Wednesday, 29 February 2012
http://www.facebook.com/events/238886712868644/
is the link to information about the Wilderness Quest: The King and Queen Must Wed The Land. Please contact us today if interested. Places are very limited.
I have been heads down in the finishing of this new book - which keeps uncurling into new and shadowy areas - so forgive me for no entry last week. Here is a little piece from the commentary on the Brutus of Troy story - the commentary should not hold too much in the way of problems if the story is not familiar. The below comes from a general awareness of a changing and probably turbulent times ahead. From artistic and philosophic communities there is talk of 'otherness' 'liminality' 'fragmentation' - in mythic terms, Trickster talk. This is healthy. But Trickster is trying to get us to see re-see holy things; if there is no divine edge then Trickster is simply not present. So this is just a little on that - and really trying to re-emphasise the idea of certain myths as an echo location (see last entry) from the earth to us. If there isn't this earthy pulse in an idea then i suggest we leave it alone. The soul won't be convinced.
Where is the Altar in Altermodern?
It is clear, just like the story, that culturally we are in a period of huge but incredibly speedy transitions. Old Kings, old notions, old fixities are taking arrows to the heart on an almost hourly basis. The writer Nicolas Bourriaud claims the post-modernism is over, done. The corpse is stiff, waxy and congealed. This new emerging he calls the Altermodern.
The modern and post-modern attention to a primarily western fixated culture is at an end. There is no clear centre anymore, but an emerging polyglot. The velocity of exposure to endless varieties of society, opinion, texture, is cooking up an enormous creolisation, at the expense of multiculturalism and regional identity. For the emerging generation, culture is resolutely globalised, slow ground is no ground.
Bourriaud sees this new universalism as being based on subtitling and generalised dubbing. How could it be any other way when the heavy task of actually learning a new language, or being immersed long term in another culture is a ridiculous labour when compared to clunky, un-nuanced, sub-titled, un-informed, but an absolutely instant montage of image appearing on the glowing laptop screen? This is one aspect of the Protean Age I mentioned in the introduction. We are receivers of a vast backdrop of information, but identical to the vastness is thiness of relationship. And out of that vast panorama, roughly two inches deep, can only arise modern art.
Whilst the turning from a western fixated centre should be celebrated, celebration is halted when we realise the replacement is not rich diversity but globalization. This is the very opposite of a mythline- something found slowly by diligence, place, reaching out into history, myth and the wild thought of a landscape. This is more like the smoke streams from an aeroplane, briefly visible with but with long term affects.
The ‘Alter’ in ‘Altermodern’ refers to multiplicity, and also notions of otherness. What happens to otherness when everything is subsumed into the blinding light of the new creole? Will otherness become the new constant? It would appear so.
Of course, we can see Hermes, Coyote, and Loki scampering around in this new dis-located, un-Olympian, flattened out barrage of instantaneous connections, but how long will it keep their interest? – all three are in service to speed and a little chaos,but only when it serves more than profane. No matter how grubby their appearance, Trickster is pushing us back into encountering divine forces. But this thiness of knowledge, this denial of the local, where does this place Saturn and his candled study of long term goals? What of the loving construction and steady logic of Apollo and Athene, or of home loving Hestia? Have we forgotten the Altar in the alter? I worry that we bore the Gods.
Eras of time used to be seen within a kind of straightline history; but the Altermodern is no straightline, it is a maze. And a maze with no centre to locate, no flag to be embedded. Like (and I do stress ‘like’) Coyote, its life force is not really gathered in one place, like a heart, certainly not in Old Europe, and that is one of its positives. There is a starting from scratch at work. Realms are no longer stratified and boundaried, but gateway riddled plateus. We have information but do we have meaning?
We would do well to remember: Coyote requires settled areas for his wider travels to take on real significance, he needs something to run up against. He enjoys some sovereign heft. If everyone travels, then we encourage a form of his demise. Occasionally Trickster establishes as well as transgresses boundaries. But if the boundaries no longer exist at all, then where is Trickster?
The issue is that the Gods are a complicato. Hermes is at his best when relating to other forces; fierce Hera, Aphrodite, Zeus’s kingly gaze. The rough and tumble of their shared intrigues create culture, they are not to be separated. Globalisation is monotheism. Hermes within this format is not Hermes at all, but a mimic. Bernard Neville talks of ‘Hermes inflation’, as a psychological, not mythological, alignment with the western ego.
An attempt to reorient could be to remember the specific form of Hermes communication – to communicate the gods messages by psychic means –from soul to soul. So if the soul does not open, then Hermes is not present. If there are no other god's to send messages back and forth to, then Hermes is not present. Remove the flowers and the bee is taskless.
Copyright Martin Shaw 2011
is the link to information about the Wilderness Quest: The King and Queen Must Wed The Land. Please contact us today if interested. Places are very limited.
I have been heads down in the finishing of this new book - which keeps uncurling into new and shadowy areas - so forgive me for no entry last week. Here is a little piece from the commentary on the Brutus of Troy story - the commentary should not hold too much in the way of problems if the story is not familiar. The below comes from a general awareness of a changing and probably turbulent times ahead. From artistic and philosophic communities there is talk of 'otherness' 'liminality' 'fragmentation' - in mythic terms, Trickster talk. This is healthy. But Trickster is trying to get us to see re-see holy things; if there is no divine edge then Trickster is simply not present. So this is just a little on that - and really trying to re-emphasise the idea of certain myths as an echo location (see last entry) from the earth to us. If there isn't this earthy pulse in an idea then i suggest we leave it alone. The soul won't be convinced.
Where is the Altar in Altermodern?
It is clear, just like the story, that culturally we are in a period of huge but incredibly speedy transitions. Old Kings, old notions, old fixities are taking arrows to the heart on an almost hourly basis. The writer Nicolas Bourriaud claims the post-modernism is over, done. The corpse is stiff, waxy and congealed. This new emerging he calls the Altermodern.
The modern and post-modern attention to a primarily western fixated culture is at an end. There is no clear centre anymore, but an emerging polyglot. The velocity of exposure to endless varieties of society, opinion, texture, is cooking up an enormous creolisation, at the expense of multiculturalism and regional identity. For the emerging generation, culture is resolutely globalised, slow ground is no ground.
Bourriaud sees this new universalism as being based on subtitling and generalised dubbing. How could it be any other way when the heavy task of actually learning a new language, or being immersed long term in another culture is a ridiculous labour when compared to clunky, un-nuanced, sub-titled, un-informed, but an absolutely instant montage of image appearing on the glowing laptop screen? This is one aspect of the Protean Age I mentioned in the introduction. We are receivers of a vast backdrop of information, but identical to the vastness is thiness of relationship. And out of that vast panorama, roughly two inches deep, can only arise modern art.
Whilst the turning from a western fixated centre should be celebrated, celebration is halted when we realise the replacement is not rich diversity but globalization. This is the very opposite of a mythline- something found slowly by diligence, place, reaching out into history, myth and the wild thought of a landscape. This is more like the smoke streams from an aeroplane, briefly visible with but with long term affects.
The ‘Alter’ in ‘Altermodern’ refers to multiplicity, and also notions of otherness. What happens to otherness when everything is subsumed into the blinding light of the new creole? Will otherness become the new constant? It would appear so.
Of course, we can see Hermes, Coyote, and Loki scampering around in this new dis-located, un-Olympian, flattened out barrage of instantaneous connections, but how long will it keep their interest? – all three are in service to speed and a little chaos,but only when it serves more than profane. No matter how grubby their appearance, Trickster is pushing us back into encountering divine forces. But this thiness of knowledge, this denial of the local, where does this place Saturn and his candled study of long term goals? What of the loving construction and steady logic of Apollo and Athene, or of home loving Hestia? Have we forgotten the Altar in the alter? I worry that we bore the Gods.
Eras of time used to be seen within a kind of straightline history; but the Altermodern is no straightline, it is a maze. And a maze with no centre to locate, no flag to be embedded. Like (and I do stress ‘like’) Coyote, its life force is not really gathered in one place, like a heart, certainly not in Old Europe, and that is one of its positives. There is a starting from scratch at work. Realms are no longer stratified and boundaried, but gateway riddled plateus. We have information but do we have meaning?
We would do well to remember: Coyote requires settled areas for his wider travels to take on real significance, he needs something to run up against. He enjoys some sovereign heft. If everyone travels, then we encourage a form of his demise. Occasionally Trickster establishes as well as transgresses boundaries. But if the boundaries no longer exist at all, then where is Trickster?
The issue is that the Gods are a complicato. Hermes is at his best when relating to other forces; fierce Hera, Aphrodite, Zeus’s kingly gaze. The rough and tumble of their shared intrigues create culture, they are not to be separated. Globalisation is monotheism. Hermes within this format is not Hermes at all, but a mimic. Bernard Neville talks of ‘Hermes inflation’, as a psychological, not mythological, alignment with the western ego.
An attempt to reorient could be to remember the specific form of Hermes communication – to communicate the gods messages by psychic means –from soul to soul. So if the soul does not open, then Hermes is not present. If there are no other god's to send messages back and forth to, then Hermes is not present. Remove the flowers and the bee is taskless.
Copyright Martin Shaw 2011
Friday, 17 February 2012
Hot from the Stove
More fresh words this week. This comes from the book i am just finishing, and should be self- explanatory. It is taken from a wider section on the notion of associative mythology, a term from Daniel Deardorff, that seems to point towards this kind of thinking. I will place a larger section on the www.associativemythology.com website in the next few days. More soon, just out the door clutching a mug of italian coffee, and with news of a great magazine about to be launched......
From the Comparative to the Associative
Myth in the way i am thinking about it is a form of echo location coming from the earth itself.
In the animal world, when a wild call collides with another being, it sends a subtle echo back to the caller, giving even an almost blind creature a sense of what is in their surrounding field. I think the earth has always done something similar.
It transmits certain pulses, certain coded information, certain images, dreams, and thoughts, and then sits back, like the toothed whale, or the shrew, or the megachiropteran bat, or the owl, to see what echo’s return from its messaging. Occasionally a hunter, or a wandering ecstatic, or a woman alone in garden at dusk will experience one of these sonorous emerging’s. These pulses tell us something about how to live.
Tribal cultures have been far more advanced at honouring this messaging, and gradually crafting art around it till it becomes a two-ways-looking form of mytho-natural beauty that creates deep relationship between humans and the animals, minerals, rowans and willows. This mystical morse code is the true underlying pattern of any myth deserving of the name. It is the sound of the earth and its inhabitants, thinking about itself.
When the call hits the red tailed hawk, wandering magus or whatever is tuned to receive it, it sends an echo back to the source of the messaging; it confirms relationship, and in some way edifies that source. These pulses can get picked up when fasting on the mountain top, in the temple during a silent retreat, whilst grieving for an old love by a deep lake. It is very mysterious, and requires a certain aliveness to pick it up. It’s not fashionable to admit it, but the kind of rapid multi-tasking that modernity celebrates is a direct hindrance to receiving it. Any healthy culture has celebrated and expressed these transmissions with rituals, storytelling, slow emerging mythologies, crafty art.
When this form of echo location is lost, we fall out of myth. We fall out of relationship. We start to get an atrophy of image, thinned out allegories that are a fallen, Barthian, attempt to promote and control ideas of the state. The hallucination of empire emerges.
The subtle ears that receive the earth’s pulse keep it lively, add some of their own animal-flavour to the transmission, allow a constant re-visioning to take place. By their spontaneity, Oral telling’s especially, cannot help but assist that constant re-seeing of an eternal image. In doing so, it doesn’t become religion, it doesn’t try unduly hard to anchor its deepest meanings in historical time and space. There is great hope in this.
So to follow a wild mythology involves a lot of listening, a stilling, to get connected to this ancient form of calling. It is a love story really. Some old lover is gently trying to call us home. When confronted with panicked ideas about ecological ‘narratives for now’ – I suggest that this awareness is paramount. We need bush soul.
(the book continues with a review of three modern thinkers ideas about what a myth is - here is one from my old sparring partner Roland Barthes)
The meaning of the myth has its own value, it belongs to a history, that of the Lion or that of the Negro (examples of objects): in the meaning, a signification is already built, and could well be self-sufficient if myth did not take hold of it and did not turn it suddenly into an empty, parasitical form. The meaning is already complete, it postulates a kind of knowledge, a past, a memory, a comparative order of facts, ideas, decisions. When it becomes form, the meaning leaves its contingency behind; it empties itself, it becomes impoverished, history evaporates, only the letter remains.
(Barthes 1957 :117)
Barthes is clearly not sentimental, and rather than relegating myth to ancient history, views it as alive and well, suggesting manipulation and vivid damage when its influence is detected. Rather than myth as an expression of insights into consciousness, he places it in the centre of modernity, of advertising. Myth takes the personal meaning of an object and places its signification over it, almost as a form of possession. He views the moment when myth claims an image as the movement from ‘meaning’ to ‘form’ - it has become something else, and he implies a terrific loss in this.
So that's a long way from my own thinking, and for me speaks to the absence of myth in a culture, not its presence.
I would like to give a different image
Myth as Eco-System:
Within the valley of story exists clusters of oak trees, thin but lively streams, brightly splashed jungle birds. It is a mythography - meaning that the story cannot be apprehended entirely from one angle - if you only speak of the oak, then what about those birds? What is all that divine sounding about? To get nearer to this charged polyphony you need to get dreamt by the place, by the story. You need blistered feet, cooled by the mud of the waterhole, eyes reddened by an all night vigil in the ancestor burial chambers, mouth full of language wrought sweet by the pear wrestled from the trees low boughs of emerald leaf. You need to get into it.
In this time of climatic movement, of being close to receiving the terrible legacy of empire thinking, then old ways of approaching myth, entirely human-centered ways of approaching myth, just don’t cut it. We need to forget old and get ancient. If we approach myth in this old way, then in some way we confirm the idiocy of consumption. We still keep the forest out.
We are moving from the comparative to the associative. From doggedly and exclusively comparing one myth to another, and expanding into a much wider framework - poetry, biology, theatre, animal-lore, anecdote, the arts, ritual. Holistic is paramount, and the swiftness of its associations bring a kind of linguistic or oral wildness into the frame. From the point of view of a working storyteller, this is something that arises naturally when working with a group of students on their own reactions to a story. They all enter a different points with a collision of angles but are all held tight within the muscle of the wider story. Associative mythology in this sense allows polyphony as well as harmony. That is very important. It is a container for paradox.
A paradox is something that appears self-contradictory, a thing that at some time, or from some point of view, appears to be what it is not…our ability to accept this ambiguity is also fundamental to our recognition and signification of change.
(Napier 1986 :1)
It is a tricky discipline because it is not a labour of assurance or platitudes, it places story as primary, as being, rather than relegated entirely to allegory or illustration. It trails rather than traps. We live, whether we like it or not, in an environment of
overstimulation and odd amalgamations of influences coming together.
This IS the era of the Bricoleur. The one that grabs something from here, something from there, and crafts something new from it. But as we have experienced, much of what we experience has little nourishment in it, little soul. We have the commons of the imagination but not always the slow ground this book has pursued to give it grounding.
Associative mythology honours the intensity of these times - not a Zeus time, a Goddess time, but a Trickster moment, by also making rapid openings between disciplines. In this it also relates to the ghazal form in Islamic poetry. It is an attempt to find the God behind the mood – to re-find the sacred to the spirit of this era. And the one that carries messages at lightning quick speed? Well, that’s the god of the storytellers, the trickster Hermes. When something is brilliant, nourishing, full of colour, then Hermes is present. Far from a tranced out, consensual Barthian harmony of impressionable masses, we entertain polyphonic, awake, contrary image, but all held firm within the wider arch of the story. A place like this has room for the crafty intelligence of the Wren, or a hot eyed old woman who knows she can flip into the gingery coat of a fox anytime she wants.
For those seeking an opiated society then this all makes life a great deal more complicated. The difference is a relishing of that complexity. Associative mythology recognizes that certain complications inflame a latent imagination – the Gloria Duplex of the Renaissance.
Copyright Martin Shaw 2012
From the Comparative to the Associative
Myth in the way i am thinking about it is a form of echo location coming from the earth itself.
In the animal world, when a wild call collides with another being, it sends a subtle echo back to the caller, giving even an almost blind creature a sense of what is in their surrounding field. I think the earth has always done something similar.
It transmits certain pulses, certain coded information, certain images, dreams, and thoughts, and then sits back, like the toothed whale, or the shrew, or the megachiropteran bat, or the owl, to see what echo’s return from its messaging. Occasionally a hunter, or a wandering ecstatic, or a woman alone in garden at dusk will experience one of these sonorous emerging’s. These pulses tell us something about how to live.
Tribal cultures have been far more advanced at honouring this messaging, and gradually crafting art around it till it becomes a two-ways-looking form of mytho-natural beauty that creates deep relationship between humans and the animals, minerals, rowans and willows. This mystical morse code is the true underlying pattern of any myth deserving of the name. It is the sound of the earth and its inhabitants, thinking about itself.
When the call hits the red tailed hawk, wandering magus or whatever is tuned to receive it, it sends an echo back to the source of the messaging; it confirms relationship, and in some way edifies that source. These pulses can get picked up when fasting on the mountain top, in the temple during a silent retreat, whilst grieving for an old love by a deep lake. It is very mysterious, and requires a certain aliveness to pick it up. It’s not fashionable to admit it, but the kind of rapid multi-tasking that modernity celebrates is a direct hindrance to receiving it. Any healthy culture has celebrated and expressed these transmissions with rituals, storytelling, slow emerging mythologies, crafty art.
When this form of echo location is lost, we fall out of myth. We fall out of relationship. We start to get an atrophy of image, thinned out allegories that are a fallen, Barthian, attempt to promote and control ideas of the state. The hallucination of empire emerges.
The subtle ears that receive the earth’s pulse keep it lively, add some of their own animal-flavour to the transmission, allow a constant re-visioning to take place. By their spontaneity, Oral telling’s especially, cannot help but assist that constant re-seeing of an eternal image. In doing so, it doesn’t become religion, it doesn’t try unduly hard to anchor its deepest meanings in historical time and space. There is great hope in this.
So to follow a wild mythology involves a lot of listening, a stilling, to get connected to this ancient form of calling. It is a love story really. Some old lover is gently trying to call us home. When confronted with panicked ideas about ecological ‘narratives for now’ – I suggest that this awareness is paramount. We need bush soul.
(the book continues with a review of three modern thinkers ideas about what a myth is - here is one from my old sparring partner Roland Barthes)
The meaning of the myth has its own value, it belongs to a history, that of the Lion or that of the Negro (examples of objects): in the meaning, a signification is already built, and could well be self-sufficient if myth did not take hold of it and did not turn it suddenly into an empty, parasitical form. The meaning is already complete, it postulates a kind of knowledge, a past, a memory, a comparative order of facts, ideas, decisions. When it becomes form, the meaning leaves its contingency behind; it empties itself, it becomes impoverished, history evaporates, only the letter remains.
(Barthes 1957 :117)
Barthes is clearly not sentimental, and rather than relegating myth to ancient history, views it as alive and well, suggesting manipulation and vivid damage when its influence is detected. Rather than myth as an expression of insights into consciousness, he places it in the centre of modernity, of advertising. Myth takes the personal meaning of an object and places its signification over it, almost as a form of possession. He views the moment when myth claims an image as the movement from ‘meaning’ to ‘form’ - it has become something else, and he implies a terrific loss in this.
So that's a long way from my own thinking, and for me speaks to the absence of myth in a culture, not its presence.
I would like to give a different image
Myth as Eco-System:
Within the valley of story exists clusters of oak trees, thin but lively streams, brightly splashed jungle birds. It is a mythography - meaning that the story cannot be apprehended entirely from one angle - if you only speak of the oak, then what about those birds? What is all that divine sounding about? To get nearer to this charged polyphony you need to get dreamt by the place, by the story. You need blistered feet, cooled by the mud of the waterhole, eyes reddened by an all night vigil in the ancestor burial chambers, mouth full of language wrought sweet by the pear wrestled from the trees low boughs of emerald leaf. You need to get into it.
In this time of climatic movement, of being close to receiving the terrible legacy of empire thinking, then old ways of approaching myth, entirely human-centered ways of approaching myth, just don’t cut it. We need to forget old and get ancient. If we approach myth in this old way, then in some way we confirm the idiocy of consumption. We still keep the forest out.
We are moving from the comparative to the associative. From doggedly and exclusively comparing one myth to another, and expanding into a much wider framework - poetry, biology, theatre, animal-lore, anecdote, the arts, ritual. Holistic is paramount, and the swiftness of its associations bring a kind of linguistic or oral wildness into the frame. From the point of view of a working storyteller, this is something that arises naturally when working with a group of students on their own reactions to a story. They all enter a different points with a collision of angles but are all held tight within the muscle of the wider story. Associative mythology in this sense allows polyphony as well as harmony. That is very important. It is a container for paradox.
A paradox is something that appears self-contradictory, a thing that at some time, or from some point of view, appears to be what it is not…our ability to accept this ambiguity is also fundamental to our recognition and signification of change.
(Napier 1986 :1)
It is a tricky discipline because it is not a labour of assurance or platitudes, it places story as primary, as being, rather than relegated entirely to allegory or illustration. It trails rather than traps. We live, whether we like it or not, in an environment of
overstimulation and odd amalgamations of influences coming together.
This IS the era of the Bricoleur. The one that grabs something from here, something from there, and crafts something new from it. But as we have experienced, much of what we experience has little nourishment in it, little soul. We have the commons of the imagination but not always the slow ground this book has pursued to give it grounding.
Associative mythology honours the intensity of these times - not a Zeus time, a Goddess time, but a Trickster moment, by also making rapid openings between disciplines. In this it also relates to the ghazal form in Islamic poetry. It is an attempt to find the God behind the mood – to re-find the sacred to the spirit of this era. And the one that carries messages at lightning quick speed? Well, that’s the god of the storytellers, the trickster Hermes. When something is brilliant, nourishing, full of colour, then Hermes is present. Far from a tranced out, consensual Barthian harmony of impressionable masses, we entertain polyphonic, awake, contrary image, but all held firm within the wider arch of the story. A place like this has room for the crafty intelligence of the Wren, or a hot eyed old woman who knows she can flip into the gingery coat of a fox anytime she wants.
For those seeking an opiated society then this all makes life a great deal more complicated. The difference is a relishing of that complexity. Associative mythology recognizes that certain complications inflame a latent imagination – the Gloria Duplex of the Renaissance.
Copyright Martin Shaw 2012
Friday, 10 February 2012
WALKING THE STORY
Another walking of the story entry: Very fresh, a little tangled. It's from a version of the Grey Wethers story. The important detail for below is that it involves a desperate man, Lynhur, attempting to wrestle for personal wealth an old ritual that is really designed for worship of a sun deity, Belus. It's about hearing an instruction badly.
Walking the Story: Third Time Lucky
I’m leaving early. Nestling a cup of good coffee I scrawl the destination of my walking and its likely route on a note and leave it on the large wooden table. The car is an ice-shell, an Inuit’s bad dream, a dragon of frosting.
We tilt northwards, with huzzahs! and a firm whip hand, up into the solid wave of blue sky and frozen green hills beneath. My breath steams onto the window as Ken Bruce witters quietly from the radio. Gears feel thrashed, muddied spurts of earth cake the doors, every piece of plastic on it is hanging dainty from its righteous position. Good. I’m just starting to get comfortable with this motor.
It’s third time lucky for this story walking. First time, some time back, I got within site of the remote rings but got called away due to a sudden darkening of the sky – night fell quick with a forest to negotiate. Second time I got turned around by jagged weather, so this bright day I am grimly determined.
Hawk
Without a map I descend into the plethora of muddied lanes and dirt tracks between the Postbridge road and the descent into Chagford. There is hay bound in black lining like huge sticks of liquorice. Somewhere on route I am looking for signs left for Fernworthy reservoir, and the pine woods that surround it. It is through them that I will eventually get to the open moor and the circles. Today, all signs seem to suddenly stop, and I am almost on the descent into Chagford before I realise that something must be up. This can’t be right.
I’m hot and irritated. Why is it so hot? I have been up and down this steep road more than once, assuming I would get spoon fed by signs showing the route to the forest. As this sits angrily in my sizzle-brain, a large hawk bursts from the low cover in front of me. It is to my left, and sweeps across my path, only several feet ahead, initially at shoulder height. Epic wing span, mottled with dashes of exposed white, fierce mouth; that’s about all I can take in. I could have reached out and touched it. And lost a finger.
It is a great, thrumming blast of feather and clarity; cutting utterly through my pouty mood. Wing span clears five foot, easy. It’s not a buzzard – I know the colourings of the common and rarely seen rough legged buzzard, even have a fair idea of the even more obscure honey buzzard. This is something else again. (The buzzards have grown more visible on the moors since a lessening of game keeping aggression, large ‘wakes’ of them being reported, the largest with over forty four birds gathered)
Hawk hefts itself upwards, catches a current, and forces my head far right. In the distance I can see the formal shape and ‘cut out’ pattern of a conifer forest, past more lanes, dips and old growth copses. Thank you. Hawk, friend to Hera, Isis, Circe, clawed instructor of patience but companion to lovers – King Lover Gawain means ‘Gwalchmei’ – Hawk of May. Its vigour makes me done with my whines.
The Anxious Forest
I get into some focused walking, almost a slow jog, to cut through the time spent on tarmac. All Devon lanes are crooked and seem to lead you round on yourself before you get anywhere near your destination. Rather like a Devon conversation. When I finally enter the forest at its sweetest spot, I see that the dry stone walling at its entrance is almost entirely covered – the old stones appear like mossy loaves of bread, or the curls of a green sea. There is a briny scent, up from the coast, that only leaves when I move further into the shadowed forest, and the unmistakable aroma of pine seems to rise out of the very ground. At the centre of the dirt track is a wide ice ridge, although most of the ground is without snow. I can’t help but enjoy jumping from puddle to puddle, breaking the iced top. There seems to be no one about.
Tracking the ice ridge I slip, scamper, and steady myself on this white arrow of intention leading, some miles ahead, to the Grey Wethers stones. Was Lynhur so enthused on his walk to the stones – was it a glory swagger he carried with him? Had his winter starvation’s burnt all caution from his whip-thin frame? Today my companions are invisible, but they stomp alongside – the peat diggers, the solar worshippers, the transgressor of the sacred. I am many.
These pine trees, planted out of necessity for wood in the first war, carry war-paint – dashes of white horizontal against the steep trunks and endless shades of black. They seem poised for the chainsaw, to suffer without complaint. Occasionally, in the soldiering lines of timber, a strong gold light warms small areas of earth. It is strange to think that these non-native forests were planted out of a sense of anxiety. Maybe it can be sensed, I see no animal tracks but the occasional horse and sheep scat as I get nearer the moor.
These trees are voracious wanderers. Read the statistics: from the Canary Islands to the far East of Russia they are found, from Africa to Scotland, from New Zealand to Chile. They have become a tree of empire, of building, they have a knack of wiping out the local. Like most invaders they are tall. Tall and long living – some going for as long as a thousand years. A god stands behind them, the immortal Prometheus, the stealer of fire from Zeus. Well, like their inspirational deity they too have spread like a wild fire. A pine found in California was a true ancient, and aged at almost five thousand years old, and was named after the God who’s liver is eaten daily by an eagle and regenerated every divine night. The woods feel efficient certainly, but lonely. They absolutely do not hold the panache of an old growth stretch of oak and ash.
I come to an earlier stone circle. twenty seven small stones, roughly twenty metres or thirty strides in diameter, probably four thousand years old. When first discovered the inside face of the stones were black with charcoal – from ritual: funeral or feasting. Hair, teeth, flickering flame, lurching figures, raised incantation, tears, offering. As I make my way towards them I can see sunlight glittering; taking my attention to something placed by one of the entry stones to the circle. There is a bundle - letter, photograph, map – curled now through weather, but clearly a message to a lost and young friend. The photo is taken at what seems to be a rock festival, a group of young men, handsome wide open faces, lean together in camaraderie. It’s clear one hasn’t made it.
There are water logged and now ice stiffened pieces of cloth here and there, purple and red. And then more - witching gear, fifth fath. A bound rough figure in lightning struck wood, placed on the top of a stone. I leave the wood, the letters, the map, all of it, well alone. The very publicness of the offerings seems a little clumsy. This strange charcoaled circle, so far from anywhere, is clearly in use, in some form. Maybe not with the elegance and precision of original design, but there is something here that drags the bereft, the mystically ambitious, the straight out curious, to its humours.
Bone Pile
The track rises, passes a crossroads, more air, more blue sky. Like all these walks I relish the sheer aloness. I can see for miles and there really isn’t a soul. Some part of me uncurls into that space as I start thinking about having turned forty some months ago, of my father’s illness, or my life now. As these unwieldy but not unpleasant thoughts crash about I re-focus my attention to the present. I gaze around.
Stacked up, probably a dozen on either side of me, maybe fifteen foot high, are stacks of bones. Bone Hills. I blink, and look again. It’s not bone, but erratically assembled piles of bleached wood. They look like Mongolian shrines; I await the yip of the swift ponied Asian rider. Where is the dark Altai cry? Each skulled hump looks like it deserves orchids, bowls of frothing beer, silks tied to branch, rough slabs of jungled chocolate, quiet attention, goat meat for the circling hawk. Each one looks like a little death, some small ending that has occurred during my life. All the grieved and un-grieved moments I have dragged my still limping frame through. It’s a kind of review of all sorts of passages I simply have not recently allowed myself time to feel. Really, it’s a very strange moment.
And oddly, it’s ok. In this sudden graveyard I can map my own travels, places I have lived, erratic betrayals, crooked loves, emphatic healings, street brawls, lonely Sundays counting the hard cards of grief. In the smaller piles I see many little routes I have not taken; friendships cut short, choked at the hilt, strangled, mashed and bruised with bill hook flails. There are kindling piles of hubris and simple stubborness. We can’t follow every trail. We are not meant to hear every voice that speaks to us. So it is. Things pass back into the composting earth. I feel a strange pleasure that there is something to show for these few decades. There is a story. The brightness makes it all visible, concealment no kind of option. I have preferred moonlit nuance on the piles before now. The wind is up, and freezing, I keep going. Apart from that insistent wind, it is deeply quiet.
I linger awhile on the edge of the forest, and note a reluctance to come out from its shades into open moor. My lunar, forest, silvery stream nature is developed, instinctive, but this appointment in the palace of the Sun God is making me nervous. I’ve avoided it many, many times.
The Courtly Stones
I finally cut out from the forest entirely and head across open moorland, keeping in the tree-lines shade. Although cold, the sun is fiercely beating, too much for my pale wintered face. The grasses are stumpy bolts, blown into extreme clusters, meaning a constant meandering, no straight line kind of way across broken down walls, more moorland, over small, semi-frozen streams until finally the stones.
There are two circles. I count twenty stones in the northern circle, the southern has twenty nine. This second circle seems far more substantial, large, strangely shaped chunks of rock. Someone has placed a black stone, glittering with crystal, in a worn spot where a stone must have once been. Somewhere in Birmingham, an occultist feels pleased with themselves. Between the two courts of stone is a gap, a grassy runway, heading way off into open moor. The sky is criss-crossed with plane fumes. Again, my attention is drawn to the unusual late winter heat. Then it hits me. Belus! This is his place. No wonder the rocks bake on a February day in a sub-zero wind.
And how did I get here? Not ordinance survey map, not compass or grinning local, but by the sweeping grandeur of a Hawk. A Hawk- messenger of the Sun Gods. Friend to bright Apollo, head of Ra, feathered loyalty to Armenti, the Great Mother. Friend to Belus. The Celts said truly that a Hawks feathers carries sunlight with them. The Hawk is more than a familiar of choice for Merlin, but actually the power he would skin-crawl into it. Dear Hawk, bold pathmaker where there is no clear path, what the Seanchai storytellers fiercely name as the oldest animal of the Celts. Fly above me, fly above me, always.
Here, like the other circle, is signs of ritual use. This rather more charged. There is the remains of a flesh offering, just a scrap left, and some bloodied icicles, hanging off a particular distinguished stone.
This place was here during the battle of Hastings, the witch hunts, the Tudors, the Great War. It sat steady through the reformation, Cromwell, 9/11. Businesses go bust, empires go haywire, proud people make love, have families, dream, fight, die. Endless thousands of dramas played out. And still the circle, the wind, the great empty hold their eternal council. It is a constant scene. There is no stagnation here, only permanence. I’ve never been in such a place that seemed so entirely to itself, almost its own ecosystem, it’s own consciousness. These stones seem vast and elemental, the current ceremonial detritus I have witnessed scratchy and without consequence. But they bring some ghost memory from our guts, the real excavation is not of them but something inside of us. It is like arriving at an extraordinary theatre set without a description of the play, the actors gone for lunch, but a fierce longing to see it. It is as if older eyes watch from the tree-line, seeing us puzzle over the jigsaw. It is not a strange thing that we bring our brokeness here, our fragmented imaginations; we have to have something to lean on.
On this day I am not confronted with the drama of the Lynhur story but something of my own. The times I have shied from light, averse to clarity. My own scepticism of bright things, of success. The bone-piles I carry with me. That it is alright to follow a birds grand flight rather than a badger’s earthy snuffle sometimes. The blessings I have squandered into a slow drip poison.
Alone, in the vast, baking and windswept wintering moor, I pray to the one I hold dear, the Friend, and try to make good. I accept, and step into certain long denied energies. When, hours later, I emerge from where I began this walk, my face is salty, scorched by the sun.
Copyright Martin Shaw 2012
Walking the Story: Third Time Lucky
I’m leaving early. Nestling a cup of good coffee I scrawl the destination of my walking and its likely route on a note and leave it on the large wooden table. The car is an ice-shell, an Inuit’s bad dream, a dragon of frosting.
We tilt northwards, with huzzahs! and a firm whip hand, up into the solid wave of blue sky and frozen green hills beneath. My breath steams onto the window as Ken Bruce witters quietly from the radio. Gears feel thrashed, muddied spurts of earth cake the doors, every piece of plastic on it is hanging dainty from its righteous position. Good. I’m just starting to get comfortable with this motor.
It’s third time lucky for this story walking. First time, some time back, I got within site of the remote rings but got called away due to a sudden darkening of the sky – night fell quick with a forest to negotiate. Second time I got turned around by jagged weather, so this bright day I am grimly determined.
Hawk
Without a map I descend into the plethora of muddied lanes and dirt tracks between the Postbridge road and the descent into Chagford. There is hay bound in black lining like huge sticks of liquorice. Somewhere on route I am looking for signs left for Fernworthy reservoir, and the pine woods that surround it. It is through them that I will eventually get to the open moor and the circles. Today, all signs seem to suddenly stop, and I am almost on the descent into Chagford before I realise that something must be up. This can’t be right.
I’m hot and irritated. Why is it so hot? I have been up and down this steep road more than once, assuming I would get spoon fed by signs showing the route to the forest. As this sits angrily in my sizzle-brain, a large hawk bursts from the low cover in front of me. It is to my left, and sweeps across my path, only several feet ahead, initially at shoulder height. Epic wing span, mottled with dashes of exposed white, fierce mouth; that’s about all I can take in. I could have reached out and touched it. And lost a finger.
It is a great, thrumming blast of feather and clarity; cutting utterly through my pouty mood. Wing span clears five foot, easy. It’s not a buzzard – I know the colourings of the common and rarely seen rough legged buzzard, even have a fair idea of the even more obscure honey buzzard. This is something else again. (The buzzards have grown more visible on the moors since a lessening of game keeping aggression, large ‘wakes’ of them being reported, the largest with over forty four birds gathered)
Hawk hefts itself upwards, catches a current, and forces my head far right. In the distance I can see the formal shape and ‘cut out’ pattern of a conifer forest, past more lanes, dips and old growth copses. Thank you. Hawk, friend to Hera, Isis, Circe, clawed instructor of patience but companion to lovers – King Lover Gawain means ‘Gwalchmei’ – Hawk of May. Its vigour makes me done with my whines.
The Anxious Forest
I get into some focused walking, almost a slow jog, to cut through the time spent on tarmac. All Devon lanes are crooked and seem to lead you round on yourself before you get anywhere near your destination. Rather like a Devon conversation. When I finally enter the forest at its sweetest spot, I see that the dry stone walling at its entrance is almost entirely covered – the old stones appear like mossy loaves of bread, or the curls of a green sea. There is a briny scent, up from the coast, that only leaves when I move further into the shadowed forest, and the unmistakable aroma of pine seems to rise out of the very ground. At the centre of the dirt track is a wide ice ridge, although most of the ground is without snow. I can’t help but enjoy jumping from puddle to puddle, breaking the iced top. There seems to be no one about.
Tracking the ice ridge I slip, scamper, and steady myself on this white arrow of intention leading, some miles ahead, to the Grey Wethers stones. Was Lynhur so enthused on his walk to the stones – was it a glory swagger he carried with him? Had his winter starvation’s burnt all caution from his whip-thin frame? Today my companions are invisible, but they stomp alongside – the peat diggers, the solar worshippers, the transgressor of the sacred. I am many.
These pine trees, planted out of necessity for wood in the first war, carry war-paint – dashes of white horizontal against the steep trunks and endless shades of black. They seem poised for the chainsaw, to suffer without complaint. Occasionally, in the soldiering lines of timber, a strong gold light warms small areas of earth. It is strange to think that these non-native forests were planted out of a sense of anxiety. Maybe it can be sensed, I see no animal tracks but the occasional horse and sheep scat as I get nearer the moor.
These trees are voracious wanderers. Read the statistics: from the Canary Islands to the far East of Russia they are found, from Africa to Scotland, from New Zealand to Chile. They have become a tree of empire, of building, they have a knack of wiping out the local. Like most invaders they are tall. Tall and long living – some going for as long as a thousand years. A god stands behind them, the immortal Prometheus, the stealer of fire from Zeus. Well, like their inspirational deity they too have spread like a wild fire. A pine found in California was a true ancient, and aged at almost five thousand years old, and was named after the God who’s liver is eaten daily by an eagle and regenerated every divine night. The woods feel efficient certainly, but lonely. They absolutely do not hold the panache of an old growth stretch of oak and ash.
I come to an earlier stone circle. twenty seven small stones, roughly twenty metres or thirty strides in diameter, probably four thousand years old. When first discovered the inside face of the stones were black with charcoal – from ritual: funeral or feasting. Hair, teeth, flickering flame, lurching figures, raised incantation, tears, offering. As I make my way towards them I can see sunlight glittering; taking my attention to something placed by one of the entry stones to the circle. There is a bundle - letter, photograph, map – curled now through weather, but clearly a message to a lost and young friend. The photo is taken at what seems to be a rock festival, a group of young men, handsome wide open faces, lean together in camaraderie. It’s clear one hasn’t made it.
There are water logged and now ice stiffened pieces of cloth here and there, purple and red. And then more - witching gear, fifth fath. A bound rough figure in lightning struck wood, placed on the top of a stone. I leave the wood, the letters, the map, all of it, well alone. The very publicness of the offerings seems a little clumsy. This strange charcoaled circle, so far from anywhere, is clearly in use, in some form. Maybe not with the elegance and precision of original design, but there is something here that drags the bereft, the mystically ambitious, the straight out curious, to its humours.
Bone Pile
The track rises, passes a crossroads, more air, more blue sky. Like all these walks I relish the sheer aloness. I can see for miles and there really isn’t a soul. Some part of me uncurls into that space as I start thinking about having turned forty some months ago, of my father’s illness, or my life now. As these unwieldy but not unpleasant thoughts crash about I re-focus my attention to the present. I gaze around.
Stacked up, probably a dozen on either side of me, maybe fifteen foot high, are stacks of bones. Bone Hills. I blink, and look again. It’s not bone, but erratically assembled piles of bleached wood. They look like Mongolian shrines; I await the yip of the swift ponied Asian rider. Where is the dark Altai cry? Each skulled hump looks like it deserves orchids, bowls of frothing beer, silks tied to branch, rough slabs of jungled chocolate, quiet attention, goat meat for the circling hawk. Each one looks like a little death, some small ending that has occurred during my life. All the grieved and un-grieved moments I have dragged my still limping frame through. It’s a kind of review of all sorts of passages I simply have not recently allowed myself time to feel. Really, it’s a very strange moment.
And oddly, it’s ok. In this sudden graveyard I can map my own travels, places I have lived, erratic betrayals, crooked loves, emphatic healings, street brawls, lonely Sundays counting the hard cards of grief. In the smaller piles I see many little routes I have not taken; friendships cut short, choked at the hilt, strangled, mashed and bruised with bill hook flails. There are kindling piles of hubris and simple stubborness. We can’t follow every trail. We are not meant to hear every voice that speaks to us. So it is. Things pass back into the composting earth. I feel a strange pleasure that there is something to show for these few decades. There is a story. The brightness makes it all visible, concealment no kind of option. I have preferred moonlit nuance on the piles before now. The wind is up, and freezing, I keep going. Apart from that insistent wind, it is deeply quiet.
I linger awhile on the edge of the forest, and note a reluctance to come out from its shades into open moor. My lunar, forest, silvery stream nature is developed, instinctive, but this appointment in the palace of the Sun God is making me nervous. I’ve avoided it many, many times.
The Courtly Stones
I finally cut out from the forest entirely and head across open moorland, keeping in the tree-lines shade. Although cold, the sun is fiercely beating, too much for my pale wintered face. The grasses are stumpy bolts, blown into extreme clusters, meaning a constant meandering, no straight line kind of way across broken down walls, more moorland, over small, semi-frozen streams until finally the stones.
There are two circles. I count twenty stones in the northern circle, the southern has twenty nine. This second circle seems far more substantial, large, strangely shaped chunks of rock. Someone has placed a black stone, glittering with crystal, in a worn spot where a stone must have once been. Somewhere in Birmingham, an occultist feels pleased with themselves. Between the two courts of stone is a gap, a grassy runway, heading way off into open moor. The sky is criss-crossed with plane fumes. Again, my attention is drawn to the unusual late winter heat. Then it hits me. Belus! This is his place. No wonder the rocks bake on a February day in a sub-zero wind.
And how did I get here? Not ordinance survey map, not compass or grinning local, but by the sweeping grandeur of a Hawk. A Hawk- messenger of the Sun Gods. Friend to bright Apollo, head of Ra, feathered loyalty to Armenti, the Great Mother. Friend to Belus. The Celts said truly that a Hawks feathers carries sunlight with them. The Hawk is more than a familiar of choice for Merlin, but actually the power he would skin-crawl into it. Dear Hawk, bold pathmaker where there is no clear path, what the Seanchai storytellers fiercely name as the oldest animal of the Celts. Fly above me, fly above me, always.
Here, like the other circle, is signs of ritual use. This rather more charged. There is the remains of a flesh offering, just a scrap left, and some bloodied icicles, hanging off a particular distinguished stone.
This place was here during the battle of Hastings, the witch hunts, the Tudors, the Great War. It sat steady through the reformation, Cromwell, 9/11. Businesses go bust, empires go haywire, proud people make love, have families, dream, fight, die. Endless thousands of dramas played out. And still the circle, the wind, the great empty hold their eternal council. It is a constant scene. There is no stagnation here, only permanence. I’ve never been in such a place that seemed so entirely to itself, almost its own ecosystem, it’s own consciousness. These stones seem vast and elemental, the current ceremonial detritus I have witnessed scratchy and without consequence. But they bring some ghost memory from our guts, the real excavation is not of them but something inside of us. It is like arriving at an extraordinary theatre set without a description of the play, the actors gone for lunch, but a fierce longing to see it. It is as if older eyes watch from the tree-line, seeing us puzzle over the jigsaw. It is not a strange thing that we bring our brokeness here, our fragmented imaginations; we have to have something to lean on.
On this day I am not confronted with the drama of the Lynhur story but something of my own. The times I have shied from light, averse to clarity. My own scepticism of bright things, of success. The bone-piles I carry with me. That it is alright to follow a birds grand flight rather than a badger’s earthy snuffle sometimes. The blessings I have squandered into a slow drip poison.
Alone, in the vast, baking and windswept wintering moor, I pray to the one I hold dear, the Friend, and try to make good. I accept, and step into certain long denied energies. When, hours later, I emerge from where I began this walk, my face is salty, scorched by the sun.
Copyright Martin Shaw 2012
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