Wednesday, 7 January 2015
When Words Were Like Magic: The Shaman and the Storyteller - Feb 7th, Devon.
Yesterday there was another flurry of emails regarding the 'When Words Were Like Magic' gathering in early February. Rather than wading through them, i think the most salient course is to just direct them to the below - Fresh from the pen this very morning. If this speaks to you, then maybe you should consider attending. If not, steer clear. I especially dedicate it to all the ferocious and fragile folks finding their way into the tangles of nature and story - i know some of you read these notes, and i'm always touched by that. Astonishing. Long may you ride. So, this a little bit on the first rung of the ladder i continue to descend as a myth teller. This is where i come from.
THE MANY WAYS THINGS HAVE OF BEING WHAT THEY ARE
It was a kind of labour entirely born and rooted in my original openings in nature. There were no courses to attend, no diction to hone, no spindly lines of ink to memorise sharp till i could scatter-gun the first row with my literary recital of the oral tradition. it just wasn’t going to come from there. It had to come from the source; the wild places.
I’ve always loved copses, and defiant little grubs of hedge and trees that sprout unbidden from the backs of council estates. I grew up playing in them, and it had been there as a kid i had first heard the sound of ghosts. That low sound in beech trees, when an elegant, late summer wind moves through the slender branches. You just know that’s the sound
of the dead. I knew, even as a five year old, that some part of my story was being told through that sound. That i’ll hear it again someday.
Later, a little older, i would gaze at the dark bow of trees leaning over our brick wall at the back of the house, dropping large, succulent looking, possibly dangerous red berries onto the uncut grass. It wasn’t exactly sinister, it was magnificent. I knew every berry was a story from the forest. As a grown man carrying many wild, lively fairy tales, i often feel my saddle bags are full of those very fruits.
So i took myself out to a little stretch of old growth forest, mostly oak and elder, and dug in. If myth really was the power of a place speaking, then i had to bend my head daily to its murmurs.
The vast majority of time i spent over those years outdoors was not in full voice but in listening. A kind of tenderising of the heart. A shaggy equilibrium painfully wrought, where i felt - and could maintain the sensation - of being flooded by a place. Not an emptying, but a filling. And as weeks would unfold, this roving ecosystem gradually settled its shape somewhat; out of the great ravenous floods cascading through my frame, things calmed and the few same birds, animals and insects would start to show up, and, occasionally, certain regal energies that stand alongside them.
The time for this work was usually dusk, i would wait for a frittering of delicate lights to lace the gloaming air, and they would swiftly denote wether it was time to settle back on my goatskins, or to cross the rickety bridge and back up the hill to my tent. This kind of vagabond sit took place hundreds of times over those years. I was in the presence of mighty things, and, in their way, they presented me with the Big Thoughts. Over and over again.
This is weft and the weave of story for me. The endless lyrical emerging of the earths tremendous thinking, and the humbling required to simply bear witness to it. And the extraordinary day, where for an hour or so, you realise that you too are being witnessed. You are part of the big sound. You have pushed the coats aside and walked through the back of the wardrobe.
When my mouth had chewed on enough silence, and my body had felt its fragility in the face of winter, and darkness, and sorrow, had bruised up against isolation as well as solitude, and had tasted, fully, the price of my labour, slowly i began to speak. And what came what praise. Inventive speech appears to be a kind of catnip to the living world. Especially prized was the capacity to name, abundantly and gracefully, dozens or even hundreds of secret names for beings you had spent your whole life strutting past, and muttering; “willow” “holly” “bat” “dog-rose”. They are not their names. Not really.
So the first big move was not one of taking anything at all - i’d done that quite successfully my whole life - but actually re-organising the detritus of my speech to formulate clear and subtle praise for the denizen i beheld in front of me. Not “The Goddess of the River”, but “River Goddess”. The moment i squeezed “of the” into the mix, thereby hovered an abstraction, and the fox woman fled the hunters hut.
Green Curve
Udder of the Silver Waters
The Hundred Glittering Teeth
Small Sister, Dawning Foam
On the Old Lime Bank.
This wasn’t even particular imaginative. It wasn’t flattery. And most of all, it wasn’t for me. I wasn’t comparing myself. It was simply describing, acutely, what i witnessed in front of me. Some things i realised i was never going to behold clearly. I wouldn’t have language for butterfly, birch, ivy and clay. There it is, they remained indistinct. Admired, but indistinct. But, grindingly slowly, some beings made themselves known to me, became a lintel overhead, a den in which i could claim a degree of kinship. Not what i would choose, but what chose me.
So the first, and most pivotal, part of my apprenticeship to story began in a tiny stretch of woodland glade - a corral of about twenty foot - tenderising my own nature until the beings that wished stepped forward, and gave me the slow and halting opportunity to name just a few of the hundred secret ways they have of being themselves. Maybe four thousand years ago they weren't so secret.
It was apprenticeship to the swaying unfolding of the earths imagination, an endless permutation of Psyche touching the fire-tips of Eros’s fingers and creating life. The interior was everywhere! Concerned friends would worry that i had travelled too deeply into the tangles of myself, that i wouldn’t find a way out. I would laugh and gesture out towards the valley. That was where i was. I was already out.
I went looking for stories in dark places. In caves, hundreds of feet into the base of Welsh hills, the immensity of tree root and stone suspended above my fragile head. I learnt slow words down there. Words flushed deep with water and boulder-vast. I took myself to dreaming places, forgotten places, places deserving of shrines. I built small shelters in ancient, solitary haunts and sealed myself into the dark for days and nights. It was in those places i learnt many holy names for time. Time as malleable as a concertina, as robust as Irish cattle, as slippery as the trout escaping the hook. Each of the secret words was true wealth for my parched tongue. They required payment in full and i was not sad to give it.
I went looking for stories in the palace of the birds. The pastoral murmur of the wood pigeon, the exquisite blue call of the tawny owl in their boughed kingdoms. I learnt feathered words up there. Sounds that whittled a new and fragrant shape to my jaw. For a little while, i was a boy of the moonlight, cloaked and sitting by the base of great trees. It is no great brag to say that a part of me is still there.
If i’d believed the propaganda of our times, i would have seen England as too farmed, to crushed-tight with humans and their history, soil too poisoned, forest to hurt and impoverished for such an education - better to turn to the vastness of Siberia or some other pristine wilderness. Thank god i didn’t. The eye of the needle is everywhere, abiding patiently for you to quilt your life to the Otherworld, which is really our deeply natural function anyway. Small, humble pockets of absolute aliveness, greeness, riven-deep mystery are all over our strange and magnificent isle.
So my first move towards story was to give one up. The slow move from a society of take to a culture of giving. The living world was not there for my temporary edification, or a transitory back drop for my ‘healing’, it was home. A home that scared me, rattled me, soothed me, shaped me. Without the investment of time and focus, the words i longed to speak would simply be phoney on my tongue. The worst aspect of storytelling is when you hear the words spoke but you know the teller never took the journey to get them. They just squatted by the well and stole them when one that did crawled out of the Underworld. Well, i sure wasn’t much of a teller at that point, but i knew i had river-mud on my boots and green vines in the wine of my blood.
Later in this essay i will touch upon just how a storyteller could sift through the unbridled rawness of such experiences, and find stories both broad and wily enough to carry them. If you try them too often as ‘I’ statements, they will, in the end, get just too straight up lonesome and wander off to die somewhere. There’s a greater vehicle waiting for them. They need those ancestors peering in, leaning on their staffs, not quite cheering you on, not quite telling you to stop.
copyright Martin Shaw 2015
Tuesday, 6 January 2015
in the land of western dreaming
Well, here we are. The returning of the light. A long, fresh piece this week. Taken from the book i'm just finishing - which includes glimpses of my own relationship to story and its telling - (scroll down an entry or two for more - there are a few references to an earlier section). America as Otherworld - there's a great deal more about the mythos of its wilderness that i simply can't squeeze into this entry. But it's coming.
Ah yes: lots of enquires about the gatherings above - but please get in touch with Tina at tina.schoolofmyth@yahoo.com TODAY or you may not get a place. Saturday 7th February, Dartingon Village Hall, Devon is the first (above).
***
The room is gently rocking. My throat is clogged with rusty nails and the scorched and prickly fleece of a hundred furious rams, all charging deeper into my lower intestine. This is the language in which a storyteller announces they have flu.
But that regardless, the room is still rocking. It takes a minute or two of the sway before i can place myself. I’m not in the tent, or caravan, or crumbling Victorian house on the edge of Ashburton my family and i now call home. I’m half a world away. On a boat.
I aim my hot bones northwards, head up the fuzzy bees nest that is my brain and shakily peer out of a window. Oakland harbour and the wider San Francisco bay leers back. This is a long way from what i know. A long time has unfolded since those days in the tent.
In those passing days i had become reasonably known as a teacher of story, and it had become a tangible, demonstrable form of work that tied together my love of both the forest and the village.
This gift gifted me too: always something of a diviner, i learnt by glancing at a burning candle - at its splutters and rasps or steady evenness of decent - just how a story was working its way into a room of people; or the moving wispiness then density of shadows on the back wall would tell me something acute of the particular ancestors that had rolled up to listen that night. Both would influence what i had to say. I was a diligent student of these things. Powerful, rather extraordinary moments happened when these old stories entered the hall, tapping their canes, adjusting their elaborate cloaks and fluffing up their feathers. The way i was able to witness stories seemed to have become something of an event. Before i knew it, word was out, and a trail of sorts opened up before me.
So I’m a week into an extended foray of American teaching; all the way from Santa Fe in New Mexico, up to Port Townsend in Washington state. Seven nights before i’d flown through a red-skied lightning storm into Albuquerque and, not warned of the change in altitude, wondered why i was in a permanent state of mild breathlessness. Still, the land and the warm reception had acted as a stabiliser to my wooziness. The bleached recesses of that antique ground felt like teaching on some cherished ridge of the moon, unutterably different.
As is so often the way, i was just beginning to find a little conversation - or at least a phrase or two - between the water snakes and low bushes, before it was time to clamber back into a plane and be propelled over the simmering dust of Arizona to Northern California. I remember resting my head against the seat, squashed intimately and scent-close to a buzz sawed young man with “I Love to Cage Fight” on his t-shirt. Beautiful.
It was around then that i’d felt the first tightening of the throat, the first dew light bead of moisture on the forehead, the ache when i blinked that indicated the Lord and Ladies of Head Fever where plumping up the pillows and setting up residency in my skull. I rapidly closed my eyes as my neighbour cranked up Slayer on his earphones, grunted twice and had a nice, slow scratch of his crotch.
As the plane tilted, I wandered through some recent memories. I found myself back in Santa Fe, the very day before. I had been wandering the market and ended up just off the main drag, waiting for a lift to the cabin that a few miles out in semi-desert that was providing a temporary home. Feeling dislocated from the familiar and straight up lonely, the notion of weeks of teaching without the rough and tumble of my little family was weighing heavily on me. Too many trips away. Burdened.
I was sitting on a wall, admiring the low-slung quality of the towns adobe buildings when i caught the scent. That same stuff, that years before and thousands of miles away, the medicine man had lit for his ceremonies (*earlier section ref) - a very particular, especially fragrant sage. I jerked around and glanced up and down the street. Just normal stuff transpiring, the slow drizzle of traffic, a heat haze crowning distant hills. But man, i could smell it.
I turned completely round now, and the scent grew acute. From between two buildings there was the tiniest of alleys, and walking steadily out from between them came an old indian holding a lit bowl of the sage. Probably late middle age, mirror shades, baseball cap, Levis, skin resolute witness to a life led in the full glare of the sun.
He didn’t look left or right, didn’t indulge in conversation, didn't ask for change. Just produced an eagle feather, leant down, and wafted the smoke from my boots to hat. When he got to the top, he tilted his head and finally spoke. But what came out was not everyday words, but a song. Something traditional? Yes. Something stirring? Yes. Something from the depths of his peoples tradition? Not exactly.
In the glaze of that spring day, with my own startled reflection mirrored back in his shades, the Indian cleared his throat, and in a gorgeous, tobacco-strewn timbre sang:
Amazing grace, how sweet the sound,
that saved a wretch like me,
I was was lost and now am found,
was blind but now i see…
Through many dangers, toils and snares,
i have already come;
’Tis grace hath bought me safe thus far,
And grace will lead me home…
When we’ve been there ten thousand years,
Bright shining as the sun,
We’ve no less days to sing Gods praise,
Than when we’d first begun.
(John Newton 1779)
I’ll never hear the hymn quite like that ever again, its quiver of blessings couldn't release their arrows with such mysterious lustre again. It was like getting skewered on raw beauty. A sound made before Eden.
He tilted his head in that curious way again, like a fox, as if to make sure what ever had needed to land had landed, then turned around, and disappeared down the alley. Astonished tears. Well alright then Señor, i’ll continue. There we have it.
America. A place of many blessings for me, many friendships, much learning. Only a few hundred years ago the People of the Boats had sailed from Plymouth docks, just a few miles down country from me. Into the west. The dreamers, the rowdy adventurers, the slick entrepreneurs, the unutterably desperate, the pale faced kiddies, the villains, the mystics, the mean ones with squint eyes and vast jaws, ready to tough out whatever was coming. They wanted a new story.
The New World. That’s what they called it. But i want to give it another name. An older name. A name that, deep down in the barley-dust of our bones, back in pre-history we would have known. A word that squats firm in the understory of the pagan imagination.
The Otherworld.
A name that would have resided in the mythic memory of us that waved the boats away. The old belief that when you sailed west you sailed into the Otherworld. This is a belief with teeth, nerves and vital organs. A belief that swishes its dragonish tale underneath all our literalist banter of acreage, start-overs and opportunity. To the Welsh, even Ireland was Dreaming Across the Waters. The place our great heroes sailed with the wounds of a culture about them. All the wounded of Europe sail west. It’s where they go to dream and also to die.
So in some archaic way these pioneers sailed into the land of the dead whilst attempting to outrun their own. To outrun the fates. Somewhere in my fever, i realise that i have arrived in a kind of Otherworld.
It was in America that i realised that if we were in the Otherworld, then deep down many of us secretly suspected we were ghosts. What other reasoning could i find for the way so many seemed to glide through their lives, touching little? Of course i'd grown up with in England too. The media bleats its message that a substantial life is one viewed by thirty million, and when we don’t receive that the only conclusion is that we don’t deserve it. And so begins the inelegant contortion of trying to fit in. Every layered numbness, every cryptic cloak disguising honest speech is a step towards thinned-out ghoulishness. Ultimately deep lostness. That’s where despair lives.
There comes a point where a society in this kind of trance will consciously un-witness anyone that behaves differently. They will stare through you. Try and make you the ghost that they themselves are becoming. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
Amongst the eco-set, the premature intelligence, even strident wisdoms of many of the young people i met also disturbed me. It meant in some way their parents had let them down. It was if twenty year olds were having to squeeze into the britches of elder-hood, due to a mass abdication of the task by their parents. They were adopting enormous spiritual attitudes that have always traditionally been held by much older folks. I just didn’t hear enough about hell raising, unrequited love and shitty jobs. I didn’t smell enough life on them. Those polished little ‘I’ statements just kept rolling off the tongue. Every time i heard the phrase “going to India” it meant their mythology was in pieces around their feet.
I spent a lot of time listening to people talk, and a large part of that was witnessing what stands behind them. Not in some psychological sense of agenda, but to literally witness the deities that crowded around the back end of their syntax. I wanted to see what temple they served in.
No matter how agile the speaker, how impassioned, how coherent, how current, i rarely caught that little crosswind flicker that meant their little story had a tributary way back running to the big ocean. That’s a whole other soak, the water is way deeper out there. So, over time i started to name whatever fairy tale that the speaker was unconsciously rubbing up against in their story. Not as a diminishment but as ballast, as firmament, as real fire power, as confirmation, as the beginning of a mythos they could carry in their jaw. As soil.
A clear argument could be that these younger folk are in an accelerated time frame, and don’t have the luxury of a misspent youth, that they are facing admirably complexities their parents never did. I’m prepared to absorb that polemic, whilst not letting their parents off the hook. But advice regardless is the same: your insights through brilliant cannot yet carry the chthonic weight of the antlered herds of image that have trawled countless thousands of years to lay their treasure at your very door. It’s the old distinction between spirit and soul. Learn to bend your head, otherwise you’re just another kid with a laptop and point to prove. Let the story elegantly break you.
But i admire the intensity of the search. I really do. It’s something that the English - still so constipated by history - would do well to consider. The notion of America as the orphan of Europe is a mythic one. It’s always the orphans that become Culture Heroes in the old stories. Don’t take too much inflation from that, just consider it awhile.
Ancestor worship won’t carry you too far either. By all means find ways to authentically and sometimes imaginatively ground yourself in the the traditions of your people, but maybe don’t fantasise too often that they had one foot on Mount Olympus.
They, to a large degree, are the ones that got us into this mix in the first place. As has been said better and more acutely by others, in the end you have to become some kind of nutrient rich, many boughed tree of splendid crookedness to the ones coming. If you achieve nothing else, create some shade for the seedlings to grow. Practice becoming an ancestor. Outrageous and maintained generosity, a degree of useful wiliness, and workers hands are all identifying characteristics.
And in all this, i still say get out on the hill. Before you become farmers, activists, travelling circus people, reindeer herders, temple makers, green politicians, actors, silversmiths, writers: get your ears tuned in case it’s just yourself that you’re listening to. The wilderness vigil is not a call to create a generation of pale faced magicians or anything of the sort. What it offers is an invitation to bend your head to the thinking of the earth. I promise, true culture can arise from such an ordinary act.
Copyright Martin Shaw 2015
Ah yes: lots of enquires about the gatherings above - but please get in touch with Tina at tina.schoolofmyth@yahoo.com TODAY or you may not get a place. Saturday 7th February, Dartingon Village Hall, Devon is the first (above).
***
The room is gently rocking. My throat is clogged with rusty nails and the scorched and prickly fleece of a hundred furious rams, all charging deeper into my lower intestine. This is the language in which a storyteller announces they have flu.
But that regardless, the room is still rocking. It takes a minute or two of the sway before i can place myself. I’m not in the tent, or caravan, or crumbling Victorian house on the edge of Ashburton my family and i now call home. I’m half a world away. On a boat.
I aim my hot bones northwards, head up the fuzzy bees nest that is my brain and shakily peer out of a window. Oakland harbour and the wider San Francisco bay leers back. This is a long way from what i know. A long time has unfolded since those days in the tent.
In those passing days i had become reasonably known as a teacher of story, and it had become a tangible, demonstrable form of work that tied together my love of both the forest and the village.
This gift gifted me too: always something of a diviner, i learnt by glancing at a burning candle - at its splutters and rasps or steady evenness of decent - just how a story was working its way into a room of people; or the moving wispiness then density of shadows on the back wall would tell me something acute of the particular ancestors that had rolled up to listen that night. Both would influence what i had to say. I was a diligent student of these things. Powerful, rather extraordinary moments happened when these old stories entered the hall, tapping their canes, adjusting their elaborate cloaks and fluffing up their feathers. The way i was able to witness stories seemed to have become something of an event. Before i knew it, word was out, and a trail of sorts opened up before me.
So I’m a week into an extended foray of American teaching; all the way from Santa Fe in New Mexico, up to Port Townsend in Washington state. Seven nights before i’d flown through a red-skied lightning storm into Albuquerque and, not warned of the change in altitude, wondered why i was in a permanent state of mild breathlessness. Still, the land and the warm reception had acted as a stabiliser to my wooziness. The bleached recesses of that antique ground felt like teaching on some cherished ridge of the moon, unutterably different.
As is so often the way, i was just beginning to find a little conversation - or at least a phrase or two - between the water snakes and low bushes, before it was time to clamber back into a plane and be propelled over the simmering dust of Arizona to Northern California. I remember resting my head against the seat, squashed intimately and scent-close to a buzz sawed young man with “I Love to Cage Fight” on his t-shirt. Beautiful.
It was around then that i’d felt the first tightening of the throat, the first dew light bead of moisture on the forehead, the ache when i blinked that indicated the Lord and Ladies of Head Fever where plumping up the pillows and setting up residency in my skull. I rapidly closed my eyes as my neighbour cranked up Slayer on his earphones, grunted twice and had a nice, slow scratch of his crotch.
As the plane tilted, I wandered through some recent memories. I found myself back in Santa Fe, the very day before. I had been wandering the market and ended up just off the main drag, waiting for a lift to the cabin that a few miles out in semi-desert that was providing a temporary home. Feeling dislocated from the familiar and straight up lonely, the notion of weeks of teaching without the rough and tumble of my little family was weighing heavily on me. Too many trips away. Burdened.
I was sitting on a wall, admiring the low-slung quality of the towns adobe buildings when i caught the scent. That same stuff, that years before and thousands of miles away, the medicine man had lit for his ceremonies (*earlier section ref) - a very particular, especially fragrant sage. I jerked around and glanced up and down the street. Just normal stuff transpiring, the slow drizzle of traffic, a heat haze crowning distant hills. But man, i could smell it.
I turned completely round now, and the scent grew acute. From between two buildings there was the tiniest of alleys, and walking steadily out from between them came an old indian holding a lit bowl of the sage. Probably late middle age, mirror shades, baseball cap, Levis, skin resolute witness to a life led in the full glare of the sun.
He didn’t look left or right, didn’t indulge in conversation, didn't ask for change. Just produced an eagle feather, leant down, and wafted the smoke from my boots to hat. When he got to the top, he tilted his head and finally spoke. But what came out was not everyday words, but a song. Something traditional? Yes. Something stirring? Yes. Something from the depths of his peoples tradition? Not exactly.
In the glaze of that spring day, with my own startled reflection mirrored back in his shades, the Indian cleared his throat, and in a gorgeous, tobacco-strewn timbre sang:
Amazing grace, how sweet the sound,
that saved a wretch like me,
I was was lost and now am found,
was blind but now i see…
Through many dangers, toils and snares,
i have already come;
’Tis grace hath bought me safe thus far,
And grace will lead me home…
When we’ve been there ten thousand years,
Bright shining as the sun,
We’ve no less days to sing Gods praise,
Than when we’d first begun.
(John Newton 1779)
I’ll never hear the hymn quite like that ever again, its quiver of blessings couldn't release their arrows with such mysterious lustre again. It was like getting skewered on raw beauty. A sound made before Eden.
He tilted his head in that curious way again, like a fox, as if to make sure what ever had needed to land had landed, then turned around, and disappeared down the alley. Astonished tears. Well alright then Señor, i’ll continue. There we have it.
America. A place of many blessings for me, many friendships, much learning. Only a few hundred years ago the People of the Boats had sailed from Plymouth docks, just a few miles down country from me. Into the west. The dreamers, the rowdy adventurers, the slick entrepreneurs, the unutterably desperate, the pale faced kiddies, the villains, the mystics, the mean ones with squint eyes and vast jaws, ready to tough out whatever was coming. They wanted a new story.
The New World. That’s what they called it. But i want to give it another name. An older name. A name that, deep down in the barley-dust of our bones, back in pre-history we would have known. A word that squats firm in the understory of the pagan imagination.
The Otherworld.
A name that would have resided in the mythic memory of us that waved the boats away. The old belief that when you sailed west you sailed into the Otherworld. This is a belief with teeth, nerves and vital organs. A belief that swishes its dragonish tale underneath all our literalist banter of acreage, start-overs and opportunity. To the Welsh, even Ireland was Dreaming Across the Waters. The place our great heroes sailed with the wounds of a culture about them. All the wounded of Europe sail west. It’s where they go to dream and also to die.
So in some archaic way these pioneers sailed into the land of the dead whilst attempting to outrun their own. To outrun the fates. Somewhere in my fever, i realise that i have arrived in a kind of Otherworld.
It was in America that i realised that if we were in the Otherworld, then deep down many of us secretly suspected we were ghosts. What other reasoning could i find for the way so many seemed to glide through their lives, touching little? Of course i'd grown up with in England too. The media bleats its message that a substantial life is one viewed by thirty million, and when we don’t receive that the only conclusion is that we don’t deserve it. And so begins the inelegant contortion of trying to fit in. Every layered numbness, every cryptic cloak disguising honest speech is a step towards thinned-out ghoulishness. Ultimately deep lostness. That’s where despair lives.
There comes a point where a society in this kind of trance will consciously un-witness anyone that behaves differently. They will stare through you. Try and make you the ghost that they themselves are becoming. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
Amongst the eco-set, the premature intelligence, even strident wisdoms of many of the young people i met also disturbed me. It meant in some way their parents had let them down. It was if twenty year olds were having to squeeze into the britches of elder-hood, due to a mass abdication of the task by their parents. They were adopting enormous spiritual attitudes that have always traditionally been held by much older folks. I just didn’t hear enough about hell raising, unrequited love and shitty jobs. I didn’t smell enough life on them. Those polished little ‘I’ statements just kept rolling off the tongue. Every time i heard the phrase “going to India” it meant their mythology was in pieces around their feet.
I spent a lot of time listening to people talk, and a large part of that was witnessing what stands behind them. Not in some psychological sense of agenda, but to literally witness the deities that crowded around the back end of their syntax. I wanted to see what temple they served in.
No matter how agile the speaker, how impassioned, how coherent, how current, i rarely caught that little crosswind flicker that meant their little story had a tributary way back running to the big ocean. That’s a whole other soak, the water is way deeper out there. So, over time i started to name whatever fairy tale that the speaker was unconsciously rubbing up against in their story. Not as a diminishment but as ballast, as firmament, as real fire power, as confirmation, as the beginning of a mythos they could carry in their jaw. As soil.
A clear argument could be that these younger folk are in an accelerated time frame, and don’t have the luxury of a misspent youth, that they are facing admirably complexities their parents never did. I’m prepared to absorb that polemic, whilst not letting their parents off the hook. But advice regardless is the same: your insights through brilliant cannot yet carry the chthonic weight of the antlered herds of image that have trawled countless thousands of years to lay their treasure at your very door. It’s the old distinction between spirit and soul. Learn to bend your head, otherwise you’re just another kid with a laptop and point to prove. Let the story elegantly break you.
But i admire the intensity of the search. I really do. It’s something that the English - still so constipated by history - would do well to consider. The notion of America as the orphan of Europe is a mythic one. It’s always the orphans that become Culture Heroes in the old stories. Don’t take too much inflation from that, just consider it awhile.
Ancestor worship won’t carry you too far either. By all means find ways to authentically and sometimes imaginatively ground yourself in the the traditions of your people, but maybe don’t fantasise too often that they had one foot on Mount Olympus.
They, to a large degree, are the ones that got us into this mix in the first place. As has been said better and more acutely by others, in the end you have to become some kind of nutrient rich, many boughed tree of splendid crookedness to the ones coming. If you achieve nothing else, create some shade for the seedlings to grow. Practice becoming an ancestor. Outrageous and maintained generosity, a degree of useful wiliness, and workers hands are all identifying characteristics.
And in all this, i still say get out on the hill. Before you become farmers, activists, travelling circus people, reindeer herders, temple makers, green politicians, actors, silversmiths, writers: get your ears tuned in case it’s just yourself that you’re listening to. The wilderness vigil is not a call to create a generation of pale faced magicians or anything of the sort. What it offers is an invitation to bend your head to the thinking of the earth. I promise, true culture can arise from such an ordinary act.
Copyright Martin Shaw 2015
Thursday, 11 December 2014
ten years
Well, the tenth year of lively scholars left the rambling confines of our Dartmoor HQ four days ago now, and i still feel like i've been shot out of a old time ships cannon and into some strange, warm-muddied slumberous swamp. Exhausted. Exhausted in a very bespoke, ritually acute, rather fine kind of way. I'd be highly suspicious if i didn't. We call it The Bite, and its just part of the down payment for something real arriving in the fluctuating polemics of our own lives.
I started teaching from the fluttering doorway of my black tent eleven years ago this coming January - tho' had ten years of working with the wilderness vigil afore that. At that point i was more in the diviner and ceremonialist line of work; it was over the next few years that i cottoned onto the extraordinary notion that the mead-hall of my tongue was a place where some of the energies i served could find a landing strip out into the spluttering confines of the early 21st century. I confess to not being always a good steward of that realisation, but the aspiration holds firm.
I rouse my hide in a few hours to teach at Schumacher College this afternoon on creating a Culture of Conviviality, and i'm very honoured to be performing alongside Mark Rylance and others this sunday at the Northcott Theatre in Exeter. For those of you that may have been wintering on Mars these last ten years, Mark is the finest stage actor of his generation - by several well leapt roe-buck leagues. Tickets are not cheap for this event, but it will be something to witness.
I think this will be the last entry for 2014. I just want to create feasts, coax the fire and uncork a really good red.
There's lots of coming down the chute in terms of gatherings and teaching in 2015 - i'll put it all up next time. What will i be (re) reading over Christmas? Well, in no particular order or year of release: Memory and Landscape by Simon Schama, An Endless Trace by Christopher Bamford, Night and Horses and the Desert by Robert Irwin, The Islandman by Tomas O Crohan, Confession of an Irish Rebel by Brendan Behan, The Wake by my friend and colleague Paul Kingsnorth, H is for Hawk by Helen MacDonald, Romanticism and Esoteric Tradition by Paul Davies, Kiviug by Kira Van Deusen. I can't give a list of highlights for 2014 because there've been so many, so diverse in nature and so outrageous it may come off like bragging. So i won't. Lots of utterly normal stuff transpired too.
But before you or i start claiming to much ancientness in our creaking bones, let's go back a little to where maybe one place the stories come from. I wish you well as we enter winter, and hope you claim some time to rest, dream, and nourish.
Slange to all.
OLD TIME, DEEP TIME
I am in my writing hut now. Very late summer, the cusp. There is a good natured wind-shake of the frame every few minutes, tottering on its wheels. I can hear the drone of the last harvesting going on in a nearby field, but today the winds dictates primacy, ushering in the change from corn-time to dying time.
Somewhere the Holly King is sharpening his blade for his soon-come meeting with the Oak King, and his long wintering reign.
But i’m not in the hut. I open up the wood burner, chuck in the kindling, settle under my furs and step out of my usualness.
A fire is a road to
pre-historic mind.
Into the immensities of deep time.
Flames make nonsense crumble and we are gone:
We are 4,600 million years ago.
In vast space itself, where we
hang in the firm claws
of the Hawk of the Well,
watching.
Earth is a humming chunk of rock, thrashed by meteorites and hurtling comets, a sublime attack, laden with gifts we cannot yet see.
Story churns and gargles
bellows its dramas.
Already the mythos: without chaos there will be no eros - no succulent, vital, devouring, troublesome life. Earth absorbs the carving, accommodating the rupture. But this dance is but a parade of minnows when a vast planet collides like a drunk at a wedding with this baby planet. Their great impact causes both a melting heat and shards of debris to hurl out into the inky blackness - shards that over time twist and bind into the elegant breast of the moon.
Snow Palace.
Dream Guardian.
Vast White Belly
Tide Keeper.
Our scrying shifts to 500 million years. The rocky animals that are continents, blissful in their solitudes for so long, come to seek a herding warmth, and start a slow cluster together, though the proud cloak of vegetation is still to spread their bony shoulders. The continents share gossip in the way that they do. Shallow seas hold life in its gurgling waters: sea scorpion, well-armoured trilobite, starfish. The thin waters are not like ink but luminous with sun, a glowing churn.
Glow-Gold-Wave
Salty Ale of Scales
The Glittering Beginning
The Sewing Needle of the Moon.
250 million years. We behold one vast stretch of land now, it’s face lush and hairy with plant deities. The continent confidently stretches its wing span from both high latitudes of the equator; the horsetail stretches its roots into succulent swamp, palm trees catch the breeze, as dragonflies claims residence to the hot air. Scaled beings - amphibians - lay their eggs in crusts of river beach.
Verdent Lushness
Grey Ladies of the Bank
Sweet Flurry of the Dragons Wings
Damn Handsome Rock
100 million. Time of snapping jaw and the belly-scrape-of-the sandy places, the broad and wide ranging dinosaur. Round their claws scuttle a red sea of termites, and skirting their shoulders those great survivors, the dragon fly. The continents continue their archaic shoulder rub,and their vivid dreaming continues - the moon-milk of the earths braided
intelligence, behooving us its intricate and delighted diversity, crowned with silver and white clouds, a-flower with elk and butterfly, whittle-tipped mountains of snow, brown leafed copse and urging flanks of red sand.
Deep time. Old time.
Boulder slow, loosened underworld immensity, grinding forever chords of glacial singing, bedazzled green-sizzle of the jungle rump summer lands. We are the bone pile, the swan road, the bitter dark berries in the belly of the wolf.
And on.
And on.
And somewhere, just a minute ago really, something opened its eyes that looked a little like your or I. And what we heard were the stories. The ancestors were diligent in this regard. Dragon fly would not hesitate to grace us with its buzzing saga of the wind road, bear would dictate the terms of how we padded the snowy forest. These are the stories our bodies were tuned for, that still grind quietly away in our bones as we peer at the computer screen.
And for a long long time we listened.
As the rain slapped the moss-strewn roof of an orkney shelter we listened, as the dream-rattle of the cicada poured through the dark we listened, as our lungs ripped a blood-flurry in our chest as we leapt over boulder and decaying brush pursued by boar, still we listened.
We listened to the Old Time, and knew our brief, majestic, terrible
place in it. We were just the latest in a long, long line of storytellers.
Come Ice-Giants, and Eight Legged Horses, come Blodeuwedd of the
Flowers, come Fenryr, Cinderbiter, Bertilak, Gringolet, Ossian, Scathach, Gwynn Ap Nudd. The land shudders and births you, like the sea erupts lava that becomes mountains, forests, graves. Come Psyche.
Come Goemagog, Wayland Smithy, Rhiannon of the Mares, Chaw Gully Raven, Robin of Loxley and all the laughing boys of the Greenwood.
Let your names be called, as precious as meat.
And one day, just a moment ago, an old woman came from her place at the edge of the village, her ears replete with listening, a mouth of fresh-cut meadow flowers, and told us to light the kindling.
Once it was dark, and the little ones were drifting under the antelope robes, the strange one loped forward into the light of the flames and stood in front of the village.
She says:
Once upon a time.
Once upon a time.
Once upon a time.
So she says.
And she tell us the story of ourselves back to ourselves.
Copyright Martin Shaw 2014
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