Into the Woods, 27: The Deepwood (Part ll)

From The Wild Places by Robert Macfarlane:

"Before coming to the Black Wood, I had read as widely in tree lore as possible. As well as the many accounts I encountered of damage to trees and woodland -- of what in German is called Waldsterben, or 'forest-death' -- I also met with and noted down stories of astonishment at woods and trees. Stories of how Chinese woodsmen in the T'ang and S'ung dynasties -- in obedience to the Taoist philosophy of a continuity of nature between humans and other species -- would bow to the trees which they felled, and offer a promise that the tree would be used well, in buildings that would dignify the wood once it had become timber.  The story of Xerxes, the Persian king who so loved sycamores that, when marching to war with the Greeks, he halted his army of many thousands of men in order that they might contemplate and admire one outstanding specimen. Thoreau's story of how he felt so attached to the trees in the woods around his home-town of Concord, Massachusetts, that he would call regularly on them, glady tramping 'eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beech-tree, or yellow-birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines.'

"When Willa Cather moved to the prairies of Nebraska, she missed the wooded hills of her native Virginia. Pining for trees, she would sometimes travel south 'to our German neighbors, to admire their catalpa grove, or to see the big elm tree that grew out of a crack in the earth. Trees were so rare in that country that we used to feel anxious about them, and visit them as if they were persons'....

"Single trees are extraordinary; trees in number more extraordinary still. To walk in a wood is to find fault with Socrates's declaration that 'Trees and open country cannot teach me anything, whereas men in town do.' Time is kept and curated and in different ways by trees, and so it is experienced in different ways when one is among them. This discretion of trees, and their patience, are both affecting. It is beyond our capacity to comprehend that the American hardwood forest waited seventy million years for people to come and live in it, though the effort of comprehension is itself worthwhile. It is valuable and disturbing to know that grand oak trees can take three hundred years to grow, three hundred years to live and three hundred years to die. Such knowledge, seriously considered, changes the grain of the mind.

"Thought, like memory, inhabits external things as much as the inner regions of the human brain. When the physical correspondents of thought disappear, then thought, or its possibility, is also lost. When woods and trees are destroyed -- incidentally, deliberately -- imagination and memory go with them. W.H. Auden knew this. 'A culture,' he wrote warningly in 1953, 'is no better than its woods.' "

From Ross Anderson's interview of Robert Pogue Harrison (in The LA Review of Books):

Robert Anderson: Your book [Forests], particularly the end of it, criticizes some of the basic ideas that motivate environmentalism and ecology. In particular you argue that when we conceive of deforestation as "loss of wildlife habitat," or "loss of nature," or "loss of biodiversity," we're not capturing the full loss that we face. First of all, what is the extent of that loss, and in your view has ecology changed much in the past twenty years?

Robert Pogue Harrison: That's a good question. When I'm critical of modern approaches to ecology, 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.

Is there a sound? There is a forest.
What is the word? The word is wilderness.
What is the answer? The answer is the world.
What is the beginning? A beginning is happiness.
What is the end? No one lives there now.
What is a beginning? The beginning is light.

- Bin Ramke
(from his beautiful, painful poem "Trouble Deaf Heaven: Sonnet 29")

Into the Woods, 26: The Deepwood (Part 1)

From The Wild Places by English naturalist Robert Macfarlane:

"To understand the wild you must understand the wood. For civilization, as the historian Robert Pogue Harrison writes, 'literally cleared its space in the midst of forests.' For millennia, 'a sylvan fringe of darkness defined the limits of cultivation, the margins of its cities, the boundaries of its domains, but also the extravagance of its imagination.'

"Although the disappearance of the true wildwood [in the British Isles] occurred in the Neolithic period, before humanity began to record its own history, creation myths in almost all cultures look fabulously back to a forested earth. In the ancient Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh, the quest-story which begins world literature, Gilgamesh sets out on his journey from Uruk to the Cedar Mountains, where he has been charged to slay the Huwawa, the guardian of the forest. The Roman empire also defined itself against the forests in which its capital city was first established, and out of which its founders, the wolf-suckled twins, emerged. It was the Roman Empire which would proceed to destroy the dense forests of the ancient world.

"The association of the wild and the wood also run deep in etymology. The two words are thought to have grown out of the root word wald and the old Teutonic word walthus, meaning 'forest.' Walthus entered Old English in its variant forms of 'weald,' 'wald,' and 'wold,' which were used to designate both 'a wild place' and 'a wooded place,' in which wild creatures -- wolves, foxes, bears -- survived. The wild and wood also graft together in the Latin word silva, which means 'forest,' and from which emerged the idea of 'savage,' with its connotations of fertility....

"The deepwood is vanished in these islands -- much, indeed, had vanished before history began -- but we are still haunted by the idea of it. The deepwood flourishes in our architecture, art and above all in our literature. Unnumbered quests and voyages have taken place through and over the deepwood, and fairy tales and dream-plays have been staged in its glades and copses. Woods have been a place of inbetweenness, somewhere one might slip from one world to another, or one time to a former: in Kipling's story 'Puck of Pook's Hill,' it is by right of 'Oak and Ash and Thorn' that the children are granted their ability to voyage back into English history.

"There is no mystery in this association of woods and otherworlds, for as anyone who has walked the woods knows, they are places of correspondence, of call and answer. Visual affinities of color, relief and texture abound. A fallen branch echoes the deltoid form of a streambed into which it has come to rest. Chrome yellow autumn elm leaves find their color rhyme in the eye-ring of the blackbird. Different aspects of the forest link unexpectedly with each other, and so it is that within the stories, different times and worlds can be joined.

"Woods and forests have been essentialt to the imagination of these islands, and of countries throughout the world, for centuries. It is for this reason that when woods are felled, when they are suppressed by tarmac and concrete and asphalt, it is not only unique species and habitats that disappear, but also unique memories, unique forms of thought."

What Tilly and I saw on our morning walk...

...in-between bursts of summer showers: a rainbow stretching from the open moor to the rolling green fields of Chagford. In myth, rainbows often lead to the land of the gods, to the spirit world, or else into the Good Folks' realm . . . which seems appropriate here. The wild hills of Devon are Faerieland enough for me.

Rainbows never fail to fill me with awe. I love their fragility, ephemerality, and the way they appear so suddenly, like a magical visitation. Tilly and I stopped to watch this one until fresh rain showers drove us home again, shrieking (me, not Tilly) as we ran through the woods, getting very wet indeed.

Now Tilly lounges by the studio window, damp but content, while the rain drums patterns on the cabin's tin roof. Outside, the parched hills drink it down; and inside, all is snug and dry. With Celtic fiddles on the stereo and a fresh mug of coffee to hand, the work week begins ....

Tunes for a Monday Morning

After posting photographs of the Morris troupe dancing near Fingle Bridge last week,  I was reminded of my favorite local troupe: Beltane, performers of the wild, almost shamanic form of the dance called Border Morris.

Americans tend to view Morris dancing as a quaintly charming slice of "olde England," and don't often realize how many of the English themselves find it hopelessly twee.* (This is the kind of dance they're generally thinking of.) As an oft-repeated quote (variously attributed to Thomas Beecham, Wilde, Shaw, and others) says snidely: "Try everything at least once once, my dear, except incest and Morris dancing." Personally, I like Morris dancing of all sorts (thereby "outing" myself as deeply uncool); and I especially love modern Border Morris as practiced by younger troupes like Beltane, with goth, punk, and neo-pagan leanings.

Border Morris originated in the west of Britain -- probably sometime in the late Middle Ages, arising from dance traditions that were older still -- developed primarily by dancers and musicians along the border of England and Wales. The distinguishing characteristics of Border Morris (as opposed to other forms) are shorter sticks, higher steps, ragged costumes, blackened faces, and larger bands of musicians. The history of the blackened face is much disputed: it may have had ceremonial significance in the dance's deeply pagan origins; or it might have been a form of disguise adopted in years when Border Morris was frowned upon as rowdy, subversive, and un-Christian.

It certain is rowdier than most other forms of Morris; it's also more overtly pagan, and thus (to me) more powerful. Often performed at sacred times in the Celtic lunar calendar, the dances invoke a palpable magic tied to the land, the seasons, and the mythic wheel of life, death, and rebirth. Like other forms of sacred dance the world over, the drum beat and the dancers' steps weave patterns intended to keep the seasons turning and maintain the balance of the human/nonhuman worlds. Yet in contrast to other, more mannered forms of Morris, Border dancers unleash an energy that is earthier, lustier, more anarchic...both joyous and unsettling to watch, especially by dusk or firelight. 

Howard and I  once came across Beltane dancing in our village square, just as dark began to fall. At one moment in the dance, the music went quiet. The troupe dropped to their knees in unison, sticks pounding the ground in a slow, steady rhythm. Then, just as slowly, the dancers rose...the music started faintly...quickened and loudened...and the dance romped on again. It was breathtaking to watch: both beautiful and chilling. If a portal into Faerie had opened at that moment, I would not have been at all surprised.

In the video at the top of this post, Beltane performs a Fire Dance at the dawn of May Day (Beltane), 2012. The dance took place on Dartmoor, on a foggy crossroad near Hay Tor.

Below, a dance for Winter Solstice at Stonehenge, filmed last December.

And last, just for fun:

Dancing in the sea. This video (complete with wind and barking dog) was filmed at Teignmouth on the south Devon coast.

* The American equivalent of the English word "twee" would be "hokey" or "corny."

On Singing & Music

“It may be laid down as a general rule that if a man begins to sing, no one will take any notice of his song except his fellow human beings. This is true even if his song is surpassingly beautiful. Other men may be in
raptures at his skill, but the rest of creation is, by and large, unmoved. Perhaps a cat or a dog may look at him; his horse, if it is an exceptionally intelligent beast, may pause in cropping the grass, but that is the extent of it. But when the fairy sang, the whole world listened to him. Stephen felt clouds pause in their passing; he felt sleeping hills shift and murmur; he felt cold mists dance. He understood for the first time that the world is not dumb at all, but merely waiting for someone to speak to it in a language it understands. In the fairy's song the earth recognized the names by which it called itself.”  - Susanna Clarke (Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell)

"Why does exquisite song stir us deeply? Perhaps, more than any instrument, song can capture us because the human voice is our very own sound; the voice is the most intimate signature of human individuality and, of all the sounds in creation, comes from an utterly different place. Though there is earth in the voice, the voice is not of the earth. It is the voice of the in-between creature, the one in whom both earth and heaven become partially vocal."  - John O'Donohue (Beauty)

"There is a profound sense in which music opens a secret door in time and reaches in to the eternal. This is the authority and grace of music: it evokes or creates an atmosphere where presence awakens to its eternal depth. In our everyday experience the quality of presence is generally limited and broken. Much of the time we are distracted; we might manage to be externally present, but often our minds are secretly elsewhere. Music can transform this fragmentation, for when you enter into a piece of music your feeling deepens and your presence clarifies. It brings you back to the mystery of who you are....Listening to music stirs the heavy heart; it alters the gravity."   - John O'Donohue (Beauty)

         I want to thank

my mother for working and always paying for   

my piano lessons

before she paid the Bank of America loan   

or bought the groceries

or had our old rattling Ford repaired.

I was a quiet child,

afraid of walking into a store alone,

afraid of the water,

the sun,

the dirty weeds in back yards,

afraid of my mother’s bad breath,

and afraid of my father’s occasional visits home,   

knowing he would leave again;

afraid of not having any money,

afraid of my clumsy body,

that I knew

         no one would ever love

But I played my way

on the old upright piano

obtained for $10,

played my way through fear,

through ugliness,

through growing up in a world of dime-store purchases,   

and a desire to love

a loveless world.

- Diane Wakoski (an excerpt from her poem "Thanking My Mother for Piano Lessons")

“Our songs travel the earth. We sing to one another. Not a single note is ever lost and no song is original. They all come from the same place and go back to a time when only the stones howled.”
- Louise Erdrich (The Master Butcher's Singing Club)

"Singing has always seemed to me the most perfect means of expression. It is so spontaneous. And after singing, I think the violin. Since I cannot sing, I paint."   - Georgia O'Keeffe

“Then the musical instruments appeared. Dad’s snare drum from the house, Henry’s guitar from his car, Adam’s spare guitar from my room. Everyone was jamming together, singing songs: Dad’s songs, Adam’s songs, old Clash songs, old Wipers songs. Teddy was dancing around, the blond of his hair reflecting the golden flames. I remember watching it all and getting that tickling in my chest and thinking to myself: This is what happiness feels like.”   - Gayle Forman (If I Stay)

(That's how I feel when the instruments come out too.)

“I believe in kindness. Also in mischief. Also in singing, especially when singing is not necessarily prescribed.”   - Mary Oliver

The art above is: "A Fairy Song" by Arthur Rackham (English, 1867-1939); "Beauty & the Beast: After She Had Done Her Work She Would Sing and Play" by Edmund Dulac (French, 1882-1953); "The Green Singing Book" by Elizabeth Shippen Green (American, 1871-1954 ); "The Piano Lesson" by Carl Larsson (Swedish, 1853-1919); "Choir Rehearsal" by Otto Piltz (German, 1846-1910); "The Choir Lesson" by Auguste Joseph Trupheme (French, 1836-1898); "A Woman Singing" by Godfried Schalcken (Dutch, 1643-1706); "The Singing Lesson"  by Frederico Zandomeneghi (Italian,  1841-1917); and "Singing Praise" by Richard Sargent (American, 1911-1979 ), for the Saturday Evening Post.