Myth & Moor

Silence

"Have you ever heard the wonderful silence just before the dawn? Or the quiet and calm just as a storm ends? Or perhaps you know the silence when you haven't the answer to a question you've been asked, or the hush of a country road at night, or the expectant pause of a room full of people when someone is just about to speak, or, most beautiful of all, the moment after the door closes and you're alone in the whole house? Each one is different, you know, and all very beautiful if you listen carefully.” - Norton Juster (from The Phantom Toolbooth)

“After a time I found that I could almost listen to the silence, which had a dimension all of its own. I started to attend to its strange and beautiful texture, which of course, it was impossible to express in words. I discovered that I felt at home and alive in the silence, which compelled me to enter my interior world and around there. Without the distraction of constant conversation, the words on the page began to speak directly to my inner self. They were no long expressing ideas that were simply interesting intellectually, but were talking directly to my own yearning and perplexity.” - Karen Armstrong

"I am obsessed by the idea of silence. I went through an entire library studying art, artists and their critics, philosophers, too, on the meaning and significance of the color white. I dreamed of white birds and white bears. I thought about the white pages of my mother’s journals. I became enthralled with John Cage and his work, 4’33”, his masterpiece of ambient sound. Rauschenberg, too. And then at some point I let go. What sticks to the soul is what gets placed on the page. Maybe that’s the unknown part, the mystery, the power of the empty page." - Terry Tempest Williams 

“How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.” - Virginia Woolf

Images above are "The Dreamer of Dreams" by Edmund Dulac (1882-1953), "Blanket of Snow" by Virginia Lee, "The White Bear" (from East of the Sun, West of the Moon) by Kay Nielsen (1886-1957), "A Silence Like Intimacy" by Jackie Morris,  "The Night Before the Journey to England" by Carl Larsson (1853-1919), and a pen & ink skerch by Arthur Rackham (1867-1939).

The Terry Tempest Williams quote comes from a recent interview, On Writing as an Act of Living, which I highly recommend.

Morning

An excerpt from "How I Get to Write" by Roxanna Robinson :

"In the morning, I don’t talk to anyone, nor do I think about certain things.

"I try to stay within certain confines. I imagine this as a narrow, shadowy corridor with dim bare walls. I’m moving down this corridor, getting to the place where I can write.

"I brush my teeth, get dressed, make the bed. I avoid conversation, as my husband knows. I am not yet in the world, and there is a certain risk involved in talking: the night spins a fine membrane, like the film inside an eggshell. It seals you off from the world, but it’s fragile, easily pierced.

"....The reason the morning is so important is that I’ve spent the night somewhere else. This is nowhere I can describe exactly, only that it’s mysterious and limitless, a place where the mind expands. Deep, slow currents, far below the surface, shift me in ways I needn’t understand. There is no sound, no scrutiny. Waking, I’m still close to that silent, preconscious, penumbral state, still focussed inward. I’m still in that deep, noiseless place, listening to its voices, very different from those of the outside world."

(The full article is here.)

I read Robinson's piece (on The New Yorker blog) thinking, "Oh my gracious yes, that's it exactly!" -- for I too like to be up and out to the studio before anyone else in the house is awake, climbing the hill from house to studio by the light of the stars. I don't want to speak or be spoken to; I don't want to be jogged from this liminal state; I want to rest on the delicate threshold between the Night World and the Day World just as long as I can.

At this moment as I write, the sky is still dark, the studio hushed with pre-dawn enchantment; the only sounds are the ticking of the clock, water rushing in the stream outside, and a single owl calling from the woods. I compose these morning posts as I drink my coffee, waking (as Agatha Christie's Poirot would say) the "little grey cells" up. But I musn't be too awake, not yet, in order to slide gently into the writing day before the "fragile membrane of the night" has been pierced.

Tilly snuggles up beside me, yawning, dozing, waiting for our morning walk out in the woods. The tap-tap-tap of the computer keys is a familiar, comforting sound to her. She is waiting for the sun, and the click of the laptop closing, and the words: Okay, girl, let's go.

“Outside, there was that predawn kind of clarity, where the momentum of living has not quite captured the day. The air was not filled with conversation or thought bubbles or laughter or sidelong glances. Everyone was sleeping, all of their ideas and hopes and hidden agendas entangled in the dream world, leaving this world clear and crisp and cold as a bottle of milk in the fridge. ”
- Reif Larsen (from The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet)

The paintings above are by Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009). The photograph at the top of the post is of the Kuerner Farmhouse in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, where he often painted.

The dog who could see the wind

My old friend Neil Gaiman has written a very moving eulogy for his dog Cabal, posted here.  If you're a dog-lover yourself, beware; it's virtually impossible to read the piece without a few tears. As I wiped off my own, I turned to Tilly and insisted, "You're going to life forever, right?"

To lose a good dog is to lose a best friend and family member all in one. Rest in peace, Cabal.

The painting below is "Know But Do Not Tell " by the wonderful American painter Jeanie Tomanek. The name, I'm guessing, refers to this quote from the letters of Emily Dickinson:

"You ask of my companions. Hills, sir, and the sundown, and a dog as large as myself that my father bought me. They are better than human beings, because they know but do not tell."

Recommended Reading

Some interesting articles to pass along....

* Paul Kingsnorth (author of the excellent book Real England: The Battle Against the Bland, and one of the movers-and-shakers behind The Dark Mountain Project) discusses Green Man symbolism in Aeon magazine.

* Yuka Igarashi discusses the perils of editing in a charming post on the Granta website. (My own take on editing is here.)

* The BBC reports the discovery of a new story by Hans Christian Andersen. (For more on the life of H.C.A., go here.)

* Two interesting articles on artistic collaboration: one by Maura Kelly in The Atlantic, and one about Fran Walsh and Phillipa Boyen (co-screenwriters for Peter Jackson's Tolkien films) in The New York Times.

* A provocative article by Sarah Mesle on boys in YA fiction, in The Los Angeles Review of Books.

* Noah Shachtman discusses the history of Europe's secret societies,  in Wired.

* Sophie Elmherst has published an interesting profile of Booker Prize winner Hilary Mantel, in The New Statesman.

“I think if I hadn’t become a writer I would just have suppressed that part of my personality," says Mantel. "I think I would have put it in a box that I never opened. I’m not sure I would have been happy doing that. Sometimes people ask, does writing make you happy? But I think that’s beside the point. It makes you agitated, and continually in a state where you’re off balance. You seldom feel serene or settled. You’re like the person in the fairy tale The Red Shoes: you’ve just got to dance and dance, you’re never in equilibrium. I don’t think writing makes you happy, not that you asked that question, I’m asking myself. I think it makes for a life that by its very nature has to be unstable, and if it ever became stable, you’d be finished.”

Hmmm. I'm not sure if I agree with that or not, but it's an interesting comment.

Thanksgiving

I posted the picture above on Thanksgiving Day last year, and I'm re-posting it now because it says all I want to say -- although I'm celebrating the holiday in America this time, an ocean away from my sweet pup and and our beloved Devon hills. (If you find the type hard to read, click on the image for a larger version.)

Speaking of pups, for fellow dog lovers I recommend a new article by Virginia Hughes on how a dog sniffs, at the science blog The Last Word on Nothing. "It’s humbling to think of how much of this big wide world my microsmatic self will never get to experience," she says. "The only whiff I get comes from watching my dog’s delight." The last picture below relates to the topic, and is also re-posted from my picture archives.

Also, please don't miss Annie Lamotts's lovely Thanksgiving essay, in praise of books, writers, and bookish families, in The New York Times.

Recommended Reading

The great mythic fiction writer Alan Garner discusses inspiration, the mythic landscape, living with bi-polar disease, and his new book, Boneland, in "Alan Garner: A Life in Books" (Alison Flood, The Guardian) and "There is Light at the End of the Tunnel" (Robert Chalmers, The Independent).

I also recommend a 2008 video of Garner, made on the 50th anniversary of The Weirdstone of Brisingamen; and Garner's fascinating collection of essays: The Voice That Thunders (Havrill Press, 2003).

Recommended Reading:

Please don't miss "Chamber of Secrets: The Sorcery of Angela Carter" by fairy tale scholar Marina Warner, which is over on the Paris Review site.

Warner writes: "Angela Carter...refused to join in rejecting or denouncing fairy tales, but instead embraced the whole stigmatized genre, its stock characters and well-known plots, and with wonderful verve and invention, perverse grace and wicked fun, soaked them in a new fiery liquor that brought them leaping back to life. From her childhood, through her English degree at the University of Bristol where she specialised in Medieval Literature, and her experiences as a young woman on the folk-music circuit in the West Country, Angela Carter was steeped in English and Celtic faerie, in romances of chivalry and the grail, Chaucerian storytelling and Spenserian allegory, and she was to become fairy tale’s rescuer, the form’s own knight errant, who seized hold of it in its moribund state and plunged it into the fontaine de jouvence itself."

So very true. In the mythic arts field we owe an enormous debt to Angela Carter, whose influence on contemporary fairy tale literature remains unsurpassed to this day.

Art above: "Little Red Riding Hood" by Gustave Doré (1832-1883)

The magic of stories....

Heads up, folks. There's a gorgeous interview with Amal El-Mohtar that's just been posted on the John Barelycorn blog, discussing stories, words, language, and the magical "language" of the Tarot. Here's a taste:

"Coleridge wrote a poem called ‘The Eolian Harp,’ " Amal says, "in which he explored the notion of music slumbering on its instrument. It's a gorgeous poem! It moves through thoughts and moods of the soul as if we're all but harps waiting for a breeze to pass through us to animate us. I feel the same way about art: that it is something that on many levels colonises you, gets inside you and changes you from the inside out. I find that happens with books, too. After I’ve read a book, for a couple of days afterwards I think in the patterns of the book’s writing, because the act of reading is an act of organising your own thought process. If you are reading someone else’s writing, you are having to organise your perception along someone else’s structure. So if I read a book by Terry Pratchett, a few days later there is still a little Terry Pratchettness to my thoughts. When I read something by Catherynne Valente, for quite a few days there is a kind of ‘jewelled’ quality to my thoughts. To read a book is to let someone else reach inside me and reorganise me. As a writer, I find it very difficult to start writing immediately after having read another writer's book. I have to digest it first, and let the influence pass…."

Amal, of course, is the author of The Honey Month (highly recommended) and many other mythic works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. She's also co-editor the poetry journal Goblin Fruit...and a great friend of Tilly's, as you can see above.

I'm still out of the office, but here's another lovely article that I want to recommend to you: Philip Hensher's paean to the handwritten word, "Why Handwriting Matters."

"I've come to the conclusion," he says, "that handwriting is good for us. It involves us in a relationship with the written word that is sensuous, immediate and individual. It opens our personality out to the world, and gives us a means of reading other people. It gives pleasure when you communicate with it. No one is ever going to recommend that we surrender the convenience and speed of electronic communications to pen and paper. Though it would make no sense to give up the clarity and authority of print which is available to anyone with a keyboard, to continue to diminish the place of the handwritten in our lives is to diminish, in a small but real way, our humanity."

I agree. I love handwriting so much that it drifts from my letters and notebook pages into my drawings, paintings,  collages...and then onto the walls of houses and studios...a gentle scattering of poems, quotes, half-legible tales, slipping into and out of our dreams....

Art above: Carl Larsson's painting of his diningroom at "Little Hyttnäs,"  and my "Fairies in the Meadow" (a detail from a larger collage)

Publication Day

Roll up! Roll up! Tilly has opened her bookstall to sell copies of Rex and Howard's newly-published graphic novel, John Barleycorn Must Die: a metaphysical mystery about a magician-sleuth in modern day London. (The name of the novel, of course, comes from an old British folksong and Robert Burns poem.) Please join me in congratulating the two knuckleheads distinguished artists in the studio next door to mine, on this, the book's Publication Day. It's such a pleasure to hold the finished volume in my hands, and to be able to share it with others.

If you'd like to sample the first three chapters of the comic, or order a copy, you can do so on the Barleycorn website.

For those of you who care about the details of book production, the American edition is the better one, beautifully produced by Kablam (a publisher dedicated to comics). But Kablam's international postage costs are high, so there's also a UK edition from Lulu for European readers who are watching their budget. And there's an e-book edition.

Holding the World in Balance

From an interview with Chickesaw writer Linda Hogan:

"There is the story that so many tell of the time when humans and animals could change into each other. There were times when animals and people spoke the same language, or when the animals helped the humans. For instance, our mythology says it was the spider who brought us fire.

"I’ve thought about these human-animal relationships for years – is this true? Well, humans and animals existed together for many thousands of years without creating the loss of species. There was enormous respect given to animals. I have to trust the knowledge of indigenous people because it held a world in balance.

"I have a special interest in ceremonies. I look at a ceremony called The Deer Dance. In the ceremony, I watch the entire world unfold through the life of the deer and a man dressed as a deer. The man dances all night. It is as if he were transformed into a deer. This is a renewal ceremony for the people. The deer that lives in the mountains far from the people provides them with life.

"The purpose of most ceremonies – such as healing ceremonies – is to return one person or group of people to themselves, to place the human in proper relationship with the rest of the world. I thought that we were out of touch with ourselves 20 years ago. Now, with computers and email and cell phones, we are even more out of touch. How many of us even stay in touch with our own bodies? If we aren’t inhabiting our own bodies, how can we understand animal bodies of the world?"

(I recommend reading the full interview here.)

Images above: "The Mule Deer Child," Yaqui and Mayo deer dancers (photographed during public dance displays, not sacred ceremonies), a deer dancer in Bhutan, a women's deer dance in Bali, a Tibetan Cham Deer; a deer dance by performer and installation artist Carolyn Ryder Cooley; and performers from the Tucson "circus and fire theatre" troupe Flam Chen. Further reading: "Deer Woman and the Living Myth of the Dreamtime" by Carolyn Dunn, "Where the White Stag Runs" by Ari Berk, and "Balance of the World, Parts I and II" by Howard Gayton.

Shape-shifting

From the Introduction to The Beastly Bride: Tales of the Animal People, a YA anthology I edited with Ellen Datlow:

"Contemporary writers use animal-transformation themes to explore issues of gender, sexuality, race, culture, and the process of transformation...just as storytellers have done, all over the world, for many centuries past. One distinct change marks modern retellings, however, reflecting our changed relationship to animals and nature. In a society in which most of us will never encounter true danger in the woods, the big white bear who comes knocking at the door [in fairy tales] is not such a frightening prospective husband now; instead, he's exotic, almost appealing. 

"Whereas once wilderness was threatening to civilization, now it's been tamed and cultivated; the dangers of the animal world have a nostalgic quality, removed as they are from our daily existence. This removal gives "the wild" a different kind of power; it's something we long for rather than fear. The shape-shifter, the were-creature, the stag-headed god from the heart of the woods--they come from a place we'd almost forgotten: the untracked forests of the past; the primeval forests of the mythic imagination; the forests of our childhood fantasies: untouched, unspoiled, limitless.

"Likewise, tales of Animal Brides and Bridegrooms are steeped in an ancient magic and yet powerfully relevant to our lives today. They remind us of the wild within us...and also within our lovers and spouses, the part of them we can never quite know. They represent the Others who live beside us--cat and mouse and coyote and owl--and the Others who live only in the dreams and nightmares of our imaginations. For thousands of years, their tales have emerged from the place where we draw the boundary lines between animals and human beings, the natural world and civilization, women and men, magic and illustion, fiction and the lives we live."

Images above: "Perched" by Kelly Louise Judd (Kansas City), two prints by Kiki Smith (New York), "Book and Tiger" by Julie Morstad (Vancouver), and "Bitch" by Kay Fu (Brooklyn). Please follow the links to see more of their work. Further reading: "Into the Woods: On British Forests, Myth and Now" by Ruth Padel.

Crossing over

A passage from Brenda Peterson's Build Me an Ark: A Life with Animals, in which she is swimming with a dolphin pod on the Florida coast:

"'Crossover' is a word scientists use to describe dolphins' soaring over seas, their traveling so free and fast, so high-spirited and almost effervescent that their sleek bodies barely skim the waves. The suggestion of splashes from tail and pectoral leaves a luminous wake across the water. For these crossover miles, the dolphins, like their human terrestrial mammal kin, belong more to the element of air than the sea....

"Held in [the dolphins'] fluid embrace, I pulled my arms close against my sides and our communal speed increased... Racing around the lagoon, I opened my eyes again to see nothing but an emerald underwater blur. And then I remembered what I had either forgotten long ago or never quite fully realized. This feeling of being carried along by other animals was familiar.

"Animals had carried me all my life. I was a crossover--carried along in the generous and instructive slipstream of other species. And I had always navigated my life with them in mind, going between the human and animal worlds--a crossover myself. By including animals in my life I was always engaging with the Other, imagining the animal mind and life. For almost half a century, my bond with animals had shaped my character and revealed the world to me. At every turning point in my life an animal had mirrored or influenced my fate. Mine was not simply a life with other animals, but a life because of animals.

"It had been this way since my beginning, born on a forest lookout station in the High Sierras, surrounded by millions of acres of wilderness and many more animals than humans. Since infancy, the first faces I imprinted, the first faces I ever really loved, were animal."

If you haven't yet read Brenda's luminous work (which includes fiction, essays, memoirs, and anthologies), please do seek it out. The link above goes to her website, and her blog (on books, nature, seal watching and more) is here.

Images above: "Mermaid in Flight" by Fay Ku (Brooklyn), "Sky Pack" by Julianna Swaney (Portland), "Fox Confessor" by Julie Morstad (Vancouver), and "Hank" by Carson Ellis (Portland). Please visit their websites to see more of their art.

Recommended Reading

"I think part of my purpose in this life is to talk about magic, and to make it."  - Theodora Goss, from her blog post "Finding the Magic."

Recommended Reading

"[E]verything is fiction," says the Irish novelist Keith Ridgway in an interesting post about writing on The New Yorker's blog. "When you tell yourself the story of your life, the story of your day, you edit and rewrite and weave a narrative out of a collection of random experiences and events. Your conversations are fiction. Your friends and loved ones—they are characters you have created. And your arguments with them are like meetings with an editor—please, they beseech you, you beseech them, rewrite me. You have a perception of the way things are, and you impose it on your memory, and in this way you think, in the same way that I think, that you are living something that is describable. When of course, what we actually live, what we actually experience—with our senses and our nerves—is a vast, absurd, beautiful, ridiculous chaos."

The full post is here.

Illustration above by Edmund Dulac (1882-1953)

Recommended reading:

Jaimie James discusses the poetry of William Butler Yeats in relationship to his practice of magic in "W.B. Yeats, Magus" (Lapham's Quaterly).

"Magic," writes James, "imbrued Yeats’ thinking so profoundly that it’s nearly impossible to disentangle the strands without rending the garment. Kathleen Raine, a poet deeply influenced by Yeats, offered a useful formula: 'For Yeats magic was not so much a kind of poetry as poetry a kind of magic, and the object of both alike was evocation of energies and knowledge from beyond normal consciousness.' The salient word there is 'evocation,' casting the poet as a magus conjuring verbal spirits, not from his imagination but from a higher, or a deeper, place."

Art above: A detail from "The Alchemist" by Edmund Dulac (1882-1953)

Recommended Reading

Cinderella by Edmund Dulac (1882-1953)

The Los Angeles Review of Books has launched a series of essays called Fairy Tales Revisited, looking at fairy tale re-tellings past and present. The first essay is "The Nature of Cinderella" by Marie Rutkoski.

"Fairy tales are rife with transformation," write Rutkoski, "from beast to handsome prince, from dirty scullery maid to well-dressed princess. It is perhaps no coincidence that nature in the Cinderella stories facilitates transformation, for nature itself is a changeable thing, from season to season, from a sunny day to rain, from an egg to a flying bird in a matter of weeks."

Also, on the same site you'll find an interview with one of my favorite authors of the subjects of trees and forests, Robert Pogue Harrison, discussing "Deforestation in a Civilized World."

"When I'm critical of modern approaches to ecology," says Harrison, "I'm really trying to remind my reader of the long relationship that Western civilization has had to these forests that define the fringe of its place of habitation, and that this relationship is one that has a rich history of symbolism and imagination and myth and literature. So much of the Western imagination has projected itself into this space that when you lose a forest, you're losing more than just the natural phenomenon or biodiversity; you're also losing the great strongholds of cultural memory."

Indeed.

Tilly communes with a Tree Elder

I should also note that the Moveable Feast on Creative Inspiration continues to grow. You'll find the full listing (so far) on the Moveable Feast page...and do let me know if you have a new dish to add. All contributions welcome.

Recommended Reading

A few quick recommendations today:

* Thedora Goss has posted some interesting thoughts "Selchie Women" on her writing blog.

"It occurred to me that there have always been selkie women," Dora writes, "women who did not seem to belong to this world, because they did not fit into prevailing notions of what women were supposed to be. And if you did not fit into those notions, in some sense you weren’t a woman. Weren’t even quite human. The magical animal woman is, or can be, a metaphor for those sorts of women."

* George Monbiot has published a fascinating article on "John Clare, poet of the environmental crisis 200 years ago" in The Guardian.

"His father was a casual farm labourer," writes Monbiot, "his family never more than a few days' wages from the poorhouse. Clare himself, from early childhood, scraped a living in the fields. He was schooled capriciously, and only until the age of 12, but from his first bare contact fell wildly in love with the written word. His early poems are remarkable not only for the way in which everything he sees flares into life, but also for his ability to pour his mingled thoughts and observations on to the page as they occur, allowing you, as perhaps no other poet has done, to watch the world from inside his head. Read The Nightingale's Nest, one of the finest poems in the English language, and you will see what I mean."

* Carlo Rotella discusses "The Art of Storytelling" in The European, coming at the subject from the point of view of a nonfiction writer and academic.

"I’m allergic to abstraction," Rotella says. "Especially in my first two books, I was telling the story of the transformation of urban America, especially in the so-called 'rust belt,' and of the decline of the industrial city and the rise of post-industrialism. But I could only tell it as a series of locally inflected stories about particular characters at particular moments in particular landscapes. They are almost always creative characters: Writers, or musicians. These characters are often filled with some urge, and I am basically writing the biography of that urge. How does the urge to play the guitar find expression in certain styles, which are attached to certain institutions, and then to the city?"

* Michael Cunningham has published a fascinating "Letter from the Pulitzer Fiction Jury: What Really Happened This Year" in The New Yorker. (It turns out that the jurors were as surprised as everyone else when no book won the prize this year.)

"Utter objectivity...is not only impossible when judging literature, it’s not exactly desirable," he notes. "Fiction involves trace elements of magic; it works for reasons we can explain and also for reasons we can’t. If novels or short-story collections could be weighed strictly in terms of their components (fully developed characters, check; original voice, check; solidly crafted structure, check; serious theme, check) they might satisfy, but they would fail to enchant. A great work of fiction involves a certain frisson that occurs when its various components cohere and then ignite." 

So true.

* Also, it's good to see my old JoMA partner Midori Snyder back to regular blogging at In the Labyrinth (with its beautiful new page design). Particularly as she's the person who got me into blogging in the first place....

Image above: An illustration for Shakespeare's The Tempest by Edmund Dulac (1882-1953)

A second cuppa with Brian and Wendy Froud...

Part II of the "Around the Table" discussion with Brian and Wendy Froud is now up on the John Barleycorn site. (Part I, if you missed it, is here.) The focus of the talk is on the process of creative collaboration, particularly as regards their forthcoming book on Trolls (above)...but there are also many good insights on the creative process in general, so do go have a look. Then pull up a chair, pour yourself a cup of tea or coffee, and  join in the conversation; the Barleycorn boys welcome comments from all.

"When we produce pictures of Trolls, you’re not just looking at pictures of Trolls. I would argue that actually you are looking at a landscape...literally the landscape of Dartmoor...because all of the shapes and forms are based on rocks and roots and trees, and it’s very localised. Then beyond that, not only is it a Troll, and a landscape, it’s also the World. When you are looking at a picture in terms of magic, and magical thinking, everything is encompassed in that one picture; everything!"  - Brian Froud

A cup of tea with Brian and Wendy Froud...

Part I of the "Around the Table" chat with Brian & Wendy Froud is now up on the John Barleycorn blog...which includes a sneak peak at a page-spread from their forthcoming book, Trolls. Part II (with more art from the new book) will go on-line next Monday. Enjoy!

"I feel that what you should illustrate is the space between the words. It's the betweenness, the otherness, that gives depth and dimension." - Brian Froud