest these nocturnal journeys kept intact an older, wilder route back to the experiential and mystical origins of bardic practice. Night was a gateway to inner-wildness, inner-spaciousness.
The school was not so much about a geography or grand house (often a hut or home) but focused around the charisma and knowledge of the Ollamh, the big man, chief-poet. Their influence radiated out in all four directions, and when they circuited Ireland amongst kings and nobles, the school, for all intents and purposes, went too. They were intellectually fierce, opinionated and full of the pomp their status conferred. On visiting a dignitary, it was not unheard of for an Ollamh to remind their host of their own standing as being like a kind of king or bishop (Corkery 1998 :32). The word bard was actually used for a lower rank of untrained poet, the word they all aspired to was to be a fili. A bard in Ireland was more raggle-taggle; a wandering jongleur, teller of tales, maybe, heaven forbid, a singer of songs. There were heavy fines incurred for trained students tarting their gifts in such a way. This naughty underbelly of performing rogues became known as ‘bad fellows’ when they wandered England, or filous in France.
However, payment for the more noble strand could prove difficult too, even with the amount of praise they rained down on their employee's head. If they arrived en masse, they brought with them an enormous cauldron entitled ‘The Pot of Avarice’. With this they grandly emphasised the need for payment in gold and silver, or, at the very least,food. This cauldron was made of pure silver, and supported on the points of nine spears. There they would stand at the entrance to the compound. We can see them now, dusk settling, chill in the air, the great cauldron glowing silver in the gloom, the line of poets standing in the mist. They would pass a poem down the line, man by man, stanza by stanza, to demonstrate their recall and honed poetic tongue. A brisk encouragement for praise, a bed, or payment.
Over in Wales, and preserved or rediscovered or made up, by Iolo Morgannwg (or Edward Williams, Welsh antiquarian – 1747-1826), we hear of a bardic astronomy: constellations of stars with names like:
The Circle of Gwydion
The Grove of Blodeuwedd
The Hen Eagle’s Nest
The White Fork
The Woodland Boar
The Conjunction of a Hundred Circles
This is all thrilling material, especially when aligned with Morgannwg’s revealing of the bardic dividing of the seasons, ancient chronologies and descriptions of poetic trials. It is less thrilling when we realise that The Barddas, from where this language arises, is certainly a forgery, a fake, either by Morgannwg or texts he studied, that were themselves bogus. It is less thrilling when we realise that he was actually doing jail time in a Welsh prison when he started to gather the fragmentary materials from which his heady imaginings created the above, and more.
But this is far from just a calculated attempt to deceive. Indeed, he and another forger, James Macpherson (the ‘Ossian’ poems) did more to preserve some notion of the bards than anyone since possibly the Middle Ages. Who knows what was going on in their heads when they wrote this down, certainly much creativity and imagination. The trouble comes when the artist tries to place the effervescent results of their producing into a space and time that is not authentic. No matter how much we hunger for union and fullness in these old fragments, a devised ‘whole’ such as Iolo attempts to provide, tends to a fictitious atmosphere – for obvious reasons.
Many of the serious controversies in Robert Graves' “The White Goddess”, come from him taking Morganwg’s utterings as inherited knowledge. A lively poetic sensibility works at a different tempo to the kind of snail-paced scholarship required if you are to produce game-changing statements about goddesses within European mythology. In a strange way “The White Goddess” has continued a tradition of historically wobbly, but conceptually vigorous ideas that that could include this brief ‘holding of the flame’ by Morganwg and Macpherson. Later in this book I will include at least one other character that seems to be part of this on-going imaginal tradition.
Geoffrey of Monmouth, when composing his History of the Kings of Britain, claims to have come into the keeping (or loan from the Archbishop of Oxford) of a book in ‘the British language’ (probably Welsh) that gave extensive details of major figures from Brutus to Cadwallader. It is from this document that he supposedly mines all kinds of facts and detail – although again, there is a great speculation that the book never existed and was a device for Monmouth’s florid imagination to run riot. We begin to detect a pattern.
These days both men – Macpherson and Morgannwg - would probably have happy careers as writers of fantasy, or even be regarded as ‘channellers’, and make a living that way. When something beautiful has been lost, but a residual consciousness remains, we will accept even a mimic of that beauty. What makes the work of Iolo really complicated is that he did copy some authentic documents that are now lost, which means, like any great lie, there are hidden fragments of the real within it.
I suspect that what many of us long for in the figure of the bard is not the courtly reciter of the post-Norman world, but the older, more mystical, nature-connected figure of the primordial earth, a world that by its very nature is, as Robin Williamson says, made of the ‘quality of mist and starlight’; something profoundly druidic, magical, but also hard to access in modern times. This very figure was already being promoted rather clumsily by 14th and 15th Century bards in an attempt to stop a steady decline in interest of the form. Some academics insist that their speculation is the root of what we now regard as ‘fact’ about this earlier stage.
For anyone interested in orality, literature, and the wildness inherent in both, the later bardic world is problematic. One, for its frozen quality – wildness and creativity grow steadily more absent after its chief concern becomes the history of court and nobles. We get far less of an ecstatic nature stream pouring through the compositions (this is why we get so excited about Taliesin, although he is another figure under fierce debate) and more stodgy praise of dignitaries, whilst shaking the money tin for another round of drinks. Poetry is rarely vital when tenured.
Secondly, their diminishing of local dialect in favour of a unified, unwavering tongue is absolutely at loggerheads with the bio-regional flavour of this book. We need more burrs and rasps in language, not less. It may have been necessary at the time to create a clear Gaelic art form that was internationally recognised, but that time is not this time. The regional voice reveals trails back to the soil. We could go down to the specific – to dirt, twigs, streams, family roots, geographic understanding, the spontaneous and natural, than up and general – honouring wealth, status, stilted poetry, the status quo. We need to take our praise back to the natural world, not offering it to the ‘land’ owner.
We have been cut from our home ground so many times we eventually find ourselves ‘out of our mind’ – our thinking extending out into silvery lakes, jaguar teeth and dandelions – not just caught in the skull.
Whilst we honour the early stories of reciting by memory 60,000 lines of verse, and the practice of darkness as a way towards luminous awakening, as well as the love of language and also its use as dark speech – a form of verbal combat, it would be appropriate to return to an original source of the bardic inspiration, the land. When we get caught up entirely in the recreation of flowing robes, badly played harps, and forged histories, it all starts to feel like a clumsy theatre, and surely we are missing the point. Still, the word bard has vitality to it, energy, it’s still potent, and so could respond to a re-visioning with the move back to forest consciousness, moor consciousness, ocean consciousness at its centre.
Copyright Martin Shaw 2013
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Article 1
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It's Autumn. Let's read, eat and take walks.
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grand tents and bare shoulders: the gypsies
DATES FOR THE 2014 - TENTH ANNIVERSARY - YEAR COURSE
April 25-27th
June 13th-15th
Aug 1-3rd
Oct 3-5th
Dec 5-7th
Contact Tina at Tina.schoolofmyth@yahoo.com today for the details of what will be our most inventive and wildest dive/year course yet. We also have just a few places left for the right-about-to happen PARZIVAL weekend too - a telling that takes two and a half days, and embossed with troubadour, Islamic, and medieval english history arising as we saddlebag our trusty Andalusian ponies up the dark ridged and blue-snowed heaven that is this story. C'mon, reach for the kitbag and join us. Last ever telling before the book comes out, and this little secret we have been brewing in the distillery of our imagination for half-a-decade becomes a secret no more.
some slight teaser from the upcoming Snowy Tower (Parzival) book - as the land turns to waste...
Hounds call from the lonely copse,
The old womans hair is frail under the silver comb.
The gravediggers spade is bright with use,
no beards are wet with ale.
The wattle-hut is cold,
and broken open to the roaming candles of the stars.
All dream of honey-bread, a hearth fire,
a ploughing harvest of fish and corn.
The rain is grey and steady.
And the arrival of Parzival's beloved, Condwiramurs...
Ah, the moon.
A gold-scattered track in the young mans den.
He a shivering lamb
at the warm stable of her becoming.
But she wants a Lion.
Breast tight with desire,
Lusty peaks, not yet
for the quiet sucking
of a child.
In this place of bone-light
and sickle-fire, our
Lady of the Waves
harps her music, snow-naked
with power
into the boys ear.
And the final arrival at the Grail Castle...
Praise to the bright girdle of the land,
its seal-proud coast,
and cold blue crest of stars,
zodiac dazzling.
Pull close to the shepherds milky dreaming,
his grove a-hum, dingle-hot,
with the woodlarks wanton speech.
Buckle our knees to the glinting pool
and to dusky light, to beehives,
and cairns of badgers,
delirious with sleep.
Praise to the Maymed Kynge,
Praise to the Healed King,
Praise to the Holy Maker
of all things.
And this week something on west country gypsies.
The People of the Roads
It was 1505 when a genuine nomadic consciousness arrived in Britain in the shape of “exotically attired Egyptians” (Simpson 1865). Any brief fascination with the gypsies turned cold when Edward VI ordered all gypsies living in Britain to be rounded up and branded with a V for ‘vagabond’ on their chest, and then thrown into slavery for two years. Children were seized at an Englishman’s discretion and put into service to save them from an environment of ‘rogues and beggars’. For a culture that had travelled through Byzantium and Greece, through the Ukraine and Spain, from Persia and Transylvania, this was a savage but not entirely unfamiliar welcome to a certain type of English temperament.
The gypsies brought plenty of spook with them. The reading of hands, the sallow skin, narrow headed lurchers, the wagons, the rouged cheek and dark plait, the bare-knuckle etiquette, not to mention “tigress eyes”, according to Henry Williamson in his Life in a Devon Village. Gypsies soon became the largest migratory group of travellers in the west country.
They became kings and queens of fairs and revels: Stow, Bampton and Bridgewater all had fairs that featured the grand tents and wild fiddle tunes of the travelling Roma. For the men, coats were long and black, with plush, brightly coloured waistcoats, velvet knee-breeches and brogues. Come the evening, the women turned the volume up still further, with amber feathers tucked into turbans, white satin dresses, bare shoulders covered by multi-coloured shawls. Bottles were uncorked, howls thrown at the moon, and the gutsy dancing ached the feet but thrilled the soul.
As long as the gypsies remained as travelling exotics, as symbols of a kind of freedom that many secretly covet, then they enjoyed an uneasy peace. Problems would deepen with a kind of quasi-settling on the edges of town – due to agricultural depression from the 1880s – which meant it was more efficient to stay put in desperate times. The glamour fades a little when the occasional chicken gets stolen, or wallet relieved of its bragging owner. You start to notice the tattered edges on the edge of those grand tents. Everyone loves a scapegoat, and who better than those dark-eyed, strange-tongued travellers at the edge of town?
To be gypsy was to watch your myths travel ahead five paces of you wherever you want. A strong look. It could fill the tent on a Saturday night's dancing, get young women paying over the odds to have their cards read on matters of love, but it could also have you picking your teeth out of the cobbles, it could have your children pulled right from your grasp. The open road was like a plump vein to them, a trail full of nourishing blood, but also a duende vocation, carrying sorrow and pride alongside, a mottled, magpied glory of hard earned eloquence. Maps were not used, rather a nomadic homing instinct, looking for the old resting places, Dannal’s Basin in the Mendips, or Ember Pond further west. To the locals it was hard to make out a pattern to the wandering, but they had their own kind of song-lines, their own way of getting where they needed to get to. Much of the movement was seasonal, and to do with hop picking, fruit picking, and onto the horse fairs.
The language is delicious, an honour to have it spoken in England or enjoyed on the page:
Wusto-mengresky tem Wrestler’s country, Devonshire
Lil-engresky gav Book fellows' town, Oxford
Rokrengreskey gav Talking fellows' town, Norwich
Mi-develskey gav My God’s town, Canterbury
I spent the latter half of my twenties fairly frequently around travelling people. My tent was originally situated near a stopping off point for travellers coming down from areas of Wales and into England. This could be as simple as a horse drawn cart arriving, almost silently, at dusk, or waking up to find a vast array of trucks, children and hastily erected benders filling the lane in the early dawn light. Within hours the music would begin, the relentless thump of techno rather than the lilt of the fiddle, and frequently a kind of chaos that was not edifying. This was nothing to do with “back to the land” it was a kind of truck life, an occasionally nightmarish mirror to the very straight laced environment of the Cotwolds they saw stretched out in front of them. They kind of suited each other. With each hot headed police clash, both sides lumbered out for battle, each needing the other in some way. This was not Roma culture, not Irish traveller, but a kind of dilapidated council estate on wheels.
That sounds harsh, but anyone who has been in close contact with this element of the travelling community knows the truth of what I’m writing.
For every quiet and reasonably sober traveller that came through, these occasional terror-hoards were the ones who would amp up the locals, pitch up for battle and leave a bad atmosphere for years to come.
When a society rejects something, it invites it to turn ugly. If the concept of people living under canvas, or on the road, is utterly unacceptable, then myth tells us it will regress - what was once beautifully wild turns savage. This is what I am describing. Any culture worthy of the name positions initiations, fayres, art, music, as conduits between the margins and the centre. This is an old truth. It is a way of handling and being edified by wildness, but keeping the kids safe and healthy. It is mediation of the spontaneous, the unexpected, the liminal, back into the place of the village. Living in a time like this, is it any surprise we get the viking masses at the Roman gates ready to play out this scene again and again?
It is too easy to label the earlier descriptions of Roma as nostalgia. It is more than that. It is a recognition. It is a longing. They are beset by just as many issues as the English, but they have been emblematic, mythically tuned to represent a certain kind of openness to un-shackled freedom.
The gypsies came to this country at an auspicious time, partially to remind us of something that we were in danger of losing. This kind of grotesque mimic that I have just described makes me wonder whether it has now gone. Gypsies have been a vivid mirror of otherness in this country for over four hundred years, and our resolute failure to engage reasonably with them has helped create this cartoon-junkie on wheels caricature that this small, but noisy set of travellers represent. They’re us, we made them.
Copyright Martin Shaw 2013
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laphroaig quarter cask: a marvel
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dear friends from the Minnesotan backwoods
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writing
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Dig Village/ A Birthday/ Scythian Speculation
One of my new translations (with Tony Hoagland)- to commemorate reaching the ancient peaks of 42 years this coming Thursday.
The Turn in the Road
Welsh, From traditional verse; seventeenth century
Past forty,
a man can carry
the flush
of a tree in leaf,
and shoulder a
quiver of speech.
He can laugh quietly
over his scars
as he strides
the years.
But the sound of
a vault being opened,
Lets the
crow settle
on the soft acres
of his face.
DIG VILLAGE AND THE ORAL TRADITION
I finally have a moment in what is proving a heinously busy month to get into my study and scrawl down a few thoughts. Just had a great weekend with a new project from the Time Team folk - Dig Village. (Time Time is massively influential British TV show on archeology). Dig Village - the clues is in the name really.
They go digging for archeology - i go digging for story. There was great fellowship/beer/mud/wild speculation/a chilly and magnificent church/ and proper finds emerging from the soil - with a tithe-barn of local folk to hear the story of their place told back to them on the Sunday night. This was the moment i gathered the fragments of folk-lore and straight out fact from around the small town of Dunster (a grateful nod to the wonderful Helen Geake for providing some historical anchor points). High stakes poker really - when relatives of characters in the stories could well have been beadily eyeing me in the candle-lit gloom of an autumn night. Many of the stories details only landed in my lap in the hours leading up to the telling.
This all felt like a little triumph for the oral tradition - rescuing the stories from documents and getting them spoken out into the resonating air of the place itself. Imagine if every village in the country had their storytellers (who used to be cultural and speculative historians of a sort) rescuing their stories and folk-lore back out of the records and hearing them settle back into the hearts of the local folk? Get to it! What a great way to elegantly deepen the current revival of storytelling. More on that thought as it develops.
Later that night i stood out in the rain and gave a little single-malt to the grasses by the open test pits. Gazing down into those crow-dark underworld holes, and then up at the resolute and moon-brooding Dunster castle, history had slyly crept into my shoulder-bag of stories.
It was great also to meet some amazingly resilient diggers putting in the hours. My little daughter only has respect for the ones clutching trowels on the TV show. Stories she hears everyday round the woodburner. They were like something from the old tales themselves...
So in honour of where history/archeology/folklore bang into each other - here is a repeat of a post i think i out up last year.
A Scythian Camelot
C. Scott Littleton and Linda A. Malcor (2000), two scholars of folklore and anthropology, have made the case that the core of the Arthurian tradition is not Celtic, but Iranian.
Scythia was the western segment of the vast “sea of grass” that extended all the way from the Altai Mountains to the Hungarian Steppes. Everyone in this region spoke a variant of north-eastern Iranian. The academic view is that the changes in dialect were minimal, and that tribal groups were bound in a common culture. They were fierce; unlike the Celts, who were still utilising horse-drawn chariots, they were on horse back, fighting with bow, lance and sword. In a show of equality, women fought alongside. In fact, it was said that there was a marriage law that forbade a girl to marry until she had killed an enemy in battle. Wow.
This was the nomad culture of the ancient steppes: the Scythians, the Sarmatians, and then later the Alans of classical times. They adored art engraved with animals, often with great curling manes of gold, and were often blue-eyed and blond-haired. These steppe Iranians were visually different from how a typical Persian may look.
Part of the theory of Littleton and Malcor is that, as this culture (now almost forgotten), followed migrational patterns to France and England, they carried a kernel of stories with them – their myths.
In the year 175, the Roman emperor Marcus Aurealius sent a contingent of 5,500 Sarmartian cavalry to Britain. They were posted in groups of five hundred along Hadrian’s wall. When their fighting time was done, instead of returning overseas, they settled in a vicus, or veteran’s colony. The post was very near the modern day village of Ribchester, up in Lancashire. Their commander – practically hero worshipped – was named Lucius Artorius Castus, prefect of the VI legion Victrix, who was charged with the defence of northern Britain. There were numerous occasions for the Steppe Iranians to have contact with Europeans during late antiquity, and to permeate the stories that eventually became the fuller, medieval picture.
The theory is that certain key motifs and characters in Scythian mythology fit unusually well with the Arthurian canon. There is a magical cup called the Nartamongae, a grail-like vessel that never runs out of food and drink, and appears at feasts to the most worthy. It is not in the running as the chalice of the last supper (a later add on), but certainly fits with earlier Welsh and wider Celtic images of a cauldron or stone.
There is also Arthur having Excalibur thrown back into a lake by faithful Sir Bedivere; the great Scythian mythical hero Batraz, when stricken with guilt over much destruction, orders his sword also to be thrown into water – this time, the sea. Both henchmen fail to accomplish the task several times, and both heroes know that their servants are lying because they are aware of magical occurrences that will take place when they do. For Arthur, it is the hand of the lady of the lake reaching out, for Batraz, it is the waters turning wild and blood red.
Even the beginning of Arthur’s work life – the drawing of the sword from the stone – bears resemblance to the old Scythian motif of a great warrior drawing a sword from the soil. Even the name Lancelot – never perceived as British in the first place - is suggested to be a derivative of Alan of Lot – the Alans being another well travelled Scythian group. It’s intriguing at least.
Nomads Breed Nomads
The Alans arrive several hundred years later, in the fifth century, and marry into families in France. The Alans are serious business, they carry quite a reputation with them. They love fighting, adore their wagons, and regard it as an embarrassment to ever be caught on foot. Although they carry their heritage proudly, they assimilate well. Ageing was not encouraged, and killing your parents was seen as quite reasonable behaviour if you needed to spread your wings a little.
The Alans enjoyed all sorts of privileges, continually intermarrying into the next invading force to the point where, when William the Conqueror takes over England, many of the French afforded English estates were in fact Alans – feudal and deadly lords over the conquered English. It is partially these very knights who commissioned the medieval Arthurian romances that then fed back into France, and had such an impact on Troubadour culture and the courtly love ideal. Could it be such a stretch of the imagination that these lordly enthusiasms of the stories were partially a recognition of ancient images surfacing again in their new home?
It is ironic that those very Lords of William helped create a new nomadic culture – not of the steppes, but of the Greenwood – as a reaction against the brutality of their own regime change. As we will see in a later chapter, the image of these invaders forged a strong, marginal consciousness in the relegated, on-the-run lords, minstrels and wolfs-heads, who took to the forest to form inventive retaliatory strikes against the “Norman yoke” Funny how it all comes around. Up sprung Eadric the Wild, Brumannus, and Brave Hereward the Wake, to combat the most recent set of invaders and ignite the oppressed imaginations. Doomed of course - but we all love a hopeless cause.
In their lairs in the woods and waste places…they laid a thousand secret ambushes and traps for the Normans.
Flowers of History, thirteenth century chronicle
The arrival of William was a great class leveller – everyone was in trouble. Even twenty years after his arrival, there was a trail of decimated villages and homesteads in the line marking his march to London. Soon there were only two English names in the Domesday survey as tenants-in-chief of the King. There was Ailric of Marsh Gibbon, gripping his land ‘at rent, heavily and wretchedly’, and Warwickshire Hereward, now in service to the charming sounding Ogier the Breton. It was an unbelievably brutal period, England was a trembling bell in the wake of the Normans.
So we have this theory that the roots of the Arthurian canon (stories seen as the embodiment of the best of English mythology), derives from ancient folktales of the foreign conquerors, from way back when.
The Greenwood rebellion it invokes, although never a revolution, instates what I later (in essay) call a 'leaf bowed morality’, something that I believe that Arthur and the whole courtly system have been greatly sympathetic to; that the margins hold a clarity of ethics that call account to the indulgences and atrophies of the centre. Where else is it that the Knights of the Round Table ride again and again, for spiritual and ethical refreshment? The two strands of Arthurian and Hood are in no way opposed, but mystically entwined in western mythology. So, it could be argued, that Scythian culture is behind the two most vibrant threads of English story!
Scythia holds some of the most powerful myths that we in the west have encountered. It is right and probable that research should be done to investigate the mythic migratory routes, and that this canon of Arthurian stories and the Iranian images be amongst them. This is an exciting development. Or at least it will be, until they figure out that the Scythian stories originate in Africa, or North Korea, and then it all begins again.
A story's origins is not its end. It rolls around like a sow in mud, and picks up fragrant lumps of cultured soil and toddles on, drunk and frisky.
We find Russian fairy tales in New Mexico, or is it the other way around? The Arthurian romances, Nart sagas, Peublo love stories, keep unfolding, every time we gather round a fire and the mythteller begins.
This healthy tugging at what we presume is established facts has a tricksterish goodness to it – this emerging Scythian Camelot illustrates the collective commons perfectly. Who owns the story? The people of the Caucasus mountains? The medieval scholar? The dreamy child in love with the romances? Where did it begin, where does it end, and where do we stamp copyright? Such it is with empire thinking.
If we go all the way back to the ancient world, to the old bardic and prophetic traditions, what we find is that men and women are not thought to be authors so much as vessels through which other forces act and speak.
Lewis Hyde (Hyde 2010 :19)
To an exclusively written society, the long reach of the Arthurian stories can seem bewildering if one is trying to anchor a living tradition down to the authorship of specific individuals. Of course there are beloved signposts; Geoffrey of Monmouth, Chretien de Troyes, Wolfram Von Ecshenbach, Malory. But to nail it down seems tricky, when the origination and destination points of the story are wonderfully shrouded in the mysterious. Everyone is working out of someone else. And who’s to say that the story is not ‘working’ them?
This is not always a popular idea for a modern society focused on the notion of the entirely original, brilliant summoner of new ideas. And, in the old way of thinking, even if there was no historical precedent, then it is likely the ‘new’ notion is a divine wind emerging rather than thrashed out in the mind, entirely without supernatural assistance. That would be seen as a very unsophisticated idea.
Hyde, a man who has worked deeply into thoughts around originality and ownership, reminds us of this quote from Goethe.
Everything I have seen, heard, and observed I have collected and exploited. My works have been nourished by countless different individuals, by innocent and wise ones, peoples of intelligence and dunces…I have often reaped what others have sowed. My work is the work of a collective being that bears the name of Goethe.
(Hyde 2010 177-78)
So where is the copyright? Are we to be like Benjamin Franklin, refusing a patent on his wood stove as he understood it to be a collective, the bringing to fruition of many individual's ideas; or more contemporary - battling it out in the law courts for the merest shred of personal innovation? Of course, part of the genius of both Goethe and Franklin is the assembling of these others ideas into a cohesive whole; that alone blows open the distinction between ‘I’ and the ‘many’. Both points of view are served within one individual, and make art.
Within the storytelling traditions, a certain sense of handed downess is actually a sign of authenticity, it is to be admired, sought after, it indicates roots. It could be that in the second half of an individual’s life, a natural balancing between influence and instinct arises and contributes to a convincing sense of mythtelling. But I wouldn’t be too eager to point out where that dividing line is: it pulses in and out like a heartbeart.
The Arthurian story is too big, too well travelled, too deep, too robust, to have irate steppe Iranians claiming it back for the Caucasus. Elvis has long since left the building. And in the same way, Celtic scholars will have to suck on that same lemon as long atrophied ideas about the tradition’s routes suddenly leap thousands of miles to the east. This is a commons of the imagination. The claims of diffusion through Europe, or even Jung’s rather exhausted collective unconscious are but milky teats hanging on the magical belly of the stories as they amble through the known and unknown worlds.
It is difficult to begin without borrowing.
Thoreau
Copyright Martin Shaw 2013
The Turn in the Road
Welsh, From traditional verse; seventeenth century
Past forty,
a man can carry
the flush
of a tree in leaf,
and shoulder a
quiver of speech.
He can laugh quietly
over his scars
as he strides
the years.
But the sound of
a vault being opened,
Lets the
crow settle
on the soft acres
of his face.
DIG VILLAGE AND THE ORAL TRADITION
I finally have a moment in what is proving a heinously busy month to get into my study and scrawl down a few thoughts. Just had a great weekend with a new project from the Time Team folk - Dig Village. (Time Time is massively influential British TV show on archeology). Dig Village - the clues is in the name really.
They go digging for archeology - i go digging for story. There was great fellowship/beer/mud/wild speculation/a chilly and magnificent church/ and proper finds emerging from the soil - with a tithe-barn of local folk to hear the story of their place told back to them on the Sunday night. This was the moment i gathered the fragments of folk-lore and straight out fact from around the small town of Dunster (a grateful nod to the wonderful Helen Geake for providing some historical anchor points). High stakes poker really - when relatives of characters in the stories could well have been beadily eyeing me in the candle-lit gloom of an autumn night. Many of the stories details only landed in my lap in the hours leading up to the telling.
This all felt like a little triumph for the oral tradition - rescuing the stories from documents and getting them spoken out into the resonating air of the place itself. Imagine if every village in the country had their storytellers (who used to be cultural and speculative historians of a sort) rescuing their stories and folk-lore back out of the records and hearing them settle back into the hearts of the local folk? Get to it! What a great way to elegantly deepen the current revival of storytelling. More on that thought as it develops.
Later that night i stood out in the rain and gave a little single-malt to the grasses by the open test pits. Gazing down into those crow-dark underworld holes, and then up at the resolute and moon-brooding Dunster castle, history had slyly crept into my shoulder-bag of stories.
It was great also to meet some amazingly resilient diggers putting in the hours. My little daughter only has respect for the ones clutching trowels on the TV show. Stories she hears everyday round the woodburner. They were like something from the old tales themselves...
So in honour of where history/archeology/folklore bang into each other - here is a repeat of a post i think i out up last year.
A Scythian Camelot
C. Scott Littleton and Linda A. Malcor (2000), two scholars of folklore and anthropology, have made the case that the core of the Arthurian tradition is not Celtic, but Iranian.
Scythia was the western segment of the vast “sea of grass” that extended all the way from the Altai Mountains to the Hungarian Steppes. Everyone in this region spoke a variant of north-eastern Iranian. The academic view is that the changes in dialect were minimal, and that tribal groups were bound in a common culture. They were fierce; unlike the Celts, who were still utilising horse-drawn chariots, they were on horse back, fighting with bow, lance and sword. In a show of equality, women fought alongside. In fact, it was said that there was a marriage law that forbade a girl to marry until she had killed an enemy in battle. Wow.
This was the nomad culture of the ancient steppes: the Scythians, the Sarmatians, and then later the Alans of classical times. They adored art engraved with animals, often with great curling manes of gold, and were often blue-eyed and blond-haired. These steppe Iranians were visually different from how a typical Persian may look.
Part of the theory of Littleton and Malcor is that, as this culture (now almost forgotten), followed migrational patterns to France and England, they carried a kernel of stories with them – their myths.
In the year 175, the Roman emperor Marcus Aurealius sent a contingent of 5,500 Sarmartian cavalry to Britain. They were posted in groups of five hundred along Hadrian’s wall. When their fighting time was done, instead of returning overseas, they settled in a vicus, or veteran’s colony. The post was very near the modern day village of Ribchester, up in Lancashire. Their commander – practically hero worshipped – was named Lucius Artorius Castus, prefect of the VI legion Victrix, who was charged with the defence of northern Britain. There were numerous occasions for the Steppe Iranians to have contact with Europeans during late antiquity, and to permeate the stories that eventually became the fuller, medieval picture.
The theory is that certain key motifs and characters in Scythian mythology fit unusually well with the Arthurian canon. There is a magical cup called the Nartamongae, a grail-like vessel that never runs out of food and drink, and appears at feasts to the most worthy. It is not in the running as the chalice of the last supper (a later add on), but certainly fits with earlier Welsh and wider Celtic images of a cauldron or stone.
There is also Arthur having Excalibur thrown back into a lake by faithful Sir Bedivere; the great Scythian mythical hero Batraz, when stricken with guilt over much destruction, orders his sword also to be thrown into water – this time, the sea. Both henchmen fail to accomplish the task several times, and both heroes know that their servants are lying because they are aware of magical occurrences that will take place when they do. For Arthur, it is the hand of the lady of the lake reaching out, for Batraz, it is the waters turning wild and blood red.
Even the beginning of Arthur’s work life – the drawing of the sword from the stone – bears resemblance to the old Scythian motif of a great warrior drawing a sword from the soil. Even the name Lancelot – never perceived as British in the first place - is suggested to be a derivative of Alan of Lot – the Alans being another well travelled Scythian group. It’s intriguing at least.
Nomads Breed Nomads
The Alans arrive several hundred years later, in the fifth century, and marry into families in France. The Alans are serious business, they carry quite a reputation with them. They love fighting, adore their wagons, and regard it as an embarrassment to ever be caught on foot. Although they carry their heritage proudly, they assimilate well. Ageing was not encouraged, and killing your parents was seen as quite reasonable behaviour if you needed to spread your wings a little.
The Alans enjoyed all sorts of privileges, continually intermarrying into the next invading force to the point where, when William the Conqueror takes over England, many of the French afforded English estates were in fact Alans – feudal and deadly lords over the conquered English. It is partially these very knights who commissioned the medieval Arthurian romances that then fed back into France, and had such an impact on Troubadour culture and the courtly love ideal. Could it be such a stretch of the imagination that these lordly enthusiasms of the stories were partially a recognition of ancient images surfacing again in their new home?
It is ironic that those very Lords of William helped create a new nomadic culture – not of the steppes, but of the Greenwood – as a reaction against the brutality of their own regime change. As we will see in a later chapter, the image of these invaders forged a strong, marginal consciousness in the relegated, on-the-run lords, minstrels and wolfs-heads, who took to the forest to form inventive retaliatory strikes against the “Norman yoke” Funny how it all comes around. Up sprung Eadric the Wild, Brumannus, and Brave Hereward the Wake, to combat the most recent set of invaders and ignite the oppressed imaginations. Doomed of course - but we all love a hopeless cause.
In their lairs in the woods and waste places…they laid a thousand secret ambushes and traps for the Normans.
Flowers of History, thirteenth century chronicle
The arrival of William was a great class leveller – everyone was in trouble. Even twenty years after his arrival, there was a trail of decimated villages and homesteads in the line marking his march to London. Soon there were only two English names in the Domesday survey as tenants-in-chief of the King. There was Ailric of Marsh Gibbon, gripping his land ‘at rent, heavily and wretchedly’, and Warwickshire Hereward, now in service to the charming sounding Ogier the Breton. It was an unbelievably brutal period, England was a trembling bell in the wake of the Normans.
So we have this theory that the roots of the Arthurian canon (stories seen as the embodiment of the best of English mythology), derives from ancient folktales of the foreign conquerors, from way back when.
The Greenwood rebellion it invokes, although never a revolution, instates what I later (in essay) call a 'leaf bowed morality’, something that I believe that Arthur and the whole courtly system have been greatly sympathetic to; that the margins hold a clarity of ethics that call account to the indulgences and atrophies of the centre. Where else is it that the Knights of the Round Table ride again and again, for spiritual and ethical refreshment? The two strands of Arthurian and Hood are in no way opposed, but mystically entwined in western mythology. So, it could be argued, that Scythian culture is behind the two most vibrant threads of English story!
Scythia holds some of the most powerful myths that we in the west have encountered. It is right and probable that research should be done to investigate the mythic migratory routes, and that this canon of Arthurian stories and the Iranian images be amongst them. This is an exciting development. Or at least it will be, until they figure out that the Scythian stories originate in Africa, or North Korea, and then it all begins again.
A story's origins is not its end. It rolls around like a sow in mud, and picks up fragrant lumps of cultured soil and toddles on, drunk and frisky.
We find Russian fairy tales in New Mexico, or is it the other way around? The Arthurian romances, Nart sagas, Peublo love stories, keep unfolding, every time we gather round a fire and the mythteller begins.
This healthy tugging at what we presume is established facts has a tricksterish goodness to it – this emerging Scythian Camelot illustrates the collective commons perfectly. Who owns the story? The people of the Caucasus mountains? The medieval scholar? The dreamy child in love with the romances? Where did it begin, where does it end, and where do we stamp copyright? Such it is with empire thinking.
If we go all the way back to the ancient world, to the old bardic and prophetic traditions, what we find is that men and women are not thought to be authors so much as vessels through which other forces act and speak.
Lewis Hyde (Hyde 2010 :19)
To an exclusively written society, the long reach of the Arthurian stories can seem bewildering if one is trying to anchor a living tradition down to the authorship of specific individuals. Of course there are beloved signposts; Geoffrey of Monmouth, Chretien de Troyes, Wolfram Von Ecshenbach, Malory. But to nail it down seems tricky, when the origination and destination points of the story are wonderfully shrouded in the mysterious. Everyone is working out of someone else. And who’s to say that the story is not ‘working’ them?
This is not always a popular idea for a modern society focused on the notion of the entirely original, brilliant summoner of new ideas. And, in the old way of thinking, even if there was no historical precedent, then it is likely the ‘new’ notion is a divine wind emerging rather than thrashed out in the mind, entirely without supernatural assistance. That would be seen as a very unsophisticated idea.
Hyde, a man who has worked deeply into thoughts around originality and ownership, reminds us of this quote from Goethe.
Everything I have seen, heard, and observed I have collected and exploited. My works have been nourished by countless different individuals, by innocent and wise ones, peoples of intelligence and dunces…I have often reaped what others have sowed. My work is the work of a collective being that bears the name of Goethe.
(Hyde 2010 177-78)
So where is the copyright? Are we to be like Benjamin Franklin, refusing a patent on his wood stove as he understood it to be a collective, the bringing to fruition of many individual's ideas; or more contemporary - battling it out in the law courts for the merest shred of personal innovation? Of course, part of the genius of both Goethe and Franklin is the assembling of these others ideas into a cohesive whole; that alone blows open the distinction between ‘I’ and the ‘many’. Both points of view are served within one individual, and make art.
Within the storytelling traditions, a certain sense of handed downess is actually a sign of authenticity, it is to be admired, sought after, it indicates roots. It could be that in the second half of an individual’s life, a natural balancing between influence and instinct arises and contributes to a convincing sense of mythtelling. But I wouldn’t be too eager to point out where that dividing line is: it pulses in and out like a heartbeart.
The Arthurian story is too big, too well travelled, too deep, too robust, to have irate steppe Iranians claiming it back for the Caucasus. Elvis has long since left the building. And in the same way, Celtic scholars will have to suck on that same lemon as long atrophied ideas about the tradition’s routes suddenly leap thousands of miles to the east. This is a commons of the imagination. The claims of diffusion through Europe, or even Jung’s rather exhausted collective unconscious are but milky teats hanging on the magical belly of the stories as they amble through the known and unknown worlds.
It is difficult to begin without borrowing.
Thoreau
Copyright Martin Shaw 2013
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Time Teams Dig Village: Dunster
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looking back - a years highlight: having fun with Coleman Barks
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