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"No One Can Ignore Their Destiny"

December 31, 2013, 9:49 am
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http://www.woodsisterswinterfestival.co.uk/

Friends:
Get yourself to the Wood Sisters winter storytelling festival in Devon this first of february: the link above will do it. Some fantastic storytellers - a feast - a great hoard of nutty and brilliant performers. I have it on good authority that women outnumber men at least two to one in this country as storytellers now, and some great examples of the art form are gathering here. Gentleman take notes.

Tom Crane is also a name to watch (under 18's storyteller of the year), Spindle Wayfarer is my absolute favorite teller of ghost stories, rocking up from the south-east is Abbie Palache with her antler-tipped tales, and many lucid and gifted yarn-spinners from the westcountry. Wish i could attend - bless the Wood Sisters and long may they do their work.

Alas we leave on the train for London in just a few hours - so 'APPY NEW YEAR.

Here's some Lorca translation from the Hut. Stephan Harding comes round and sings them in Spanish with guitar and wine. We weep and think about smoking cigars. He then gives them a very literal spanish-english translation. I then get my hooves in and hand them back. We then get out a dictionary and figure out what we can get away with. So here's just a few raw lines continuing this honouring of the feminine. And below that is something from the old country.

OK - see you on the other side. X


Manana (Morning) p. 118
7th August 1918 (Fuente Vaqueros, Granada)
To Fernando Marchesi

Waters song
can’t die.

It’s erotic sap
guttering the fields,
It’s the blood of poets
who’s souls get tangled
in the paths of nature.

Harmonies spill
from her welling crag,
sweet rhythms
she abandons
to us.

In the bright morning
the hearth smokes,
and its plumes are arms
groping upwards in the mist.

..In the rosiness of
a forever morning
she is mist:

moons honey
flowing from
buried stars.

Christ should have told us
to turn in our fears tonight -
all our pain and meaness -
to her who rises to the sky
wrapped in sheaths of white.

No one can ignore
their destiny.
It's the water
in which we drench
our souls.

Grief gifts us wings,
there is nothing to compare
to its holy shores.


Deirdre Remembers a Scottish Glen
Irish, unknown, possibly fourteenth century

Glen of my body's feeding:
crested breast of loveliest wheat,
glen of the thrusting lorn-horn cattle,
firm among the trysting bees.

Wild with cuckoo, thrush and blackbird,
and the frisky hind below the oak thick ridge.
Green roof that covered a thousand foxes,
glen of wild garlic and watercress,
and scarlet berried rowan.
And badgers, delirious with sleep,
heaped fat in dens next to their burrowed young.

Glen sentried with blue-eyed hawks,
greenwood laced with sloe, apple, blackberry,
tight-crammed amid ridge and pointed peaks.

My glen of the star-tangled yews,
where hares would lope in the easy dew.
It is a ringing pain to remember all this brightness.

Copyright Martin Shaw 2014
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Article 2

December 31, 2013, 9:50 am
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Article 1

December 31, 2013, 9:51 am
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last day of 2013: locking up the hut

December 31, 2013, 9:52 am
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When wild becomes feral

January 9, 2014, 4:23 pm
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England in flood, east coast blizzards, delayed flights, losing my hat on the journey (payment to the crosswinds): it was a trip but we made it. Our brave ally John Gouldthorpe swooped us up in the middle of the night and drove us north after twenty four hours straight travel. It's a delight to be back on the west coast, and to be leading "The Mythic Life" course at Stanford.
A quick note and then onto a piece on feral children. Oh and some agile Lorca on the duende of the guitar:

Escaping the
round mouth
of the guitar
is the bellied-sob
of roaming souls:

It is a sound that
halts even dreams,
they remove their hats
and begin to weep.

A tarantula,
she weaves a
great star
to float in
the guts of her
black-wooden-well.

A rare Bay Area mythtelling evening: as part of the wider Great Mother Westcoast Weekend.

January 31 at 6:00pm; The Center for Living Wisdom - 11270 Sun Valley Dr., Oakland, CA, 94605, Oakland, CA.
"Martin will be telling the archaic fairy tale “Faithful John”: a story of a young king, a red horse of desire, an ecstatic woman, a shirt of grandeur, a locked door and the three drops of poison in a brides breast. This extraordinary initiation story tells us much about living well in difficult times"

https://www.facebook.com/events/324469621025783/ Is the link to getting tickets. There are very few places!

“Feral” children, children raised independently of any human parents or society, are rare but do exist. Back in the eighteenth century, a wild girl came to the edge of a French village. She was around nine or ten, barefoot, a dress of skins and face and hands as “black as a Negroes.”2 The villagers set a raging bulldog on the girl, but she held her ground and struck him one mighty blow on its head with a club and it fell dead to the floor. She did a strange victory dance and ran back into the open countryside, climbed a tree, and fell asleep.

A visiting dignitary, the Viscount d’Epinoy, took an interest in the case of the feral girl, and had her captured and brought to him. She spoke no French, and loved to eat raw meat; any attempt to cook it, or add other delicacies, led her to have terrible abdominal pains. Turned out she wasn’t black either—when scrubbed down, her upper arms and chest were white. She had unusual hands; palms as small as a girl of her age but enlarged fingers and thumbs—from clutching branches they guessed as she swung around her favorite trees. She had a necklace and small pouch that contained her little club and knife. She was amazingly keen in her eyesight—they say she could see from all sides at the same time, could imitate birdsong, and using just her thumb and forefinger, she could dig deep holes.

When they fed her wine and salty food, her teeth and nails fell out. In a panic that she would die they baptized her on 16th June, 1732. When the Viscount died, she was put into the care of a convent where they kept her away from climbing trees, catching and eating frogs, imitating bird song, and anything else she loved to do. She learned to sew, and, from a beginning when she was afraid to be touched, grew passive and directed all attention at whoever was the most tactile. They say her voice was shrill and uncommon, just the odd broken word.

As she grew older she became semi-famous for her history and ended up in Paris, peddling books about her life. She ended up owning most of the copies, piles filling around her small bed. She consciously tried to be a curiosity, a freak, in Paris’s Rue St Antoine, but grew steadily more private, her health permanently ruined by the savage change of diet that had been forced upon her.

During her life she attracted the attention of wealthy patrons and even royalty. The great mystery was where she came from—an Inuit? a Norwegian? This seemed to be answered by her account to James Burnett. She talked of a sea journey from a long distant land, being painted black to be sold on as a slave, before ending up in France and living entirely wild for ten years. There is convincing evidence that she started life into the Fox tribe of Wisconsin—then a French colony—before being sold to a Madame de Courtemanche, arriving in Marseille just as a plague descended. It was then she escaped to the woods of Provence, to be discovered a decade later, wild as they come. In the end, the girl from the forest, now known as Memmie Le Blanc, died alone at the age of sixty-three.

Memmie’s story reveals a society at odds with otherness, and the slow acting poison enacted when she is taken from the wild into the domestic without due support. She had fallen out of some other story that we have forgotten. A horrible irony is when, in the wider cases of children raised by animals, some speculate that the children would never recover from the “lack of love.”Lack of love? While I acknowledge that love from a wolf or monkey would have a profoundly different quality to that of a human, to state there is no love displayed is an anathema.

The love of tending, feeding, and protecting something as profoundly other as a human child is a huge demonstration of love. They could have just as easily become dinner. This disconnect is not forged in the wild, but the damage abundant in the mindset of the domestic. What are called feral children are not, these days, rummaging around in the un- dergrowth of the forest, but in the estates and projects of Birmingham, Detroit, and East London. I’ve worked alongside multitudes of them, and the real wild is exactly where they need to go.

Another story. The reverend Singh was a missionary to the tribes around Midnapore, a town roughly eighty miles southwest of Calcutta. He ran an orphanage. Stopping for a night in a local village, the villagers urged him to perform an exorcism in the forest—they were seeing ghosts. He agreed and they made their way to an enormous anthill, as high as a house. At dusk, a wolf stole out from one of its many tunnels, then three more and some cubs. And then, behind the cubs came the ghosts, two of them.

Singh realized in an instant that they were children, despite running on all fours with their heads down. The reports are that they were terribly ugly, with matted hair from their heads covering their faces, with just glittering eyes peering out. They were “rescued” and briefly placed in the local’s care while the reverend continued on his travels for another few days. On his return the girls were half starved, soiled, and covered in sores on his return—and tied up. He took control and had them taken back to the orphanage.

They stalked, ate, and drank like wolves. They adored darkness and would wander the compound on all fours at night. They pissed where they wanted, and lay bunched up tight together when sleeping. They seemed fearless to many things that terrorize the psyche of the civilized. Apart from briefly befriending a child and then suddenly attacking him, they remained wildly aloof, seeming to have no interest in others. They were all to themselves. They didn’t laugh and only showed distress when one of the girls —Amala (they were both now named Amala and Kamala) sickened and died.

Kamala went into profound grief and pulled entirely back from contact with other humans. She would smell Amala’s clothes and wander the gardens, as if looking for her. The orphanage was worried she would literally die of loneliness. In the end it was Mrs. Singh who started to give the wolf-girl massages and talk lovingly and softly to the girl, and that brought her back from the very edge. For eight more years she lived at the orphanage, and received love and care. But, like most children brought out from the care of the wild, did not live a long life, and in 1929 she died.

The village as herd mentality wanted to starve, abuse, and ultimately kill the girls, full in the knowledge that they were children. Rumors from that region abound that girl babies were often left in the forest to die. These dark children, the truly exiled, shunned, cursed, driven mad not by the forest but by the return, have a champion in Cundrie, a hundred thousand just like Amala and Kamala are gathered under her cloak of fierce language.

Daniel Deardorff states: “The Genius of Deformity is much more than a vantage afforded by alterity, nor is it a mere capacity of human intelligence—it is the extra-human agent of the imagination. It is the lost and longed for twin...”3 So, mesmeric as the images of the wolf-girls are, and heartbreaking as their story goes, we are faced by a mirror of how we generally react to otherness. But Deardoff also touches on the area of longing for the lost children of the woods. We weep for them because somewhere in our befuddlement we recognize that we are they. It is not enough to just ladle wild perception onto these remote figures in place of our own, or accept them as intellectual propositions. We are really in the business of profound recognition. It is what makes the divide between the court and the forest so very painful.

Copyright Martin Shaw 2014
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Article 0

January 9, 2014, 4:24 pm
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collaborations

January 29, 2014, 1:35 pm
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I am having the strange experience of peering out of my office window on campus to see if John Densmore is striding purposefully through the mist clutching drums and coffee. Yep - Doors founder and drummer supremo is stopping by class tonight to talk about myth and rock'n'roll and the soul of an american. Well i hope so. His plane touches down in about forty five minutes and then the wait begins. Being a typical brit abroad i have no cell phone - so have just arranged to meet on a particular bench and wait for his car to roll in to our vast campus. We have a gig in the bay area this weekend but i won't go any further with that because the tickets are sold out i'm afraid.

However - it is a time of collaborations:
DEEP SHAPES FOR NEW TIMES: AN EVENING WITH MARTIN SHAW AND TONY HOAGLAND

Thursday, February 13, 2014, 7:30pm
Cubberley Auditorium, Stanford University
FREE, open to the public

I am also really delighted to say that ALICE OSWALD will be coming to teach on "The Green Teeth of the Sea The Blue Tent of Sky" long course at Schumacher college. Please consider joining us - anyone that has not got onto the School of Myth year programme i would recommend without hesitation thinking about this.

Ok - here comes the blurb:

April to July 2014

With Martin Shaw, Tony Hoagland, John Gouldthorpe, Alice Oswald and Stephan Harding

£1295 All course fees include accommodation, some meals, field trips and all teaching sessions
This course is open for bookings.

A different kind of activism. A different kind of thinking.

If the heart of ecology is mythology, then we can say that in a story we witness a large part of its imagination.

The word ecology derives from a study of relatedness: of oaks, volcanos, large stretches of dark water, and the organisms that teem within them. The majestic roots of many ancient stories illustrate similar connections – also referring to tangled, inner-kingdoms we carry within ourselves.

For thousands of years that sense of the interior effortlessly flooded outwards into the hemlock, gorse and wild flower meadow, till no clear distinction was necessary. This created a kind of cosmos, a generous form of thought to the wider, living world.

So where do we find stories imbued with such imaginative inclusiveness? Why do they matter? How could they deepen the conversations of now?


Nothing like being abroad to make you think of home: Here's some thoughts on that ecstatic Gerrard Winstanley.

The Revolution That Never Happened

“In the beginning of time God made the earth. Not one word was spoken at the beginning that one branch of mankind should rule over another, but selfish imaginations did set up one man to teach and rule over another.”
Gerrard Winstanley

It is tempting to view the 17th Century in England from a view point only of rapid expansion – the American colonies were being founded, the flag was being vigorously plunged into native soils all over the globe. For such a tiny continent, its delusions of grandeur were swiftly becoming realities of grandeur. But when we turn our gaze to the old turf itself, we find all kind of trouble brewing.

Groups like the Grindletonians, Fifth Monarchists, Diggers, Levellers, Seekers, Ranters, Muggletonians, were a strident cry from the people to disassemble the existing social, economic, political even religious order of the day. Their arguments had teeth: these were confident, strident men and women willing to put their very lives on the line. This is not so unusual. As Christopher Hill reminds us (Hill 1972 :13): “popular revolt was for many years an essential feature of the English tradition.”

The historian Hill writes about two revolutions in the era. One is the successful establishing of the ‘sacred rights of property’ – power to parliament and the wealthy, reducing all hindrances to their continued abundance; and secondly, to what he calls “the revolution that never happened”. This is the dissenting dreams of the diggers and all, a dream of communal property, a clear democracy within politics, a sharp examination of religious creed. Some claimed that the church was living far from the ideal of Christ, whilst other radicals claimed indifference to the holy book at all. Although some of the ideas of these groups seem jumbled or obscure, Hill rightly claims that their rebel spirit is unfolding over time: that Digger energy is in the mix of today’s socialism, that the Levellers position gains in clarity as democracy rises in the late Nineteenth Century.

From the north came Gerrard Winstanley, from the good parish of Wigan, sloshed clean with holy water in the year 1609. In his late twenties he moved to London and married the daughter of a surgeon – something we can only imagine as a move upwards. He then watched the English Civil War disrupt, and finally wipe out, his business as an apprentice clothier. Being made destitute, he took refuge with his father-in-law and moved to Cobham in Surrey, where he initially took up work as a cowherd. Bent by labour and pockets emptied by war, Winstanley wrestled his soul daily, staring out over the black fields. The poverty he witnessed, and to an extent endured, shocked him profoundly, and the constant threat of eviction of the poor by landlords appalled him.

He produced a pamphlet entitled The New Laws of Righteousness that was clear in its advocacy of a kind of Christian communism. He drew from Acts, chapter two, vr 44 and 45: “All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need.” Winstanley fuelled his thinking (as many had before him) by a vigorous reading of biblical texts – especially the book of Samuel’s ambivalence to kingship. The brew was made especially heady when he threw in a large dose of old English radicalism going as far back as Wat Tyler’s Peasants' Revolt of 1381. His pen grew hot: “Seeing the common people of England by joynt consent of person and purse have caste out Charles our Norman oppressour, wee have by this victory recovered ourselves from under his Norman yoake.” This issue of the ‘Norman yoake' we have noted as an crucial for the rise of noblemen involved in greenwood banditry in an earlier chapter. So there is the double rub of society going against the essence of biblical doctrine, and the rich sucking on the sour tit of the oppressors. We can practically see the water start to bubble around this man.

Come 1649, a brief time after his arrival in Cobham, Winstanley had started to put his beliefs into practice. He and his followers started to cultivate common land in four counties – Surrey, Buckinghamshire, Northamptonshire and Kent. There was an immediate response to his message due to roughly a century of unauthorised squatting in the forests and wastelands due to land shortage. What Winstanley did was give it shape, a certain ecstatic dignity. The ecstatic element came from the trances he claimed brought on his ideas, the dignity from the biblical undertow to his community message. This is another form of English liminal culture – insights drawn from the edge of consciousness and, as usual, causing trouble within the status quo.

As soon as crops grew they were distributed without charge, as his message dictated. This kind of generosity always rattles cages and local landowners got edgy. Only one year later, the colonies were destroyed and all involved endured a beating by hired hard men. Crops were destroyed, houses and tools too.

Lesser men would have taken the kicking and retreated into the mists of time. But Winstanley got busy. Another pamphlet appeared: The Laws of Freedom in a Platform, where he argues that the right and proper Christian basis of right living is to abolish property and wages all together.

“If any man or family want corn or other provision, they may go to the storehouses and fetch without money. If they want a horse to ride, go to the common fields in summer, or to the common stables in winter, and receive one from the keepers, and when your journey is performed, bring him where you had him, without money.”
(Winstanley 1652)

Winstanley pushes the Anabaptist view that all institutions by their very nature corrupt: “nature tells us that if water stands still long enough it corrupts; whereas running water keeps sweet and is fit for common use.” This is just a warm up for then regaling Oliver Cromwell to fulfil the scriptures and hand the land over to the oppressed. It must have been a heartbreak to witness the toppling of royalty and the next devious agenda be hurriedly put in place. In its days, the Law of Freedom was quite the seller, although the Restoration loomed on the horizon to dictate the way society organised itself.

What really stuck in Winstanley’s craw was the notion of private property (specifically land); it is this that he regarded as the true fall of man. He believed that the creator made the world as a “common treasury” and that to divide that by hierarchy was actually a satanic enterprise. Wage labour, buying and selling, all reeked of sulphur. Surely this is the greenwood spirit born anew?

Certainly, much of the clergy got it in the neck too. And for good reason; many had been bought off by William the Conqueror instituting tithes for them to be paid. He rages: “Yet the clergy tell the poor people
to be content with poverty now and heaven hereafter. Why may people not have a comfortable maintenance here and heaven hereafter too. We gave no consent to acknowledge crown and royalist land, our purchased inheritance being sold.”

The later part of his life is obscured. Someone of his name died in 1676 as a Quaker in London. A quiet fame has grown for Winstanley and an admiration, not just for his ideas that continue to unfold, but also for eloquence, his particular style of prose. Many of his beliefs of equality, love for love’s sake, a free medical service, have a very contemporary resonance. His is another kind of Englishness, a kind of pragmatic visionary, a lion at table with sheep. Like Robin Hood, this marginal seer is not oppositional to order, not a representative of chaos, but a reminder of an ancient value system, a glimpse of way back, a myth-line, a walking cosmology. He is a kind of remembering.


And finally some Lorca to sweeten us on our way:


Summer Madrigal
August 1920 (Vega de Zujaira)

Estrella, you gypsy.
Crush your
red mouth
onto mine.

Below noons
corn-bright gold,
i will bite that apple.

In the greeness of
the olive grove,
high on the hill,
there is an ancient
Moorish tower.

It’s walls are
the hue of your
peasant flesh,
which tastes of honey
and the dawn.

This tempest feast
of your sunburnt body,
flowers the river bed,
gives stars to the wind.

Brown light -
why do you give yourself
to me?

Your sway-heavy love,
your womanhood,
the darkling murmur
of your breasts?

Is it because i look glum?
Did my life’s
drought of singing
blaze you with pity?

How can it be that
you have settled for my laments
over the strong thighs
of a peasant Saint Christopher,
handsome and steady in love?

You are Goddess of the Forest.
Your bones smell of wheat
parched in summer sun.

Confound my eyes
with your song,
your hair is a thick
cloak of shadow
on the meadows
sweet grasses.

Your mouth
is filled with blood.
Spit me a new sky,
a star of pain
in its
fleshy depths.

My wild, Andalucian horse -
my Pegasus,
is blissed by your eyes,
his flight will be of desolation
when their light dims.

I know you never loved me.
But i loved you - for your
serious gaze,
like the lark loves a new day
if only for the dew.


Estrella you gypsy.
Bite your mouth to mine.
Under clear noon
let me ravage
that apple.

Copyright Martin Shaw 2014
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the way home from work

January 29, 2014, 1:37 pm
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Alice Oswald teaching on: "The Green Teeth of the Sea, the Blue Tent of the Sky"

January 29, 2014, 1:38 pm
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John Densmore

January 29, 2014, 2:44 pm
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The ONLY day gathering to be taught in Marin by Martin this winter

February 2, 2014, 6:50 pm
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THE CROW-KING AND THE RED-BEAD WOMAN:
Vocation, Imagination, and the Royal Road of Story
A day gathering with mythologist, storyteller and author Martin Shaw.

Sat 1st March 10-5 sliding scale: $85 - $150 sign up and details email Lisa Doron at ldoron87@gmail.com

An ancient Siberian tale insists that when the right bride appears for the son of the Khan, she will arrive from the edge - when she speaks precious red beads will pour from her mouth, and black sable will stroll where she walks. In this way the wild is wedded to the village.

However, on the day of the wedding, the community accept a sorceress who, when she speaks, rancid frogs spill to the floor and vicious ermine trail her hooves. We ask: in modern times what does it mean that our vision is so entranced we can’t discern the difference?

Through a day telling of the story, time in the wild and fellowship by the fire, we will explore the relationship of the story to the development of character and imagination. Padding alongside the story will be the image of the daemon - the spirit-being that turns our attention to the kind of life our soul signed up for. It is the daemonic intelligence that is the seat of the discernment we require to truly welcome the red- bead woman to the feast. Shaw will be bringing new Lorca translations to complement the mix.

No one can ignore their destiny.
It's the water in which
we drench our souls.
Lorca
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Article 3

February 2, 2014, 6:51 pm
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for the valentines

February 12, 2014, 2:52 pm
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AMOR

We really like to celebrate the beginnings of things; none more so than in love. We are deluged with stories about the burning ground of soul mates and true love. There is sudden changes of plot, divine sickness at the thought of the beloved, in general far more time stewing in the fantasy whilst they're absent then the growingly more mundane reality of their presence. We are told that this is what love is.

Love seems to indicate full bloom, an endless seasonal riff between spring and summer: it’s all connections, support, giddy leaning in, eye-contact, once-in-a lifetime imaginings. If there is much in the way of autumn's bare trees, or the iron ground of winter, then surely love has died, we were mistaken, we have to seek the giddy feeling of newness again. And again. We expect relationship to be mono – the unchanging characteristics we societally approve, rather than myth's poly– changeable, distant at times, suddenly wildly intense. It is not just one tree but an entire scrubland of copses, muddy streams and ghoulish owls. Complicated.

Because love rarely sustains the dynamic of the earlier, celebrated stage, we are often adrift at this deepening. Where is the giddy heights? The long married have no glamour, their stories do not litter the tabloids, we prefer to see them as stuck, or co-dependent, as we shuffle wistfully on to the next honey-gorged flower.

The writer John Welwood (2006) talks about two kinds of love – absolute love and relative love. Absolute love is that love which stands beyond human relations, but occasionally, fleetingly, shines through. When caught in its radiance we feel accepted, connected, at peace, part of the wider turning of stars and seasons. It’s wonderful. Spiritual folks will spend large amounts of their time trying to get tuned up to this, but for the wider world, we often experience it in the early stages of falling in love. So confirming is its presence that we decide that this must be love’s essence. It's core.

The problem is that if we experience this through the temporary gaze of another human we have to then realise the frailty of the human heart. Although the outpouring is majestic, it is also finite: we are so littered with defences and hurts that this absolute acceptance cannot be maintained by a human perspective indefinitely, our very life history will cause this divine light to grow dim and fluctuate. It is here that we find relative love.

The very openness that love engenders will awaken the coal-dark hounds of unfinished business and general misery that always hunt close to the lover's garden. There will be an equally strong counter intention to the intention of a fulfilling love relationship. These hounds sprinkle distorted perceptions, age old hurts, and defence mechanisms into the mix. Relative love, as Welwood reminds us, is dependent on time and circumstance. It is changeable, dependent on what gods stand behind us that day, the invisible inner-balcony of family members, how much sleep we were blessed with the night before. With all this in the mix, then the notion of love as a steady, unchanging state is highly naïve.

We are frequently being hurled between a sense of delicious oneness back to a relative two-ness, often unexpectedly. We reach tenderly to the resting lover and are faced by a teeth-snapping wrathful ogre.
Welwood points to openness to these moments of the absolute, but not an unreal expectancy that it is ever available. It almost never is. For every wave of euphoric connection he advises acceptance of the salty crash that will surely follow as a wider aspect of love, not as something ‘outside’ the experience, or that it has failed in some way.

This longing for oneness grows frantic when a truly religious sensibility diminishes in the world, because love becomes the only place to glimpse something that is, in truth, often beyond our conflicted psyche. It’s a glimpse of eternity. Gnostic groups of all persuasions and Sufi groups the world over have built elaborate systems to ritually encounter its radiance. The aspiration is deep and will not go away because it is the elusive core at the experience of life we all share. It is the business of connection.

All shape-leaping stories, nine day fasts, bizarre esoteric disciplines are hints of this animistic multiplicity of oneness, and that everything is alive and everything is connected. We hear this kind of language all the time - it gets tedious - but to actually experience it as fact is anything but ordinary.

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A Shaw/Hoagland translation:


The Owl-Court of Ifor Hael
Welsh, From Evan Evans; 1731-88

This eerie ruin among the alders,
ghostly hump of bramble and thorn,

was once the court of Ifor Hael.

Boys don’t make
their stick-dens here.

The thrush and badger
are discreet visitors

in a low lying fog,
or at dawn's yellow glitter.

Where are the poets?
the bard and storied-harp?

or the generous lord,
with a cup of wine at his arm?

For Dafydd,
chief of the skilled singers,

it was a bleak woe
to lay Ifor in the slick clay.

As he lit the red candles,
and the snow wetted his beard

then Dayfydd knew
that the game was up.

This used to be a welcome ground,
a broad thoroughfare of song,

but is now an owl-court
for those lost in the forest.

For all fame's
beating of shields

there’s no ramparts here
jutting through this ivy,

Just a moon-blue cry
from the thin, black branches.

DEEP SHAPES FOR NEW TIMES: AN EVENING WITH MARTIN SHAW AND TONY HOAGLAND

DATE/TIME
FEBRUARY 13, 7:30PM – 9:00PM
CATEGORY
ARTS, LITERARY ARTS
LOCATION
CUBBERLEY HALL, STANFORD UNIVERSITY

“Myth,” says storyteller Martin Shaw, “is not about a long time ago.” Created communally, over time, in full contact with the natural world, myth is instead a particular way of understanding ourselves and our world that offers new routes through the binds of the modern world. “Poetry,” says acclaimed poet Tony Hoagland, “offers a clarifying force through its similar use of polymorphic and enduring images.” Together, myth and poetry understand us in an uncommon way.

In this special evening, Shaw and Hoagland will weave myth and poetry to reveal how the deep shapes of their stories give us surprising ways for meeting the challenges of contemporary culture. Alongside select stories and poems, they will talk about the mysterious wisdom retained in these forms and how they can help us overcome the constraints that our culture imposes on our imaginations. Shaw and Hoagland will also read and discuss some of the translations of old Celtic poetry they have been collaborating on over the last two years.

Martin Shaw, PhD, is author of A Branch from the Lightning Tree and the forthcoming Snowy Tower: Parzival and the Wet Black Branch of Language. He is a master storyteller and currently Visiting Lecturer in the Oral Communication Program at Stanford.

Tony Hoagland is the author of four collections of poems, and winner of many prizes, including the Mark Twain Award for Humor in American Poetry. He teaches at the University of Houston and elsewhere.

Free and open to the public

Copyright Martin Shaw 2014
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February 12, 2014, 2:53 pm
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February 12, 2014, 2:54 pm
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hughes as mythteller

February 19, 2014, 10:31 am
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SNOWY TOWER BOOK EVENT
Saturday, March 8
Time: 7:30pm
Location: Point Reyes Presbyterian Church
Tickets: Free event. Donation requested

(get there early - these evenings at the church get very full)

DAY GATHERING
“The Crow-King and the Red-Bead Woman”
Vocation, Imagination, and the Royal Road of Story

Event Date: Saturday, March 1
Time: 10:00am to 5:00pm
Location: Petaluma ranch location (to be announced)
Tickets: Sliding scale ($85–150)
For details or to register, contact Lisa Doron at ldoron87@gmail.com.

(again - a big demand for places so please don't delay in booking and risk disappointment)


Holed up in the rather lovely Cardinal hotel in downtown Palo Alto preparing for a day with students and our final study of Parzival tonight. Sun is shining and i have excavated part of an essay which includes - not for the first time - a brief defense of Ted Hughes. More soon! M

Mad as the Mist and the Snow
So how do we find a language porous enough to hold red berries and fish scales in its syntax? We turn to a kind of poetics; a raised torrent that pleases the invisible world and some humans. But I do say ‘some’. For others, it is unwieldy.

Ted Hughes, one of the grittiest poets on animism that the English language has ever had, has received consistent criticism for the overloaded, almost violent range of image found in even one line of his poetry. The author Nick Bishop (Bishop 1994), decries Hughes' early work as “wielding language as a broadsword”, it “forcing the head down into submission”. He claims it all arises from some emphatically masculine impulse to ram an elevated literary consciousness down the throat of the unsuspecting reader.
For Bishop, the intense flavours are an avoidance of revealing psychological realities alive in the poet. All this drama – of horses and drumming ploughland – is merely a smokescreen for a hidden Hughesian consciousness. He’s hiding. Much later in Hughes’s timeline, he supports a lessening of ego, highlighting ‘Go Fishing’, a stanza I include here:

Join water
Let brain mist into moist earth
Ghost loosen away downstream
Gulp river and gravity

With these eastern infused lines, Bishop relaxes, far away from the battlefield of the earlier work. This can be approved of, in a wider, slightly vague western approval of eastern‘oneness’. Now Hughes has ensured that there is “no longer an arbitrary division between serenity and beauty above, and violence and beastliness below”. But that division is partially what makes Hughes’s work so compelling. That division and its pains are what the reader experiences as resolutely anchored through their own lives. It makes it relatable, despite its gnostic twists and almost unbearable tensions between ecstatic and hellish. Within myth, that division is called the wound, or the limp. And it's knowledge of it that activates genius. Not enlightenment necessarily, but genius.

Nature has ego, display, bloodied scenes, cruelties, spasmodic tenderness, and it is Hughes' dark inheritance that he allows it to wriggle madly though almost every line. To claim he should somehow get his learning, his spell-crafting, out of the way, to make some kind of more benign flow, is an appalling notion. He is a stag clearing ground in those early years, taking space, claiming air filled with twitters of lesser poets.
He’s not there to make nice.

Sometimes the mythological has far more true expression in it than thinned out ‘I’ statements. Its broad back carries depths that we sense in ourselves, but that are beyond anything we may have consciously lived through. It carries cosmos not just jumbled neurotic history.

Hughes is loyal to both the intensities of a thunderstorm and also to the oral storytellers love of copia – what I described earlier in the book as “the ready supply of inventive language”. His fame is not mistaken. He is truly loyal to his impressions of the living world and a clear vocation as mystic and thinker. His logos disciplines hard craft to the boundaried corral of his mythos abandon. His work is a place to go.
Bishop again takes him to task by suggesting that an early and brief debt to Dylan Thomas somehow makes the poetry less authentic, as if he should he have leapt like a jack-in-the box pristine into the world of 1950s poetry. The mythworld – the world he constantly drew upon – and the storying tradition that comes from it, does not work like that. Certain energies get mysteriously handed down, images find beds in the imaginations of different artists in different generations. Sometimes its a sculptor, or a wandering ballad singer, or a Lincolnshire healer. When handled with grace they are not a steal but a life giving re-visioning. They honour and sustain the echo locations of the earth, something just occasionally caught here and there, far more than just the legacy of that one individual.

Certain images are very precious, and require repetition.

Like the forest trails the hunter takes, when the way is obscured with brambles, something immense is lost. The mythteller carries a sharp bill hook to respectfully re-clear the leafy trail so the image can roar through into consciousness again. This is mythtelling we are witnessing, not just a moment in time, but outside of it altogether. As he stared into the Dart river fishing, the truths of this must have settled in the bloodied lump of Hughes’s brain.

So I hope this book has been true to the notion of an associative mythography. We have soaked our boots in Dartmoor snow, bent our minds to history's radical happenings and book-knowledge, padded loyally after the story itself as it charges through the yellowed gorse and foaming stream – sometimes a jackdaw, sometimes a tor, sometimes words sheltering from icy sleet, tucked in tight with the hay-warm goats.

So yes to wild language, and yes to the discipline of crafting them into a form that can be slowly taken into the body. In the era of Shakespeare, inventive language was true wealth, it refuted the sluggish but built delicate word-cairns in the humming air around the speaker. Men and women would stagger from the Globe theatre, beautifully assaulted with vast armies of flowered language - to be treasured, seeded, unpacked, and cultivated in the strong privacy of ones own chest. It was gold, corn, single-malt, rubies, a salted hoard. You could literally speak a cosmos back to life. Yes to this.

Yes to the storied tongue – the tongue of those Suffolk farm hands,
and to the slathered foam of Devon’s south coast shores, the frost encrusted field, the far distant kestrel, the heavy horse and the orchard, the hare’s joyful lope through the fragrant spring grasses.


How many years ago
Were you and I unlettered lads
Mad as the mist and the snow?
W.B. Yeats

copyright martin shaw 2014
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Article 2

February 19, 2014, 10:34 am
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It's on its way: tony hoagland with review copy of SNOWY TOWER

February 19, 2014, 10:35 am
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February 19, 2014, 10:45 am
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wilderness vigil: 4th - 12th July

February 24, 2014, 11:01 am
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(please note: if from the U.S. you may want to consider The School of Lost Borders in California for something like this.)

The dates have arrived for the Wilderness Vigil in Dartmoor national park this summer:
Friday 4th July to Sat 12th.
Cost £600.

The Basics:
The first two days are spent orientating to the area and finding your spot. There will be daily one-to-one sessions with myself, and on-going sessions with the wider participants and the base-camp crew. You will receive full preparation and a deepening context for your vigil and it's place in history. Food will be healthy and slightly reduced in size as preparation. We advise giving up caffeine in advance. Health and safety will, of course, be observed.

Monday morning you leave base camp and head for your alone spot. For the next four days you will be completely alone fasting in a wild place. During the entire time the crew will stay at base camp. I will return daily and attend to whatever is needed. You will take plenty of water/ a tarp for keeping the rain off/a warm sleeping bag.

On the fifth morning you will return to base camp for a gentle re-orientation to a new world. When fed, watered and rested, you will tell your story to your fellow questers and an experienced and supportive crew. This is the last time you will tell the story in depth for one year - to allow it time to settle. At some point on the saturday we will pack up base camp and leave.

The vigil usually proves tough/ wonderful/ scary/ sometimes boring and deeply mysterious. All and more. It can be a life changer. It won't make you a good person or your life simpler, but it will help you relish its complexity. Come if, as Yeat's, you say; "I'm looking for the face i had before the world was made".

To apply we require a PDF biography of your life up to now. Not just stories of achievement, but the difficult parts too, everything that has got you to this point. No more than ten pages no less than six. Secondly a non-refundable deposit of £200 if accepted.

If it feels like it's your time to be on the hill, we will be in touch with preparatory material - reading and practical work.

Please note, you will need your own equipment (tent for base camp, tarp, bivvy bag, sleeping bag etc).

Warmly,
Martin and the base-camp team.

* Martin has almost twenty years experience of both undergoing and leading wilderness vigils. The experience is a crucial underpinning to his mythological work.

PLEASE CONTACT TINA AT: TINA.SCHOOLOFMYTH@YAHOO.COM TO REGISTER. PLACES VERY LIMITED.
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