Green Thoughts, Green Shades, Green Knights

What sort of journey does Gawain go on? I asked this when thinking about the interior and exterior journeys in children’s literature and traditional tales. Today – cold as cold, but sunny even in the woods as the leaves lose their grip – I was struck by the challenge in how I ask my students to take some time alone and quiet in the woods. No ‘phone, no eye contact with one another, just ten minutes (today five, since they were so cold) stood or sat alone in the sunshine of a little wood.

I do this because one of the dominant things when we think about outdoors is the opportunity for boisterous play – the “let kids be kids” argument is full of this. However, I saw this picture of one of my class and suddenly remembered a little girl who “played camping” all one long summer afternoon in a nursery garden. I repeatedly asked her if she was OK, if she needed anything, and she always smiled and said “no.” Letting humans be human is often about the powerful and energetic ways we interact; today’s shelter building and “One Two Three Where Are You?” games were great examples of this. But to “be” outside may also need time: time to listen to the angry little wren, the panic of a jackdaw, the wary crackle of feet (a hoof, I suspect) in the undergrowth. Time to not listen to me melling on, or to the demands of social media –

till what I find, I find
because it’s there

as John Burnside puts.

Rachel Kaplan‘s sustained work on the benefits of being outdoors (for example here) emphasises the restorative effects of being out in nature. She is also clear you don’t need a wood, and I can understand that. I might contend that these forays into expansive environments also can/might include a spiritual encounter – with silence (or, as the students today identified, a lot of different, smaller noises), with our own feelings and intentions. For some this is familiar, welcome; for others, I know from debriefing this activity in the past, it might entail a confronting of an individual’s own discomfort. What sort of journey do we go on to our respective Green Chapels, and what might we find? Time to be alone with (or without) our thoughts can lead to all sorts of different paths and encounters – even in five minutes in an autumn-cold wood.

Yellow Skies and Red Suns

Monday 16th October:

What a day today has been! And while words like “apocalyptic” were bandied about on Twitter, the epic skies made me think not only only of texts like this manuscript of Beatus of Liébana’s commentary on the Apocalypse , with its rich and terrifying visions of the end of all things, but of the icon gold of Jackie Morris’ art work in The Lost Words. The icon is important here, the translation of the Divine into the here and now. I remembered the colours in the Corfu Icon Museum and the gold in the Palatine Chapel in Palermo and Monreale Cathedral in Sicily. It is as if I am back with de Hamel and the Remarkable Manuscripts again: so much beauty. Back to myth and might-have-been.

I have said I won’t review The Lost Words, although I have commented on it, notably in response to Rob McFarlane’s wonderful essay and on the original movement around excising words from the dictionary. My avoiding a “proper” review is partly because Dara McAnulty’s blog reviews it so much better than I could. I will however comment on this one other aspect of the work: how nature writing and art have an astonishing double edge to them, revealing the instant beauty of the thing or event, and at the same time revealing the “mystery…instressed, stressed,” that is at the heart of the icon, maybe at the heart of this book of spells and the pictures than conjure not only this kingfisher, those otters, but also an almost Platonic ideal. Nature -dare I personify it? – herself.

And maybe this is the revelation, an apocalypse: the eternity in the gold behind Jackie Morris’ kingfisher, the “quick now here now always” of Rob McFarlane’s Wren.

Dancing above the hollow place

…will do to start me off on a brief visit to the spirituality represented in Le Guin’s first three Earthsea stories.

And let me start with three sources, rather than end with references:

Paul Reps representation of classic Zen texts in Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, linked here
Alan Watts’ Tao, the Watercourse Way, linked here
And the text itself of the Tao Te Ching, which exists in a number of different versions and translations into English – this one, for example, and this one.

And by saying, as if it needed saying, that I am no Zen master or Taoist scholar. I cannot begin to explore the riches of these great traditions. I might be the scholar of spirituality that the early expression of Christian monasticism dismisses as someone who “has filled his window with books.”

So let’s look at Earthsea. In the first book, A Wizard of Earthsea, Le Guin describes how Ged, the boy who will be at the centre of all three stories, is recognised by the wizard Ogion, and struggles to make sense of his desire to “learn, to gain power,” when Ogion will not even use magic to stop them getting wet. Silence is key to Ged’s learning, but so also is a simple life. It reminded me of the apprenticeship of a young Buddhist with a mountain hermit, where the apprentice asks about the Buddha-nature and the master responds with instructions about tea, or rice. Ged’s choice of action and scholarship as a Mage in the city/college of Roke colours his life in the next books, to the point where there is a wistfulness about his return to his ageing master in the third book – a wistfulness, and something akin to the tension Herman Hesse explores in Narziss and Goldmund, and The Glass-Bead Game (The desert-and-a-city is also a fundamental tension in the early Christian monastic developments in Egypt, where “going back to the city” is a recurring problem, and word-and-silence a theme throughout the great recounting of the sayings of the desert monastics).

But when we come to the Tombs of Atuan, we are, perhaps, more in the labyrinth of Jungian mapping of the subconscious. The protagonist, Tenar, discovers herself, or she discovers the nature of her role as the Eaten One, the priestess of the claustrophobic temple above a dark labyrinth, and then meets the questing Mage, Ged. This is not a master and apprentice relationship as in Book 1, but an uncomfortable negotiation that leads to liberating Tenar to “a vast, clear, wintry sky, a vast barren, golden land of mountains and wide valleys.” As she watches Ged she realises that

Living, being in the world, was a much greater and stranger thing than she had ever dreamed.

It is the same idea, maybe, as Thomas Merton’s lines

…to be ordinary is not a choice:

It is the usual freedom

Of men without visions.

And the very Le Guin-like pondering of R S Thomas:

…is man’s

meaning in the keeping of himself

afloat over seventy thousand

fathoms, tacking against winds

coming from no direction

going in no direction?

But here we are the heart of the difficulties of very deep spiritual experiences: that there is both enlightenment and no enlightenment, vision and no vision. The night in Ged’s boat, Lookfar, shows Tenar

a vaster darkness… There was no end to it. There was no roof. It went on out beyond the stars. No earthly Powers moved it. It had been before light, and would be after. It had been before life, and would be after. It went on beyond evil.

Is Le Guin referring to the Tao? The core message of the Heart Sutra? No roof, no obstacle, the destroyer of all suffering the incorruptible truth? Maybe I overstate my case, or maybe I’m just jumping the gun.

In The Farthest Shore, the ageing Mage, Ged, has a number of statements very close to classic Taoism. The Chinese links are reinforced by the changing power relationships around the dragons: none of the terrible creatures in Le Guin’s world are really like Qinglong or the other traditional dragons, but the connection seems important: in Earthsea they are also sources of ancient wisdom and magic. They are as necessary in Earthsea as in the heavens of the Jade Emperor.

The Farthest Shore is already a special text for me, and I know I will read it again. This is partly because of the episode below, and the ways that master and pupil interact, lose sight of one another, face doubt and pain and come to their understanding of their lives together. I know this is simply a personal matter, but in terms of tonight’s blog post it has some relevance. For me the most meaningful episode is the confrontation and reconciliation that occurs when the youth Arren recognises his despair as he discusses his all-but abandonment of his hero, Ged. The stricken hero effects the reconciliation with a resounding rhetoric:

…This is. And thou art. There is no safety. There is no end. The word must be heard in silence. There must be darkness to see the stars. The dance is always danced above the hollow place, above the terrible abyss.

The dance above the emptiness, the Yin and Yang. The wording echoes the song that starts the first book, which the boy Arren then sings when the summer ritual falters, and brings us back to the silence of meditation.

There is much, much more, of course: Farthest Shore is a moving, insightful Pilgrim’s Progress around society’s attitude to death, for one thing, but for this blog this will have to do for the lyrical prose about self-discovery. I am sailing too close to the Argus posters of the 70s.

There is, however, one, much more explicit, Taoist link, in Ch 4. The reader begins to understand what might be in store as Ged, the understanding and compassionate leader whose decisions will take Arren into danger and death (yes, there are shades of Dumbledore and Harry, or rather we might check off another source for Rowling), sees the youth’s future as king. He talks to the youth of kingship and its role in the Earthsea world:

We must learn to keep the balance. Having intelligence we must not act in ignorance. Having choice we must not act without responsibility. Who am I – though I have the power to do it – to punish and reward, playing with men’s destinies?

[…] I will continue to do good, and to do evil … But if there were a king over us all again, and he sought counsel of a mage, as in the days of old, and I were that mage, I would say to him: My lord, do nothing because it is righteous, or praiseworthy, or noble, to do so; do nothing because it seems good to do so; do only that which you must do, and which you cannot do in any other way.’”

Powerful. Compare these extracts from the Tao Te Ching:

[37] If kings and the nobilities can abide by their true nature and follow the great Tao, All things shall be reformed naturally. If during the process of reform, desires arouse. I shall overcome with the simplicity of original nature. With the simplicity of true nature, there shall be no desire. Without desire, one’s original nature will be at peace.

[46] The greatest crime is to have too much desire. The greatest disaster is not to find contentment. The greatest mistake is to desire for endless possession. Hence, when one is gratified with self-contentment, True contentment can then long endure.

Le Guin puts her hero Ged into questing and travelling narratives, and while the wandering scholar is at home in Buddhism and Taoism, it would be misleading to ignore the Tao Te Ching when it says

[47]…there is no need to leave the house to take journey in order to know the world. There is no need to look outside of the window to see the nature of Tao.

To end the post. If we understand there are religious/philosophical influences here, how might it warn the reader to read carefully? I find the points at which Le Guin seems to lay bare a theological approach based on Buddhism/Taoism (I am very aware they are not the same) almost at the same level as C S Lewis lays bare in Narnia a Western Christian cosmology. If this is the key to Le Guin’s world as Anglican Christianity is to Narnia, then it is more than an oriental wallpaper, and needs to be treated with as much regard.

What gives me pleasure in reading?

This post, as I begin it, is an instant “Save Draft,” since it will take a lot of unpicking. Even as I write I see the CLIP Carnegie Kate Greenaway list is out with Tidy, Wolves of Currumpaw and Wild Animals of the North in there. Popularity, pleasure, professional judgement come together. Complex stuff.

Do I read because something is popular?

Not always, but sometimes I have to, if only to keep up to date with other people’s ideas or trends in production. A Hello Kitty version of Red Riding Hood recently stands out as a low point. I persevered with Harry Potter because I thought I should, and was glad I did.

Do I read children’s books for pleasure?

For my own pleasure, as well as the pleasure of sharing? I get pleasure from the innocence – whether knowing or otherwise on the author’s part – which I can see even if I don’t really participate in it. Granted , as Hollindale so gnomically says “ours is the age of Lord of the Flies,” where even the bear-protagonist of Jon Klassen is vengeful and murderous, there is in much children’s literature a lightness that is engaging.

I like the simplicity, whether (again) knowing or unknowing. The foxy-looking gentleman leading Jemima Puddleduck astray; the bromance (an anachronistic term) of Esca and Marcus Flavius Aquila; the inversion of roles in the Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig: they are tricksy, or challenging, funny and poignant but simple in the storytelling in some way I haven’t yet teased out, somehow. I know I am in danger here of seeming as if I like the descent into liking the easy read, and I will only protest (using Julien Benda’s phrase (revisited by Hollindale) Le Trahison Des Clercs, the way that intellectuals do not stay true to their “calling”) that it is the subtlety and playfulness of the design and language that I find attractive, not the easiness. There’s so much more to say on this, but this will do for now.

I get pleasure from good design, from inventive use of colour, interesting cadences in prose, from irony and jokiness. I get pleasure – and did as a child – at the knowing wink towards the world of the adult in the Moomins (I like it less in Dahl). I suppose I get pleasure in the play of ideas: it’s a bit like reading poetry, where rhythm and cadence and imagery and word choice and the appreciation of all of them together makes for the biggest part of my pleasure in reading. Look at these lines from R S Thomas for example:

What is the Christmas without
snow? We need it
as bread of a cold
climate, ermine to trim

our sins with, a brief
sleeve for charity’s
scarecrow to wear its heart
on, bold as a robin.

My pleasure comes from appreciation of the shared experiences, but also from the way the words are placed, with care and attention, the slipperiness of simile and metaphor, of sacrament and observation.

And I get pleasure from the debate I have with colleagues about something we delight in together. Children’s literature is one of the reasons I came to Brookes, with my original work title of “Senior Lecturer in Early Childhood Studies, Communication, Language and Literacy. ” It is a joy to find that discussion still alive in the last years of my work.

Professional Judgment comes in somewhere?

Because of my job and my chosen area of research (now here’s a circular argument bowling down the hill of criticism!) , yes.

I can cite two voices in announcing the prize lists today :

There are journeys to be made, friendships to discover, characters to fall in love with and worlds to truly immerse oneself in.
Questions of identity, friendship and responsibility, both to others and to the natural world, are key themes this year. It is also hugely heartening to see our shortlisted writers and illustrators tackling potentially difficult and big ideas…

And I like those descriptions of the values that professionals see in books. I’d like my students to appreciate these views.

Forsaken

Among the rich threads of thinking in Rick Greene’s latest blog is his account of his own Tolle Lege: I won’t impinge on his post by doing more than pointing to the My God, My God why have you forsaken me? It is a well placed stroke, well written – unlike this, which is just a personal ramble, with no answer.

And I just wanted to add something to that intimation of loss. March is, for me, Theo time, when I remember the little boy who we waited for, and watched grow, and who in the end came and went in a day: born 20th March, died 21st, 2000. We can do the folklore: a child of the eclipse, a child of the vernal equinox. We can do the grief, the anger, the bewilderment.

Today, however, with Lent beginning and the dreadful news of so many children buried in a common grave in Tuam, it was too confused in my mind to make sense of. I am gobby, and it is unusual that words fail me, but I could not finish my bidding prayer at Mass. It was a poor show, a lack of human compassion for all those girls, and for the institutional callous indifference, and for all that human loss. How many children were lost, and died sick or frightened, how many mothers lost and angry and disempowered and bewildered? The only consolation- and it is a thin gruel – was that as I stumbled to silence I looked up at the big, modern cross at the back of church and found that silence echoed back. My silence. Theo’s silence. All his brothers and sisters put away like so much landfill, and then (and now) the sisters’ own silence.

So here’s a blog post that goes nowhere, but which I’m going to post tonight. Tomorrow we go – finally – to see a stone carver to ask for a headstone that reflects the sermon at Theo’s funeral, from Bede’s account of the conversion of the North:

Cuius suasioni uerbisque prudentibus alius optimatum regis tribuens assensum, continuo subdidit: ‘Talis,’ inquiens, ‘mihi uidetur, rex, uita hominum praesens in terris, ad conparationem eius, quod nobis incertum est, temporis, quale cum te residente ad caenam cum ducibus ac ministris tuis tempore brumali, accenso quidem foco in medio, et calido effecto caenaculo, furentibus autem foris per omnia turbinibus hiemalium pluuiarum uel niuium, adueniens unus passerum domum citissime peruolauerit; qui cum per unum ostium ingrediens, mox per aliud exierit. Ipso quidem tempore, quo intus est, hiemis tempestate non tangitur, sed tamen paruissimo spatio serenitatis ad momentum excurso, mox de hieme in hiemem regrediens, tuis oculis elabitur. Ita haec uita hominum ad modicum apparet; quid autem sequatur, quidue praecesserit, prorsus ignoramus. Unde si haec noua doctrina certius aliquid attulit, merito esse sequenda uidetur.’

The text – and more – appear in translation and with comment in Eleanor Parker’s wonderful blog. We have asked for a sparrow for the headstone. The image of one sparrow feels like it stands for so many sparrows, in one window and out the other. Talis vita hominum, such is the life of men.

Still no answer.

Boneland and Thursbitch

As I come away from Twitter this evening I am aware I have started a hare around “favourite” works by Alan Garner. Now, Mat raised a tricky question about “good books” and children’s books in his MA session in which the class explored the Brookes Early Children’s Book Collection, and this evening I feel pulled in all sorts of directions.

What do I “get” from Thursbitch as a novel?

Is there something that takes the edge off Boneland for me?

Is Elidor a better children’s book than Thursbitch is an adults’ one?

In response to Mat’s challenge these are crass questions here, I know, simple responses, not Lit Crit. I’m only going to look at the first one, and “which is best” faced with these two books is a game for the deluded: I have to admit this is just about taste, and that others can defend their own options as robustly.

What I love about adult Garner is his trickery. He deliberately lays trails of myth and language across his known landscape, dragging us (like the unwilling Mobberley farmer in the Alderley Edge foundation myth) around the countryside in search of his deepest roots. This is known territory. In Boneland- crudely recapped here and with a crystal-clear review from Ursula LeGuin here – Garner asks what it might be like to grow up having had some ambiguous and dangerous adventure as a pre-teen. But this is not really his motive, it seems to me: in linking a present story with a Mesolithic (or even pre-Sapiens hominid) story in the same place, he is challenging the reader to ask about time, about myth and religion, and therefore about people as storytellers. He draws on his own story, first seen in the Weirdstone and the Moon of Gomrath, but with a real reverence for pre-history, for advanced astronomy, and for the tale of Gawain and the Green Knight, whose denouement is set in the area. Like the Green Knight, Garner offers a challenge to go beyond the comfortable, and does so in a moving and accomplished conclusion to the Weirdstone trilogy.

What I love about adult Garner is his trickery. In Thursbitch, Garner plays again with time – as he has in Elidor, Red Shift and the Owl Service – but here , as in Boneland, his argument is not just with simplistic and linear history but with how past and present are mutually influential. In Boneland, the Man, the shaman of a prehistoric refugium, is anchored in a spirituality that returns him again and again to Ludchurch, which Garner renames Ludcruck. I found myself profoundly moved by the place, on visiting it – and in contrast found Thursbitch no less – well, what? “vigilant”? “sentient”? but markedly less welcoming. It would seem natural, therefore, to like Boneland more than Thursbitch (I had read them both a number of times before the visit). But actually, much as I like (too weak a word) Boneland, and especially the prehistoric sections, I think it’s Thursbitch the novel that takes my prize, even if it’s Ludchurch, the place, the Green Chapel, Ludcruck that has my heart.

What I love about adult Garner is his trickery. He tickles me into action, into deep (as much as close) reading, and thence into the archaeology of story. In this way the mystical parallels that underpin Thursbitch play out Garner’s own insights into the valley’s potential as a cultic site. In making Jack Turner the jagger or packman key to the story, he is able to pull threads (yes, this is a Garner metaphor) of stories from 4000 BCE Sumeria, astronomy and myth from England and elsewhere, and weave the passing tales of local farmers he knows. In doing so he writes with an authority I do not feel in Strandloper or even Boneland. Can I defend this? Is it simply that in Thursbitch – and arising from Garner’s own evocative commentary on it in a number of places – I can see the trail of reference, half-remembered story, song and ritual? That I am flattered, or flatter myself?

There is that.

What I find so moving in Thursbitch is the complexity of his meditation on love and death. Sal, terminally ill, finds herself attracted to the place. Her companion, the Jesuit Ian confronts, with her, her impending illness. The barely spoken love they feel is half explored, and ruthlessly, painfully part of their relationship. In the eighteenth century valley, Jack loses his wife to the plague, loses his baby, and nearly loses his soul, too. The dual protagonists come so close in their experience of love and loss they discern one another’s presence in the valley – and in the end, when Sal and Jack meet the end that has been inevitable since their first appearance in the novel, there is some sense of a kindness in the way the Immortals end their sport with the two of them.

So it presses lots of buttons for me: it gets my mind racing, it excites me to think and read (and read and read) beyond the text and then go back for more. It has (and if you have followed this blog before you are maybe tiring of the references) dragged me up to the Tors themselves for (no pun intended, but inescapable nonetheless) a Peak Experience. Quid multa dicam? There is a lot more to say – a lot more work for Mat and me (and others) to do, unpicking the landscape and the myth and the story. But this will have to do for now; I think I have written enough to convince myself of my love and admiration for Thursbitch.

But I dream in Ludcruck.

Difficult Spiritual Experience and Landscape

One of the reasons I suspect beautiful waterfalls and so on are attractive when people (including me) talk about spirituality is that they exalt but do not challenge. The Great Bell Chant by Thich Nhat Hanh is a wonderful example of a series of pictures and text that mostly show natural beauty – “the beautiful child appears in the heart of the lotus flower.” [3’23”] – waterfalls from a great height, whales, then Masai leaping, monks walking. But pay attention to the children at around 5’15” and see where they are, what they are doing. Meditation is about truth. Thick Nhat Hanh has worked with the war refugees from his homeland: Boat People who saw the same crippling suffering we see in the refugees from Syria, from Africa. In the same way, in the Great Bell Chant there are children gleaning from a rubbish tip. This is not comfortable living for people who want to Zen their home – however much I look enviously at their photos of libraries, sunrooms, bathrooms!

In the same way, the film that reduced me to tears last night has an ambiguity: when I sit in a comfortable cinema, watching expensive SFX and carefully coached acting and think about the anger of grief and loss, I spectate a deep – but hugely uncomfortable and potentially damaging – spiritual experience. So there’s my disclaimer. In reading A Monster Calls and seeing the film many people will be challenged. The critics were ambivalent. Variety didn’t like it; their advert-heavy review linked here says “we’ve heard the same lesson countless times before in other movies” (I’d disagree, but it shows the tone of their review), others refer to a “cheap tear-jerker” but Rotten Tomatoes is at least somewhat warmer. So it is on the level of the protagonist’s experience rather than the success of the book or film that I want to ask these questions:

Can a spiritual experience be damaging? Can trauma be a spiritual experience?

There are a number of gnomic statements we might at least look at here: “The best way out is always through,” “We learn through suffering,” etc., and it is Philip Sheldrake in Spirituality and History who really pulls these to pieces for me in considering spirituality in a post-Holocaust era. Spirituality, when it is at its most genuine, confronts pain. The easy inspirational poster draws on the spirituality-laden themes of waves and whales, maybe, but can we tell Patrick Ness’ protagonist Conor these things, as he struggles with his nightmare, facing the ravaging decline of his mother? Will the poster help the war child?

This is where the earlier editions of A Monster Calls are so powerful: the illustrations (echoed in the film) show a menacing creature, full of earth and storm and history and danger, from the grasping hands of the half-title page and the stalking wildman of the cover. This is a Lud-like demigod, who shows no mercy at one level but in a deeper way is the psychopomp who leads Conor through the death he has to face. And the message this creature brings to suffering Conor is simple beyond a motivational poster’s reach: “If you speak the truth, you will be able to face whatever comes.”

Misappropriated, mishandled, a spiritual experience might well be damaging. It is open to willful or stupid misinterpretation (as Teresa of Avila discovered); it is open to manipulation even (almost) to the point of murder as Katharina von Hohenzollern discovered; it is open to the demagogue, the cruel, the convincing psychopath. In this sense, it can be damaging. There is another sense, too, in that someone who is misled might move to convince themselves – to allow themselves to be convinced by that cruel demagogue – to hurt others, to despise them. And sometimes the urge is simply to give up on them. The Headmistress after Conor attacks his bully sums this last position up in her first words: “I don’t even know what to say.” They reminded me of my tutor’s comment on my weekly test at University when I came back from my mother’s funeral: Forgiven for this week. He didn’t even know what to say – and maybe neither did I. How does anyone come back from something huge and have something to say? At best, perhaps, we can say that spiritual experience is like any experience: it has a yesterday and a tomorrow.

Or perhaps it has, rather, an inside and an outside: an enclosed and controllable aspect, and the wild, Ent-like, elemental rage Kathleen Raine (whom I quote more here) so vividly depicts in her Northumbrian sequence:

The storm beats on my window-pane,

Night stands at my bed-foot,

Let in the fear,

Let in the pain,

Let in the trees that toss and groan,

Let in the north tonight.

This spiritual experience (of loss, of choice, of change) is going to change the boy Conor forever. He is left (more or less) without a father and without this magic (is that the right word?) spiritual guide: the losses he sustains are huge. The reason this traumatic loss of so much is – we guess – not going to damage him, is this lesson he learns at the end: “All you have to do is tell the truth.”

Light

I am intrigued by Oyvind Torseter’s The Hole, a charming but puzzling book by the same author as “My Father’s Arms are a Boat.” The Hole gets a good exposition here on Brain Pickings from the prolific and insightful Maria Popova. “My Father’s Arms…” similarly gets a write up here.

I wonder what the eponymous hole might signify? It could be all sorts of things: the hole could be a gap in the protagonist’s life, such as a separation; it could be a lost or unrequited love; it could be that this is a new symbol for depression. However, a hole is also an opportunity, where the light gets in.

“Beware of practising your piety to be seen,” Jesus warns, and whatever your idea of practice, this seems sensible. So this is a quick disclaimer: my mindfulness is not your mindfulness; this was nothing special except for me – but with a Friday mindfulness session coming back at Harcourt, I thought I’d record the way one night’s sitting session went.

Seven o’clock and on the evening I’m thinking of it’s time for the “unguided” sitting, where we sit and sit and at the end of forty minutes a bell is rung. Tonight there is a hint of a looming thunderstorm: the air is close, and it’s overcast. As we sit the light goes.

What is this metaphor? It goes? It fades? The dark increases? I watched it happen and am at a bit of a loss. The shine disappeared from the wooden floor. Colours muted (another metaphor) rather than deepened, it seemed to me. The gradual loss of light was itself so stunningly beautiful – but where does this come from? Why do I find it beautiful?

[Or maybe even asking these questions are unmindful. The light was what it was. I sat. I felt my breathing, the stiffness in my legs. The sitting was the sitting.]

And the hole? The Leonard Cohen line about the cracks being where the light gets in came to me as I pondered Torseter’s imagery last night. A hole can be a gap. A lack can be a desire to change. The gathering shadows in a mindfulness session can be beautiful. The ambiguity is (can I say it?) illuminating.

Manuscripts: a brief thought on autoethnography

I’ve been given Christopher de Hamel’s beauty of a book, Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts for Christmas, and today I sat in bed listening to de Hamel and Andrew Marr enthusing about the more notable MSS de Hamel discusses.

The greater part of me is enthralled by the book, by the challenge of a not insignificant work, and by coming back to something I used to know well. Part of me, however, is a little wistful: I have had late medieval Books of Hours, chant books, portiforia in my hands, known or guessed their provenance, struggled with their handwriting. It was a world I loved, playing M R James as I looked at the Bridgettines of Syon Abbey- although I knew it a bit even at the time, I was without the obsessive commitment needed for the role. I describe myself as a “lapsed medievalist,” and I guess this will have to do.

So now, for the most part, I am the kid outside the sweet shop, looking at the barley sugars through the window…

…with the exception of the work on Gawain that’s come my way this year. I find that the past stuff on late medieval literature and spirituality is carrying me a long way into the sentient landscape project, picking up the crumbs that Alan Garner has dropped with a sharper eye than I would have done if I had not had those years of experience with the Syon MSS.

A final thought (for now) on making sense of my stumbling study: the way I looked at “my” manuscript (MS Rawl D 403) [when I finally packed away the reproduction I have and got on with training to be a teacher] was that I might come back to it. However, I wonder if that confuses scholarship in its widest sense with doctoral study, which is a a part of the scholarly project. Maybe the Liber Mortis et Vite never really left me; maybe I can dredge from those twenty-something enthusiasms skills and understanding I can still use. I used to dream in Syon; now I belong as much to the myths of quest and learning from my mistakes that are in Boneland, and Ludchurch. It feels all about synthesis of these different parts tonight.

Maybe a thought for my study in 2017…

Maybe

Return to…

A return to Garner country is demanded. I will confess here what Mat already knows: I dream of Ludchurch and spend a lot of sleep time in Thursbitch.

It is unfulfilled business, I guess, that takes me back. While these chaps seem to have done the things we might have I am left feeling that there is more to do, more to say. Is this because I am looking for a “safe” way of looking at the experiences we had, a tame Analytic Autoethnography (Anderson, Journal of Contemporary Ethnograph, 2006: thanks to Jon Reid for the source)? Am I just fighting shy of the overwhelmingly evocative? Would categories and Digimaps tame our experience? A lengthy quotation follows, although I would discourage this in a student essay:

Evocative autoethnographers have argued that narrative fidelity to and compelling description of subjective emotional experiences create an emotional resonance with the reader that is the key goal of their scholarship. The genre of auto ethnographic writing that they have developed shared postmodern sensibilities—especially the skepticism toward representation of “the other” and misgivings regarding generalizing theoretical discourse. Evocative autoethnography requires considerable narrative and expressive skills..

and these are skills beyond me, or maybe the hugeness of the experience simply dwarfs my skills.

It is as if (clumsy extended metaphor alert) I foolishly took up a challenge and find the Big Thing (Garner’s translation of þurs) bigger and more humbling than I had expected, and the Gawain quest provides a suitable framework.

In the comfort of Camelot the quest was achievable, but in Thursbitch I found something- a project, an attraction, a something that cannot be reduced to analysis. I note Garner talks about the bigness of the þurs… So this brings me to the ambiguity of the relationship between Thursbitch and Gradbach. In Ludchurch we met up with the big, slow awesomeness of the Green Knight, but just because it is big, is this Thing the þurs? My instant reaction is to say that if Ludchurch is safe, Thursbitch is danger, the Valley of the Living Dread in Erica Wagner’s tricksy phrase, and for me maybe Ludchurch is (as I’ve said before) masculine, and Thursbitch, feminine: Sarastro and the Queen of the Night. Lost on the moor, in the fog, lost in the folklore, and in some hinterland of Jung and Freud… Two different big things – lots of different big things – in my mind. Continue reading “Return to…” →