A Branch from the Lightning Tree

by Martin Shaw

Finding community is a tricky thing. Community could live at least partially in the imagination, rather than continually forced into the literal. Our community should involve long dead poets, sharks teeth, the heavy frost on a Scottish glen, the erotic trim of a Bedouin tent. We could reach a wider perspective on the word rather than attempting to wrestle it always into concrete solutions, petitions, finger wagging, committees, living in a tiny house of comrades arguing over who last bought the toiletries and who stole the tofu from the back of the fridge.

  Communities could also be to do with reclaiming time: it seems to have a harsh, worried pulse to many people. It is useful to reach back through it to a community of ancestors. I don’t mean some vague concept but in the work of vitalising folks down the centuries. It is naïve for us to claim personal impoverishment when we are connected to the legacy of Emily Dickinson, Taliesin, Patti Smith, Delius, Mirabai, Black Elk, Wolfram Von Eschenbach, and John Coltrane. We could find a specific soul-teacher from history and follow that lead. This will also broaden and deepen time around us, and in the same moment make us more genuinely present.

  It’s quite possible to completely re-experience time. Start by regarding the coming of night as a regular move into the eternal, the end of clock time till the sun rises the next day. Take questions to the night, questions that could never accomplish themselves in the agitation of daylight. Become a night walker, invite it to become an ally. What are the scents and impression that night brings? What Goddesses glide through the open window? Night as a disorderly community of dreams, sudden fears, and sideways epiphanies. Allow the art you make of your life to beguile the Moon to wander to your bedside and start to talk. This allows us to flood into the wisdom of shadows and the indistinct blessings that midnight offers. It’s a grave mistake for us to only associate wisdom with the daylight hours or “light of knowledge”; we isolate ourselves from half the insights that twenty-four hours carries. Night as an ally is to understand that it follows different deities to well-mannered day: Lillith, Nyx, lusty Pan, and his disgraceful fantasies. The ‘”Luna”-tics have taken over the asylum. At the same time, that very hoard of impulses can cut to the marrow of all sorts of worries and amplify all sorts of truths that we can’t get near in the daylight hours. Night is the entering of a temple.

  James Hillman claims that reaching back through history becomes a kind of osmosis, that you can merge into the leafy mulch of mystical texts and hard ideas, that you can become thousands of years old. This is another invitation to shape-leap. So we extend community by actually retreating backwards.

  Become an apprentice to the way Caravaggio handled color and don’t worry about having an original thought for at least five years. Allow yourself to feel strange and slightly magical. Compose poetry that is irritable and fiery, that runs to hundreds of lines, then learn by heart and recite to nearby jackdaws. Write letters again, and find the oldest mail box you can to post them from. Decide that your hips are an altar to old Romanian Goddesses and take up belly dancing. Give out library cards as birthday presents. Run a three-week course from your porch on the relationship between the Aztec temples and Gypsy gambling games from medieval Wales. Don’t go easy on yourself.

  One genius of story is that it refers to an inner community. Study of myth on the Return is a practice that assists in a kind of internal literacy. The intelligence of the image is placed within the violent range of emotions a participant will surely encounter, and a rich language emerges to articulate these often-warring factions within the psyche. Myth reveals that these inner impulses are not easily “managed” (Even Arthur struggles to hold the Round Table together). So the Return is a dedication to an inside as well as outside community.

  THE OLD BONES OF STORY

  A close relative to the Bard and the Poet is the almost extinct figure of the Seanchai, the wandering Storyteller whose very body is a rattling bag of mystery. This is what you might call a Storycarrier rather than teller. Characters like these have walked between settlements in Ireland and Celtic Britain for thousands of years. In Africa they may be called a Griot, in Guatamala a Great Rememberer. The Seanchai had a mystical dimension, and were even seen to have pulled some of the energy from the Filli (High Bards) of ancient Ireland with them. Conveying specifically stories from oral culture—from the campfire to the farmhouse to the Inn to the Great Hall to the campfire—they could move between huge hero cycles, to geographically specific folk tales, to meandering multi-dimensional personal anecdotes, somehow spinning the whole evening into a shimmering cloud that rained ecstatic intimacy on the listeners.

  These individuals could conjure: ancestors would roll up behind every listener and lean in to hear stories of their lives once more, willow trees would move through a hundred feet of wet grass to get to the window, a hole would appear in the mythological world and luminous little beings would pour down through the container of the story and fly out into the room, collecting teardrops. This wasn’t so much a performance as an invocation: a ritualized righting of time from the imagined straight line into the circle where the animals, the old ones, weather patterns, and great sagas could suck strong milk from each others’ breasts, and much healing was done in this world. This was almost always carried on at night, when some wyrd energy steals through the camp, cutting our threads to the mortgaged world.

  Some contemporary storytelling can appear to be a kind of ice walking; it becomes a layer through which you peer down and describe the lives of images moving cold underneath your feet, but you never jump into the story river itself. Burn the script and get wet. That way the story is always being told for the first time, over and over again.

  The joy of an oral culture is the old bones of story reconnecting to the inflamed tissue of spontaneous language. It is a specific kind of animation, an incantational convergence of narrative tracks worn smooth by the ancestors and giddy new vistas of linguistic image that are only glimpsed in that telling in that moment. Myth telling understands that the voice spoken in this attunement reaches towards the harsh thinking of the wind moving over a fissured moor, the excitement of the bat as it senses dusk. So does nature think? As I write earlier in the chapter, I believe we plant our rickety societies on huge dreaming animals. The whole point of something like a Vision Quest was to create an axis of experience that somehow accommodated the thought-ripples of nature.

  The patterning of crows over a winter field is an oracular thought of the mud, sky, and bird; the elegant procession of the reindeer across a spring meadow is part of some epic train of imagination that has been running for tens of thousands of years. The swift dive of the killer whale is a new vision from an ancient sea. Thought is not just contained in language, not even for us humans. But it is all story. The animals are myth-tellers in the way that they are. The hundred ways the otter gleefully crosses a stream is the same way the tellers splash their routes through a story: the same destination but differing currents, details, and varying intensities of stroke. These images are more than just metaphors for our own’condition but, entered respectfully, offer a glimpse of the great, muscled thoughts of the living world. It is always thinking.

  This is a complicated business. The “thinking” of nature could well seem inexpressible; to truly encounter it involves a coming adrift from entirely village-centered ambition. What we are left with is a strange image: language that seems to have the tough, green scales of the alligator in it. Poetry is the natural result of any mythic experience. The myth teller somehow articulates the story from many positions; its empathies are generous, its community oceanically wide. To hold rigidly to the script is a western plague, to deny what Finn MacCool calls “the music of what is,” to pour concrete over the entrance to the badgers den. The more defended we are, the more “in dominion,” the more wildness shrinks from us.

  THE CULTURE OF WILDNESS

  Culture had meant, primarily, the tending of natural growth, and then, by analogy, a process of human training. But this latter use, which had usually been a culture of
something, was changed, in the nineteenth century, to culture as such, a thing in itself.

  Raymond Williams 9

  The ancient myth teller’s relationship to wilderness offers a contribution to Williams tending of natural growth, in fact amplifies the sense of culture past anthropocentric connotations, offering a perception that includes the wild—moonlight, visions, contact with the spirits of whales, joyful foals, and the dawn star. Williams assessment of the current associations of the word culture connotes grave damage. This assumption of culture or wildness (wildness is not chaos) has created a legacy we see daily writ large all around us. An association of the etymology of the word culture is colere, which means “to till.” To till is to dig, to sweat, to make contact with the texture of soil, root, and worm; it is a move downwards, towards the subterranean. It seeks relationship to the information of earth through a certain labor and discipline that ultimately flourishes into clear wine for the wider community.

  This broadened perception is also crucial for the health of the imagination: it creates a conduit for un-prescripted image to carry the myth of a person, community, or country forward and into uncertain futures rather than be caught in the petrified symbology of the entirely consensual. The stories are again in movement. The desire to return to childhood is often really a desire to be connected again to the free-ranging imagination (though the reality of such a return would be untenable to most). A culture of wildness would seek to engender that associative, curious consciousness in an adult, rather than a regression to childhood: to be child-like in this regard, rather than child-ish.

  It is this capacity to become child-like that enables us to re-vision the transgressions and triumphs of our lives, to mythologize our pathologies. This is all symptomatic of the imagination in full health rather than anchored to a tiny set of ingrained symbolic references. Oddly, it is sometimes a descent from physical luster that creates that very imagistic freedom. Andre Gide says that illness opens doors to a reality which remains closed to the healthy point of view. So this re-seeing deepens perception and includes attention to marginalized, abandoned, bizarre, troublesome, absurd, mythic impulses that arise without permission. When the orchestrated crisis of initiation is abandoned, we are more likely to encounter such heretical visions in the throws of illness than the brightly lit lecture hall. As the discredited, shocking image-language shuffles forward we create accord again with the wisdom of stagnant pools, roadkill, and the shovel of the gravedigger. We allow the propulsions of unbidden vision to be accommodated within the wider remit of knowledge.

  This propulsion offers linguistic health too; there is a significant passivity in much contemporary language, an extinction of vital, thoughtful words that matches the fast decline of certain animals, forests, and stretches of wilderness. Many words are quietly disappearing from dictionaries daily.

  A culture of wildness is accommodating of these raw but subtle images. It does not seek to stagnate but to stay true to its essential mythic promiscuity. If there is no move to the margins, no complicated assignation of rationality and intuition, then myth cannot truly exist. The etymology of the word “wild” includes associations of astray, bewildered, confused, which indicates its very genius lies next to vulnerability and the bereft. It is a culture of inclusiveness, and suddenly the Gods are implicit in conversation, symptoms of illness, fetish, relationship. We start to possess a vision-language of the deity that stands behind the impulse. This perception is polytheistic, un-literal, and connected to imagination more than belief. It offers a form of thought. The myth teller in all of us needs to till dark earth, to wander into bewilderment, to allow the cracks of sacred hallucination to broker new images of transformation and dialogue. “Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry,” wrote Auden of Yeats. Agenda and assignation are only half the task; how do we discern the myth-language being spoken through the depleted ice cap and fatigued bee?

  THE PASTORAL AND THE PROPHETIC

  The beautiful thing about traditional tales, the thing that makes them interesting, and endlessly adaptable, is that they do not speak their truths directly. Traditional tales use the hidden language of metaphor… you could say it might be said that there are as many hidden stories within a narrative as there are tellers and listeners.

  Sally Pomm Clayton10

  Another characteristic of contemporary storytelling can be hesitancy to explore metaphor, that a superstitious code prevents any deeper implications being explored. In a society that largely ignores depth and metaphor in favor of the shallow and literal, Pomm Clayton’s “hidden stories” are not always accessed. The folk tale sits rather like a wedding cake—we scrape off the icing but never dig our spoon into its deeper flavors.

  Without this push to the edge of our understanding, the storyteller merely recites the pastoral tales over-polished to assure and titillate the human community, lacking a Blake-ian edge to allow the truly visionary to push at the boundaries. The pastoral offers a salve, an affirmation of old, shared values, a reiteration of the power of the herd. The prophetic almost always brings some conflict with it—it disarms, awakens, challenges, and deepens. It is far less to do with enchantment and much more to do with waking up.

  The prophetic engages the intelligence of the adult, is suffused in paradox, carries perceptive weight from unusual angles, and is not designed to reassure. It is not designed purely for stability, but for growth. It seeks not to destroy old forms for the sake of it, but rather to reanimate their propensity for holy thought. In this regard, Trickster is truly its totem.

  When the emphasis is too pastoral, “otherness” is not touched, and myth becomes merely a defensive cluster of societal anecdotes. We could say that the pastoral re-affirms village persona, where as the prophetic is transformative in nature, with all the trouble that can involve. The pastoral contains the ceremony of permanence, while the prophetic contains the wild ritual of new emergence. To allow precedent for the anthropocentric is to deny the contrary tensions of the truly bardic. This very crossroads is the highest gift that story can offer, and implicit in its performance is incantation, a kind of efficacious opening, something only possible by an interior awakening in the myth-teller. One could argue it is the difference between a craft and an art. Gary Snyder describes the power of the storyteller and of poetry this way:

  Poetry is healthy because there’s no doubt it belongs to the elusive and egalitarian realm of the imagination . . . the leaders of a nation cannot prescribe the people’s deepest feelings; they can only hope to steer them. In this they contend with the poets and storytellers . . . Seventeenth- and eighteenth century British and French poets wrote poems that drew on the Symbols and stories of Greek mythology. This is not trivial: Greek myths helped keep the wild side of European culture alive; had it died it would have left Western Europe a lonelier place, with less love, less wilderness, less joyous art.11

  RIVERS OF SILVER, LEAVES OF GOLD

  Initiation invites two seemingly opposing qualities: sobriety and intoxication. There is the weight of grief, awareness of death, and growing responsibility of adulthood, but also the exuberance of relationship to wild nature and the strength of myth to guide you on your return. On the one hand it grounds you into the hard cycles of mortality and on the other it provides an electrical current to open you to the real vitality of your life.

  It’s said of the generosity of the great Irish hero Finn MacCool (Finn Mac Uail) that, “if all the rivers of the world were to run pure silver and the leaves pure gold, Finn would have given them all away.” Now there is an attitude worth emulating. Finn grew up in the woods, and had a poet’s heart and a warrior’s fist. Wildness pours from that saying.

  The boons received are ultimately a give-away for the whole tribe/ community/country/planet. We have to establish the nature of our gifts and find a way to make them available, not naïvely, with placards and sound bites, but with Yaga’s canniness. We carry knowledge of betrayal by false giants, of dismemberment, of being fed back to life morsel by mo
rsel by the smallest, wildest of birds. We have carried our knackered, leathered hearts through difficulty, hospitals, depressions, redundancies, addictions, success, and catastrophe; we are formidable.

  Forty years ago it seemed that, every canyon and tundra having been explored, the only source of infinite exploration left was the self. With the frantic tilts and sways of global warming at hand, we are forced and humbled into renegotiating our relationship with wild nature.

  As individuals we may feel vulnerable and doubtful of our ability to change anything. The seemingly overwhelming images of disaster we are confronted with can freeze us like rabbits in the headlights. As we feel our collective energy go down the psychic plughole, I am reminded of someone at a conference asking Gary Snyder why bother to save the planet. He replied with a grin, “Because it’s a matter of character and a matter of style!” Finn would stand up, Boudicca would stand up, Arthur would stand up, Crazy Horse would stand up, Bridgit would stand up, Robin Hood would stand up.

  We are each a strange container of unique experience, a castle full of erotic chambers, dust-filled cupboards of old bones, great halls with unending feasting, small towers of arcane literature, and balconies from which heartbroken lovers hurl themselves into the moat. All this is going on inside us all the time. Poetry and myth are divining tools that dip into these waters and dredge it to consciousness, giving it form.

  The sharp bones found in an ancient cave lured fellow humans to its ravenous mouth The carving of those bones hooked me on poetry, flaking and sanding all night to get the syllables toothed and sharp, a perfect emblem of my desire, a beautiful curved thing thrown whistling toward your heart to nourish mine.

  James P. Lenfestey12