Tuesday, 31 July 2012
THE PROPHETS OF ROCK AND WAVE
Hey folks - an early heads-up about a writing retreat with a difference for winter 2012. The School has teamed up with the Dark Mountain Project - that churning beast of thought that is shuffling away from the domestic and conjuring all kinds of new literature and feral language into being. So, a good partner i'm sure you'd agree. Paul Kingsnorth is a director of Dark Mountain, and an accomplished writer and poet (and scyther actually), so will be bringing all sorts of new information with him. I'm excited about this unfolding.
More on this soon - but this is just an early tip. We are already filling spaces, and will close the doors at 20.
"Whilst promising the Earth, civilisation divorces us from it. But the stories our civilisation tells about itself are now unravelling. The intensity of that unravelling propels us into even greater disconnection from the wild.
The Dark Mountain Project and the Westcountry School of Myth and Story are collaborating for this unique writing, myth-making and wilderness workshop in the winter of 2012. It will pose a simple question: can we stand outside the wires and lights of modern living and, however briefly, re-forge a visceral engagement with the intelligence of the wild? Can we look at the human story, as it were, from outside?
Over a weekend spent in remote cabins, around fires and on the moors, we will explore what it means to un-civilise our writing and our selves. We will seek the place beyond the solitary intellect, where rather than dreaming we get dreamt. We will look to the creation of stories, poems, narratives and worldviews that are startling in their freshness, by walking beyond the usual dustbowls of the civilised world. Weather patterns, badger trails, and deep pools of water will serve as teachers. Bring your dancing shoes. And waterproofs.
The course is led by Martin Shaw, Director of the Westcountry School of Myth and Story (schoolofmyth.com), and Paul Kingsnorth, Director of the Dark Mountain project (dark-mountain.net). The weekend will combine writing workshops and exercises with moorland walks and fireside explorations. It will be active, outdoors and full of surprises. There will be no wifi connection or urban comforts.
The cost for the weekend is £200, including breakfast, evening meals and board. Numbers are limited to 20. No experience necessary – just enthusiasm"
For more information, see www.dark-mountain.net/events
To reserve your place or find out more, email tina.schoolofmyth@yahoo.com or call 01364 653723
Friday, 27 July 2012
Enlightenment and Genius
Back from the fog basin that was Snowdonia, and the tough, subtle and astonishing passage that is the wilderness fast. An honour to be part of this unfolding for those hardy folks that dragged themselves up into the wilds. Thank you for the rain-nymphs contribution, and even the deity's of blazing sunshine that lazily scattered honeyed sunlight on our crooked backs and soily hearts just when we most needed it.
I have been back in the Greek-like heat of Devon these last few days, camping with the family on the wine-red cliffs of our beautiful county. We are all as brown as berries. Through the wonders of technology, all sorts of new opportunities are flooding in at the moment to spread the kind of work we are exploring here, and some great collaborations for 2013 - i mean outstanding. Very exciting. So, more info when its time to reveal it.
A little taster from my 'Bird-Spirit King: Myth as Migration, a Wild Land Dreaming' book this week - at the end of a long chapter around language and myth; so any references to 'book', are for the invisible manuscript hovering around playing cards, drinking brandy and smoking cigars with the grandmothers till 2013.
More soon compadres - remember to check out the Dark Mountain and Westcountry Storytelling Festivals - also the Cloud Cuckoo Land Community Arts festival i will be sharing ideas and stories at a week tomorrow.
Mad as the Mist and the Snow
So how do we find a language porous enough to hold red berries and fish scales in its syntax? We turn to a kind of poetics; a raised torrent that pleases the invisible world and some humans. But I do say ‘some’. For others, it is unwieldy.
Ted Hughes, one of the grittiest poets on animism that the English language has ever had, has received consistent criticism for the overloaded range of image found in even one line of his poetry. The author Nick Bishop (Bishop 1994), decries Hughes' early work as “wielding language as a broadsword”, it “forcing the head down into submission”. He claims it all arises from some emphatically masculine impulse to ram an elevated literary consciousness down the throat of the unsuspecting reader.
For Bishop, the intense flavours are an avoidance of revealing psychological realities alive in the poet. All this drama – of horses and drumming ploughland – is merely a smokescreen for a hidden Hughesian consciousness. He’s hiding. Much later in Hughes’s timeline, he supports a lessening of ego, highlighting ‘Go Fishing’, a stanza I include here:
Join water
Let brain mist into moist earth
Ghost loosen away downstream
Gulp river and gravity
With these eastern infused lines, Bishop can finally relax, far away from the battlefield of the earlier work. This can be approved of, in a wider, slightly vague western approval of eastern ‘oneness’. Now Hughes has ensured that there is “no longer an arbitrary division between serenity and beauty above, and violence and beastliness below”. But that division is partially what makes Hughes’s work so compelling. That division and its pains are what the reader experiences as resolutely anchored through their own lives. It makes it relatable, despite its almost unbearable tensions between ecstatic and hellish.
Within myth, that division is called the wound, or the limp. And it's knowledge of it that activates genius. Not enlightenment necessarily, but genius.
Nature has bloodied scenes, cruelties, spasmodic tenderness, and it is Hughes' dark inheritance that he allows it to wriggle madly though almost every line. To claim he should somehow get his learning, his spell-crafting, out of the way, to make some kind of more benign flow, is an appalling notion. He is a stag clearing ground in those early years, taking space, claiming air filled with twitters of lesser poets. He’s not there to make nice.
Sometimes the mythological has far more true expression in it than thinned out ‘I’ statements. Its broad back carries depths that we sense in ourselves, but that are beyond anything we may have consciously lived through. It carries cosmos not just jumbled neurotic history.
Hughes is loyal to both the intensities of a thunderstorm and also to the oral storytellers love of copia – what I described earlier in the book as “the ready supply of inventive language”. His fame is not mistaken. He is truly loyal to his impressions of the living world and a clear vocation as mystic and thinker. His logos disciplines hard craft to the boundaried corral of his mythos abandon. His work is a place to go.
Bishop again takes him to task by suggesting that an early and brief debt to Dylan Thomas somehow makes the poetry less authentic, as if he should he have leapt like a jack-in-the box pristine into the world of 1950s poetry. The mythworld – the world he constantly drew upon – and the storying tradition that comes from it, does not work like that. Certain energies get handed down, images find beds in the imaginations of different artists in different generations. When handled with grace they are not a steal but a life giving re-visioning. They honour and sustain the echo locations of the earth, something just occasionally caught here and there, far more than just the legacy of that one individual.
Certain images are very precious, and require repetition.
Like the forest trails the hunter takes for the sacred antelope, when they cloud over entirely with brambles, something immense is lost. The mythteller carries a sharp bill hook to respectfully re-clear the leafy trail so the image-beast can roar through into consciousness again. The images re-find themselves in a new way, over and over again.
This is mythtelling we are witnessing, not just a moment in time, but outside of it in some ways. As he stared into the Dart river, fishing, the truths of this must have settled in the bloodied fissures of Hughes’s brain.
So I hope this book has been true to the notion of an associative mythography. We have soaked our boots in Dartmoor snow, bent our minds to history's radical happenings and book-knowledge, padded loyally after the story itself as it charges through the yellowed gorse and foaming stream – sometimes a jackdaw, sometimes a tor, sometimes words sheltering from icy sleet, tucked in tight with the hay-warm goats.
So yes to wild language, and yes to the discipline of crafting them into a form that can be slowly taken into the body. In the era of Shakespeare, inventive language was true wealth, it refuted the sluggish but built delicate word-cairns in the humming air around the speaker. Men and women would stagger from the Globe theatre, beautifully assaulted with vast armies of flowered language - to be treasured, seeded, unpacked, and cultivated in the strong privacy of ones own chest. It was gold, corn, single-malt, rubies, a salted hoard. You could literally speak a cosmos back to life. Yes to this.
Yes to the storied tongue – the tongue of those Suffolk farm hands, and to the slathered foam of Devon’s south coast shores, the frost encrusted field, the far distant kestrel, the heavy horse and the orchard, the hare’s joyful lope through the fragrant spring grasses.
How many years ago
Were you and I unlettered lads
Mad as the mist and the snow?
W.B. Yeats
copyright Martin Shaw 2012
I have been back in the Greek-like heat of Devon these last few days, camping with the family on the wine-red cliffs of our beautiful county. We are all as brown as berries. Through the wonders of technology, all sorts of new opportunities are flooding in at the moment to spread the kind of work we are exploring here, and some great collaborations for 2013 - i mean outstanding. Very exciting. So, more info when its time to reveal it.
A little taster from my 'Bird-Spirit King: Myth as Migration, a Wild Land Dreaming' book this week - at the end of a long chapter around language and myth; so any references to 'book', are for the invisible manuscript hovering around playing cards, drinking brandy and smoking cigars with the grandmothers till 2013.
More soon compadres - remember to check out the Dark Mountain and Westcountry Storytelling Festivals - also the Cloud Cuckoo Land Community Arts festival i will be sharing ideas and stories at a week tomorrow.
Mad as the Mist and the Snow
So how do we find a language porous enough to hold red berries and fish scales in its syntax? We turn to a kind of poetics; a raised torrent that pleases the invisible world and some humans. But I do say ‘some’. For others, it is unwieldy.
Ted Hughes, one of the grittiest poets on animism that the English language has ever had, has received consistent criticism for the overloaded range of image found in even one line of his poetry. The author Nick Bishop (Bishop 1994), decries Hughes' early work as “wielding language as a broadsword”, it “forcing the head down into submission”. He claims it all arises from some emphatically masculine impulse to ram an elevated literary consciousness down the throat of the unsuspecting reader.
For Bishop, the intense flavours are an avoidance of revealing psychological realities alive in the poet. All this drama – of horses and drumming ploughland – is merely a smokescreen for a hidden Hughesian consciousness. He’s hiding. Much later in Hughes’s timeline, he supports a lessening of ego, highlighting ‘Go Fishing’, a stanza I include here:
Join water
Let brain mist into moist earth
Ghost loosen away downstream
Gulp river and gravity
With these eastern infused lines, Bishop can finally relax, far away from the battlefield of the earlier work. This can be approved of, in a wider, slightly vague western approval of eastern ‘oneness’. Now Hughes has ensured that there is “no longer an arbitrary division between serenity and beauty above, and violence and beastliness below”. But that division is partially what makes Hughes’s work so compelling. That division and its pains are what the reader experiences as resolutely anchored through their own lives. It makes it relatable, despite its almost unbearable tensions between ecstatic and hellish.
Within myth, that division is called the wound, or the limp. And it's knowledge of it that activates genius. Not enlightenment necessarily, but genius.
Nature has bloodied scenes, cruelties, spasmodic tenderness, and it is Hughes' dark inheritance that he allows it to wriggle madly though almost every line. To claim he should somehow get his learning, his spell-crafting, out of the way, to make some kind of more benign flow, is an appalling notion. He is a stag clearing ground in those early years, taking space, claiming air filled with twitters of lesser poets. He’s not there to make nice.
Sometimes the mythological has far more true expression in it than thinned out ‘I’ statements. Its broad back carries depths that we sense in ourselves, but that are beyond anything we may have consciously lived through. It carries cosmos not just jumbled neurotic history.
Hughes is loyal to both the intensities of a thunderstorm and also to the oral storytellers love of copia – what I described earlier in the book as “the ready supply of inventive language”. His fame is not mistaken. He is truly loyal to his impressions of the living world and a clear vocation as mystic and thinker. His logos disciplines hard craft to the boundaried corral of his mythos abandon. His work is a place to go.
Bishop again takes him to task by suggesting that an early and brief debt to Dylan Thomas somehow makes the poetry less authentic, as if he should he have leapt like a jack-in-the box pristine into the world of 1950s poetry. The mythworld – the world he constantly drew upon – and the storying tradition that comes from it, does not work like that. Certain energies get handed down, images find beds in the imaginations of different artists in different generations. When handled with grace they are not a steal but a life giving re-visioning. They honour and sustain the echo locations of the earth, something just occasionally caught here and there, far more than just the legacy of that one individual.
Certain images are very precious, and require repetition.
Like the forest trails the hunter takes for the sacred antelope, when they cloud over entirely with brambles, something immense is lost. The mythteller carries a sharp bill hook to respectfully re-clear the leafy trail so the image-beast can roar through into consciousness again. The images re-find themselves in a new way, over and over again.
This is mythtelling we are witnessing, not just a moment in time, but outside of it in some ways. As he stared into the Dart river, fishing, the truths of this must have settled in the bloodied fissures of Hughes’s brain.
So I hope this book has been true to the notion of an associative mythography. We have soaked our boots in Dartmoor snow, bent our minds to history's radical happenings and book-knowledge, padded loyally after the story itself as it charges through the yellowed gorse and foaming stream – sometimes a jackdaw, sometimes a tor, sometimes words sheltering from icy sleet, tucked in tight with the hay-warm goats.
So yes to wild language, and yes to the discipline of crafting them into a form that can be slowly taken into the body. In the era of Shakespeare, inventive language was true wealth, it refuted the sluggish but built delicate word-cairns in the humming air around the speaker. Men and women would stagger from the Globe theatre, beautifully assaulted with vast armies of flowered language - to be treasured, seeded, unpacked, and cultivated in the strong privacy of ones own chest. It was gold, corn, single-malt, rubies, a salted hoard. You could literally speak a cosmos back to life. Yes to this.
Yes to the storied tongue – the tongue of those Suffolk farm hands, and to the slathered foam of Devon’s south coast shores, the frost encrusted field, the far distant kestrel, the heavy horse and the orchard, the hare’s joyful lope through the fragrant spring grasses.
How many years ago
Were you and I unlettered lads
Mad as the mist and the snow?
W.B. Yeats
copyright Martin Shaw 2012
Tuesday, 10 July 2012
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