Tuesday, 1 October 2013
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
Friday, 20 September 2013
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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