Coyopa :: lightning in the blood

The Jester (or Eight), the Priest and the She-Goat... (or How to Build a Jester-Trap)

2011-10-30T20:22:00.000Z

Back in the before of things, when I was both younger and older and wiser and more foolish than now, I put together a one-man show that I performed, twice, in Edinburgh, during the Fringe, at the Big Red Door. It was called Coyote Bardo, and was a two-hour tour of Trickster tales from around the world. Conceived in madness and born into chaos, the show was not an unqualified success, being in unequal parts an act of worship, an embodiment of Trickster Himself and a piece of storytelling-theatre at the same time. One show felt like surfing on the edge of a Trickster-flavoured razor-blade - which counts as success - in the other, I felt like an actor, which was something of a disappointment. There are a few photographs, which is unusual - my habit of performances going completely unrecorded in sound, photograph or audio is, I'm sure, an occasional source of amusement to those strange deities that choose to look in upon my life. Three years of ritual semi-naked combat with sword, shield and quarterstaff on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh at Samhuinn, anyone? This is the only picture I know of... Yes, that's me being carried on a throne through Edinburgh. Marvellous. Everyone should get to be carried on a throne once in their life. The only antidote to the outrageous ego-inflation it engenders is surely the ritual beheading that occurs later in the night. At this point, I'm happily throwing magic mushrooms and blackberries into the crowd and enjoying the last merriments as King of Summer.

But, I digress into the petty complaints of the storyteller's ego and the mysterious humour of the Gods.

However... I tell you about Coyote Bardo only as the flimsiest of introductions to this excellent tale collected by Aleksandr Afanas'ev back in the mid-nineteenth century (he himself was largely working from the collection of the great Vladimir Dal, I hear.) Afanas'ev, in simple terms, was the Grimms of Russia. Most of the Russian folktales we have today are retellings from his books, so thank-you, Mr. Afanas'ev, for your troubles (though it would have been nice if you'd have shared with us when and where the stories were collected, eh?)

This tale is called The Jester. If I had known about it then, I'd have included it in my Coyote Bardo show, but I didn't. Whilst there is, in theory, no reason why I couldn't reprise the show at some later date, I think I'll bide my time lest Loki get the wrong idea and start making impatient midnight skypes to Eshu and whispered conference calls with Anansi and Nasreddin...

I decided to scan it in, rather than type it out. I hope your eyes manage it (if you're struggling, zoom in or click on the pages to make them Big...)

Here we go. See you at the end.

There you are.

Another hilarious Trickster tale that ends with a pile of corpses...

The moral of this story is surely, Don't mess with a jester. Which we all, somehow, know. When we're at the circus, we just know not to piss off the clowns, don't we. Partly because we instinctively understand that they're exempt from the Rules, that they don't have to play fair, but also, I think, because we know that anyone who's allied to Trickster has a Power with which it is Unwise to Tangle. I think you probably ken what I mean. There's a quality shared by jesters and the criminally insane, and it has to do with a willingness, a compulsion, even, to Transgress. See that line over there? It's irresistible to someone in the thrall of Trickster. See that law, that social norm, that sacrasanct boundary... It must be broken. It would be possible, perhaps, to design a Jester-Trap along those lines:

Bluebeard: See that door there? Just don't open it, whatever you do! Das ist verboten!

Bluebeard's Wife (who is really a jester in drag) (to self): must resist... must resist... (Runs to the door and is trapped along with Bluebeard's previous Jester-Wives. Bluebeard, pleased with the workings of his trap, goes for a walk in the forest and is killed by a falling piano. Trickster always wins in the end.)

“They are clever in their mottoes and jokes, that they say to their mayor and judges: if they are too rigorous, ambitious, or greedy, they portray the events that occurred and even what concerns the official’s own duties, these are said in front of him, and at times with a single word.” Spanish description of the early Colonial Yucatec clowns known as baldzam.

The subject of Tricksters, fools and jesters is one close to my heart. Having been allied to an (un)healthy dose of Trickster energy for many years, it has taken time to learn to work with it in ways that don't just leave a trail of devastation. Having cultivated a certain degree of the Mercurial (which is nothing if not Tricksterish - see your Hymn to Hermes if you're in doubt), I now find myself coming to Earth for sustenance more often than to those realms of fertile chaos and constant change that are the more familiar homelands of Trickster. To build a life of relative certainty, rather than one of continual shape-shifting - this is the order of my times now, and it is work I am undertaking with great gladness and delight.
But these are Trickster times, mythologically. We all need to become acquainted with our own Trickster-ish, Puck-ish energies, because it is this part of us that is most agile, most mutable, most able to hold the opposite poles that we are continually being asked to dance between in these crazy times. And, as well you know, it is Loki, that brings about the End of the World in Norse mythology. Now's the time of Earth-building for me; some day - who knows when? - it'll be another time. Fire again, or Water, maybe. How well we navigate the changes - that's a Trickster skill. How willing and able we are to shift with the tide and the times. How like Mercury, like quicksilver, we can be... And these are times of change, of that there is no doubt...
The subject is too huge to do justice to here. I will come back to it again and again, because it's fathomless. But it's Sunday night and it's time to sit with a book in front of the woodburner, not type more words into the Machine. All I can do is recommend these three books:

Trickster Makes This World, by Lewis Hyde. (For my money, this is a better book than The Gift, but no one I know agrees with me. What do they know? This is a masterpiece. Also a fantastic collection of Coyote tales that formed the backbone of the Coyote Bardo show, so Thank You, Mr. Hyde.)
A Branch From the Lightning Tree, by Martin Shaw. (The whole thing's got Trickster wriggling under its skin. Great writing, poorly edited in parts, but plenty enough flashes of that lightning to keep the wonderment rolling in.)
Deeply into the Bone, by Ronald L. Grimes. (Subtitled Reinventing Rites of Passage, we're especially interested in pages 139-141, concerning the initiation of sacred clowns among the Tewa Pueblos of New Mexico. Hard. Core.)

Now I'm off to have a glass of mead and a rummage in the Afanas'ev archives. I hope you're all enjoying the onset of Autumn as much as I am. Bejesus, it's beautiful! The smells and the colours and the wonder of its turn from Out to In. It's so wholesome, I want to make bread out of it all and wrap it in blankets. What a thing it is!

As for the Coyote Bardo pictures, this is all you'll get until Ragnarok comes knocking more loudly than today:

(Note the black-and-white big toes in the third picture. My finest make-up touch to date, I believe.)

Credits:

'The Jester' is from 'Russian Fairy Tales' (1945) collected by Aleksandr Afanas'ev and translated by Noerbert Guterman. Pantheon Books: New York

Maya Clown Deity is from 'An Illustrated Dictionary of The Gods and Symbols of Ancient Mexico and the Maya' (1997) by Mary Miller and Karl Taube. Thames & Hudson: London

Coyote Bardo photos by Aisha Wolfe

On wooing the poem. A beginner's guide.

2011-09-07T19:29:00.001+01:00

Yesterday, I wrote a piece called Black Mountain River. You can read it here, but you might want to wait a moment (or not.) This post isn't another piece of poetry, nor of prose fiction. It's just about the writing of Black Mountain River.

I could feel that there was a piece of writing gnawing at me. For several days, it had tried to make itself known. I'm acquainted enough with this particular dance that it doesn't dismay me over-much, but it's still an uncomfortable place to be - perhaps you know it yourself. I tried my best to make myself available without over-doing it. There were a few pleasantries exchanged and a certain amount of avoiding-eye-contact, but nothing too intimate. We tried a few steps of some easy polkas, then returned to our seats.

Black Mountain River... Where the hell does a poem with that kind of title go to sit down? At the root of the mountain, that's where. In the saddle of the sea.

I didn't know its name back then, of course. If you look at a poem full in the face too quickly, there's an evaporation, a scream, a few moments of stolen pleasure and then the Poem-Mother bearing down on your soul with her rolling pin. It's a violation, for sure. If there were Poetry Police, that's what they should be knocking on your door about. If you don't woo a poem properly, you're not welcome in this town. There's vagabonds and then there's just The Bad.

At the same time, you don't want to take it too far. You don't send the poem bunches of flowers or love letters. You stalk it, sure enough, but you don't try and ingratiate yourself with its Mother (she isn't too impressed by that kind of shit anyhow. c.f. Baba Yaga.) You nod in passing, as if you just happened to be there, but you don't follow it down the street quoting Byron or Bukowski or Beowulf, trying to win it over with your extreme cleverness. The poem is a wilder thing, with archaic manners and ancient sensibilities. If you can lift a boulder with one hand whilst playing the goat-pipes of Bulgaria, well, that may just impress the poem a little. Better still, open one hand as you pass it in the road and show one of the hazelnuts of wisdom, or a sprig of alder from Bran's shield. Say nothing. Wink. Move on. Later, let the poem chance upon you wrestling an angel or the wind or the moon. Keep it intrigued. Sooner or later, your orbits will begin to overlap. You'll see it in your favourite bar, drinking Absinthe with a clown. Or playing dare with a Minotaur. Don't get jealous. Don't get jealous. Buy drinks for the clown. Congratulate the Minotaur on its bow-tie. There are books of etiquette for such occasions (c.f. Czesław Miłosz or Pablo Neruda.) In passing, slip the poem a scrap of paper with a phone number on it. Your phone number? NO! Not your phone number, numbskull. A tattoo parlour for gazelles; a museum of impossible things; a Transylvanian undertaker; the Ritz. Anyone but you.

Sit back. Read a book. Open a magazine. Begin to watch that film you downloaded (illegally) and then forgot to watch. Make your plans for that business you never started. Relax.

Don't get uptight.
It'll find you.
Trust me.

So, I didn't know its name. All I knew was that there was writing about.
This is how I found myself sitting, yesterday afternoon, in an armchair by the fire, reading Martin Shaw's excellent book A Branch from the Lightning Tree. Astute readers will be aware that one of the central folktales explored in the book is none other than Ivashko Medvedko - Little Ivan, Bear Child. None other than the tale that Rima and myself told at Uncivilisation just a few weeks ago. I wasn't aware of this. This kind of synchronicity can be a postcard from the poem, a 'wish you were here' from the depths of the Wyrd.

And where isn't the Depths of the Wyrd, in the end, eh?

Then again, sometimes it isn't. Sometimes it's just chance. Sometimes it's the initiatory gods coming to take you through the eye of the needle. Sometimes it's just a psychotic breakdown. It's almost like you can't rely on anything these days...

Only joking.

But, I was sitting reading the book and staring out of the window and not doing the countless Important Things To Be Done (some of which are actually Quite Pressing) and feeling that unique discomfort of the psyche and I'd been exploring particular wounds in myself and the creatures that live in them, gently, allowing a few days of not-doing in a busy time, letting that yin be a salve to the over-exerted yangness of it all

And there it was.

I hadn't known that it was that very thing that was trying to be written. I had thought I had something completely different to say - which shows just how in touch with my inner world I am... But, in touch or not, I was waiting. I was attentive. Maintaining that particular alchemy of nonchalance and acute anxiety. I had made the bed, polished my shoes, cleaned away the worst of the evidence of my general degenerate and appalling nature. The room smelled, if not of roses, then at least not of cabbage-farts and crack.

When the poem arrives at your door, begin to dance immediately. Don't hesitate; don't offer a cup of tea; don't ask how the journey was. That's for prose. Take the poem in your arms and dance to the music that only you can hear.

This is the amazing thing:

The poem knows the steps.

Truth be told, the poem knows the whole deal far, far better than you do. But what the poem appreciates more than anything is the style of your wooing. Go for it. Really go for it.

What are you waiting for? You want to write a hundred mediocre poems like a litany of adequate love-affairs? Or would you be happy to write one incandescent monument to your life's singular expression on this great and terrible Earth?
Dance, then!
Dance!

Sitting in the chair by the fire, I danced the best I could. You'll be the judge of how well I danced. Actually, no one will be the judge, because the challenge isn't about that - if there is one, it's about more subtle and vital entities and substances, such as:

Did you feel the lightning in your blood while you wrote?
Were you as honest as you could be?
Did something mysterious happen while you wrote?
Did your gods nod to you?
Etc.

I didn't have my notebook to hand, nor any blank sheet of paper. I did have a pen - we're cunning enough to litter the house with working pens. Or we're very messy. Pick a narrative that works for you. What I did have was a stack of magazines. I chose one that looked as though it wasn't a collector's item or one with Rima's work in, then prayed for some white space, found it and wrote.

This is what it looked like:

That one's inside the back cover of issue 194 of PN Review. I buy it once in a blue moon when I think that perhaps it'd be rewarding on some soul or financial level to be part of The Poetry World. I'm sorry to admit that I rarely read it all and most of what I do read leaves me baffled. But I'm glad it's there, genuinely.

This, apparently, is page 59. I chose it for the half-page of white. Sorry, Carola Luther (although it has had the unexpected side-effect of me reading and enjoying most of Travelling With Chickens (2) right now for the first time.)

This is what I mean.
When the poem arrives, just dance. Poems love dancing. How could they not? They're made of the same thing. Next time you're lost in ecstatic dancing, whether it's tango or podium or tea-dance, think of poetry. No, don't. Just dance. But remember, somewhere in that amazing being that you are, that the two are connected by a kinship as deep as waterfall and stream or a shooting star and the moon.

You will never keep the poem any more than you will keep the dance. It will flow through you and will then be gone. Ink is your only memory. No one will know how well you danced except for the old cackling woman in the corner with her basket of poets' heads and lovers' glances. If you meet the same poem in the street, it may not even know you. How wonderful! Whisper the secret name of the lapwing as you pass - if you are lucky, the poem may be intrigued enough to deign to dance with you again. Don't rely on old tricks. Be bold. And dashing. And broken, too. You know how it goes.

If you'd like to read the poem, it's here.
Why it's different from what I wrote in the covers of PN Review is another story. Fill my glass and I'll tell you how that one goes.

Illustrations:
Lapwing by Bridget Woodford

Leaping lurcher print by Samuel Howitt (1756-1822)

Roebuck by William Dwight Whitney from The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia: An encyclopedic Lexicon of the English Language

Black Mountain River

2011-09-06T18:14:00.003+01:00

Autumn begins.
It doesn't take much;
One tug at my feet by
Autumn's grey strangers
And I'm away
Or rather, perhaps,
Returning.

As if a stream
Has appeared in front of me
Towards that great
Black Mountain
Of Winter,
Autumn sings me home.

There I am.
In the womb of Black Mountain,
I'm waiting
As patient as a
Heron or the
Hawthorn on the moor.

Spring's grey sister
Has come for me.
What began with a crocus
Ends with the broken bough,
The leaning-in towards
Hearth-fire,
The quiet soul-song
Of the mist on the
Black mountainside.

I step into the water,
Leaving Summer's gold and laughter,
Like a man baptised
Into a luminous darkness.

The silver mist closes behind me;
The grey strangers accompany me;
The moon puts pennies on my eyes.

The tragedy of life is not its sadness,
But forgetting the way back home
Along Black Mountain River.

Beautiful photograph of Dartmoor by Jen Bryant

Sometimes a Wild God

2011-08-28T20:33:00.002+01:00

Sometimes a wild god comes to the table.
He is awkward and does not know the ways
Of porcelain, of fork and mustard and silver.
His voice turns wine into vinegar.

When he arrives at the door,
You will probably fear him.
He reminds you of something dark
That you might have dreamt,
Or the secret you do not wish to be shared.

He will not ring the doorbell;
Instead he scrapes at the door
With his bloody hands,
Though there are primroses
Growing about his feet.

You do not want to let him in.
You are very busy.
It is late, or early, and besides...
You cannot look at him straight
Because he makes you want to cry.

The dog barks.
The wild god smiles,
Holds out his hand.
The dog licks his wounds
And leads him inside.

The wild god stands in your kitchen.
Ivy is taking over your sideboard;
Mistletoe has moved into the lampshades
And wrens are beginning to sing
An ancient song in the mouth of your kettle.

'I haven't much,' you say
And give him the worst of your food.
He sits at the table, bleeding.
He coughs up foxes.
There are moles in his eyes.

When your wife calls down,
You close the door and
Tell her it's fine.
You will not let her see
The strange guest at your table.

The wild god asks for whiskey
And you pour a glass for him,
Then a glass for yourself.
Three snakes are beginning to nest
In your voicebox. You cough.

Oh, limitless space.
Oh, eternal mystery.
Oh, endless cycles of death and birth.
Oh, miracle of life.
Oh, the wondrous dance of it all.

You cough again,
Evict the snakes and
Water down the whiskey,
Wondering how you got so old
And where it all went to.

The wild god reaches into a bag
Made of otters and red nightingales.
He pulls out a two-reeded pipe,
Raises an eyebrow
And all the birds begin to sing.

The fox leaps into your eyes.
The moles rush from the darkness.
The snakes pour through your body.
Your dog howls and upstairs
Your wife both exhalts and weeps at once.

The wild god dances with your dog.
You dance with the sparrows.
A white stag pulls up a stool
And bellows hymns to old enchantments.
A pelican leaps from chair to chair.

In the distance, warriors pour from their tombs.
Ancient gold grows like grass in the fields.
Everyone dreams the words to long-forgotten songs.
The hills echo and the great grey stones ring
With laughter and madness and the pain and joy of living.

In the middle of the dance,
The house takes off from the ground.
Clouds climb through the windows;
Lightning pounds his fists on the table.
The moon leans in through the window, smiling.

The wild god points to your side.
You are bleeding heavily.
You have been bleeding for a long time,
Possibly since you were born.
There is a bear in the wound.

'Why did you leave me to die?'
Asks the wild god and you say:
'I was busy surviving.
The shops were all closed;
I didn't know how. I'm sorry.'

Listen to them:

The fox in your neck and
The snakes in your arms and
The wren and the sparrow and the deer...
The great un-nameable beasts
In your liver and your kidneys and your heart...

There is a symphony of howling.
A cacophony of dissent.
The wild god nods his head and
You wake on the floor holding a knife,
A bottle and a handful of black fur.

Your dog is asleep on the table.
Your wife is stirring, far above.
Your cheeks are wet with tears;
Your mouth aches from laughter or shouting.
A black bear is sitting by the fire.

Sometimes a wild god comes to the table.
He is awkward and does not know the ways
Of porcelain, of fork and mustard and silver.
His voice turns wine into vinegar
And death to life in return.

The Falcon's Child - an excerpt

2011-08-26T23:56:00.000+01:00

I'm beginning to migrate certain pieces of writing over from coyopa.net in a fairly non-organised fashion.
This piece kept circling my mind after last weekend's Uncivilisation festival, stalking me until I stopped and let it tell me its particular, secret story. It must be five years since I wrote it, perhaps more. Enjoy.

This is an excerpt from 'The Falcon's Child', a novel.
We're about 200 pages in.
Digger Gunn, having moved from the Suffolk countryside of his birth, has come to Edinburgh to find his estranged father. Dazzled by the city, he has all but forgotten his promised mission and his own complex past. He is barely 20 years old and the city is mesmerising him: it has cast its own 'glam' over him, but he is drawn again and again to run on the almost-wild hill at the city's heart, Holyrood Park. On this Spring day, he encounters the memory of a falconer, and a falcon of his own dreaming whose fate is wound tight with his own...

HIS LUNGS ARE BURNING. He feels as if he is carrying two fiery wounds on his chest. Pain is marching through Digger’s body as he leans, hands on his knees, and wonders how, or even if, he will manage the next stage of the run. The chill wind cools the sweat quickly on his skin; he can tell that it stinks of the bodily residue of wine and cigarettes and coffee. For the hundredth time that morning, he remembers how easy this run used to be, and curses. He spits thick phlegm to the side of the path and straightens himself to standing again, feels the ache in his lower back as if he has sat slumped for a month without moving.

Mid-morning runners pass him on their way down from the peak, glowing with exhilaration and health, raise their eyebrows in the time-honoured greeting of runners. Digger can only move his head slightly in response, but it does not matter: both he and they know that he is no longer of the same tribe or species as them. It is the first time he has run in over a month and his lungs are alien entities strapped to his heart, ashes disguised as organs.

Running... He almost wishes that he could give it up, surrender himself to hedonism and sacrifice his body fully on the altar of intoxication, but the hill draws him back again and again like a good habit that he cannot quite kick. He knows that if he leaves it behind, it will be a defeat somewhere in his soul, that something will die that he is not prepared to kill. Knows too that it is not about the running, in the end, but something more important than health — the hill stands for something in the city that is simple and good and untainted with excess; to go to it, even if he has to crawl up its slopes, is a pilgrimage.

He is not even out of hearing of the Holyrood Park road, the city not yet fallen away into the windy slopes of the hill. On Arthur’s Seat, you don’t arrive until you know you are somewhere else, not quite the city and not quite the wilds. Your body begins to take on another vibration — perhaps it is the peculiar geology of the hill itself — and some internal muscle of psyche or soma begins at last to relax. Then you know that you are there, that all that came before was just the journey. It is a beautiful moment. Whether it is in the grassy saddle between the summit of Arthur’s Seat proper and the sheer drops of the Crags, where the wind whips tall grass around Hunter’s Bog, or on the far side of the hill amongst the ruins of long-gone hill forts above Dunsapie Loch, there is the dawning awareness that you have made a transition, that although you are surrounded by it, you are no longer truly part of Edinburgh and, should you never leave, will always dwell in some liminal place, a threshold. Wildness whispering at the cultivated door of your urban heart: Let me in, let me in, let me in...

He almost treads on the two bodies rolling in the grass, has to make an extravagant leap that is one-third caution and twice as much surprise. They are laughing, free, careless with drunkenness, but it is their colours that stop him — one is painted blue from head to foot and only barely clothed; the other is painted in thick white, wears a ragged bridal gown, smirched with stains of red and blue paint. They should be freezing, he thinks, but they seem oblivious.

— happy Beltane, shouts the blue man. Happy summer!

Digger remembers: it is the first of May. Last night he saw the fire on Calton Hill on his way home, exhausted from the restaurant; he would have gone up if he’d had the energy. Made half a step towards it and knew that he didn’t have it in him to pay his respects. Beltane... A colourful slice of Edinburgh subculture celebrating the end of winter with the marriage of a Green Man and a May Queen. Drums, fire, extravagant costumes, drink, psychedelics, ritual: bacchanalia. Edinburgh’s own one-night carnival of excess and liberation. Wild abandon and wantonness abound — the good fathers of Edinburgh don’t seem to know whether to claim Beltane as their own wayward, exuberant child or cast sermons of brimfire on its unrepentant Pagan nature. Thousands flock to it and celebrate until dawn in their own, untamed style.

For a moment, he halts in his run and takes in the glorious incongruity of the figures in the landscape, totally immersed in themselves and their celebration. He wants, in that moment, to be part of that celebration, to be part of that world. Not to be the one who collapsed exhausted into bed to dream of mismatched kitchen orders and barking customers, but the one who exalts in wildness. To be painted, dancing, drunk and wild in celebration of the season’s change.

He has been aware of Winter ending. In Edinburgh it comes like a miracle; the drop in the wind and the lifting of the constant lid of cloud, the way shoulders soften, bodies lifting towards the temporary joy of sunlight and the incredible greening of the trees. Only some deep death of the spirit could deny a body the power to smile at Edinburgh Spring, but it has come sneaking in with only a nod of recognition from Digger. Now, to see them marking it, praising the change that rescues the soul from the seemingly unending darknesses of Winter, he feels negligent. It is the only word for it. As if he has fallen asleep on some watch to which he was entrusted, he wants to say: yes, I am part of this. I was not oblivious. I know the clock of the seasons, too... But, regarding them through vision that shimmers with the rush of blood from his running, it is obvious — they are the ones celebrating, not he.

— happy Summer, he says, testing a smile. Happy Beltane!

They raise their bottles again, gone off again into a world beyond words; the ragged, colour-smeared bride pulls the blue man back down into the grass and Digger turns and runs onwards, forcing his body back into motion.

He cannot make the top of the Hill. Though his legs might have strength enough and his lungs — just — capacity for breathing, he no longer has the will for it. Runs instead on the gorse-flanked dirt path that skirts along one flank of it. The morning is becoming glorious and the cool wind dropping; for a while he runs on the flat path without thought, though the picture of the two of them in the grass flashes in his eyes, an unusual enough scene to stay with him, turned and turned again in his mind, a recurring image with every step.

At last, he breaks out of the tunnel of gorse and bramble, on the east side of the park where the hill looks soft and easy behind and the eye wanders out to sea. He lies on his back in the grass and turns his eyes to the sky. Crows or jackdaws are making complicated trails near the craggy slopes of Arthur’s Seat and he watches them, lets his eyes be taken here and there by the twisting shapes of black wing against the blue and mackerel white of the May morning.

He watches until the movements take his gaze into the branches of the scrubby tree next to him. A hawthorn, he sees, having to squint at the stubby leaves to confirm it. As ever, the words come to him: ne’er cast a cloot ‘til May is oot. Never cast off your clothes until May is out. Unless you’re covered in bodypaint, perhaps. He had always thought the words meant to wait until the month of May had passed, but remembers now — the hawthorn blossom is called the May. Don’t take off your winter clothes ‘til the May blossom is on the branch. The trees a surer guide to weather than the human calendar, so arbitrary as it is, peppered with the misleading vanities of Roman emperors whose interferences always meant little here in the far North of the world, beyond the extent of the Empire. He wonders then, what the calendar might have been before, aware suddenly in the company of this hawthorn how... unfitting... this other calendar is here.

For a moment, in that space of wondering, he is gone from Arthur’s Seat and Holyrood Park, gone from May Day in Edinburgh and the routines of work and sleep, eat and drink, gone into a dell in the gentle Suffolk countryside and the shade of apple trees on another May morning that may have been nothing more than dreaming. Not the company of coffee-junkie waiters and the loveless city of stone and sweat, but the silence between slow sentences of an old man standing beside him, watching a falcon tear lines of raw magic across the sky.

— the season’s changed, Digger, says the old man. Can you smell it?

The young boy sniffs the air, cautiously, as if it might bite or turn on him. The man laughs. It is such a soft laughter, like wood-smoke in twilight, like the softness of beeswax in the heat of a summer’s day. Digger is not sure that he can smell anything at all, though he wants to, wants to show the falconer that he can.

— it’s in there, the falconer says. All the sprouting leaves and the flowers coming now, or getting ready to display themselves to the bees. That smell of cold earth has passed. All that wind of last week must have blown it clear away, I’d say, Digger. It smells like summer’s all getting ready to come prancing in.

Digger breathes it in again and feels it or imagines he feels it. Like the scent of the air is not felt in his nostrils, but in his chest. A lightness, almost more of an emotion than a fragrance.

— that’s it, Digger. So subtle. You have to stay so still to taste it properly, eh?
— it’s got a colour, too, says Digger, then flushes, thinking: how can a smell have colour?
— you’re right lad. Funny, isn’t it? What do you make of it?

Digger closes his eyes and breathes deeper, holds onto the bravery that the falconer has given him by not disproving his senses. He feels the softness of the air against his face and the freshness of it in his nose, in his lungs, full of life and possibility, both restless and still.

— it’s yellow, he says. Not bright like a dandelion or a buttercup. More like a cowslip or a primrose... Or blue, but light blue. It’s light, but it’s not... thin. Soft. Trying not to worry about the sense of his words. It’s like blossom, but it’s not so sweet.

He opens his eyes and looks up into the grey eyes of the falconer, deep as a sea he has never looked upon in life. They are shining.

— that’s just what it’s like, I’d say, Digger. I reckon I couldn’t have put it as right as that. You’re a wordsmith, Digger, so you are. It’s soft as a woman’s thigh, though don’t tell anyone I told you so! He laughs again and though Digger doesn’t understand, he laughs too, happy to be included in the falconer’s secrets. See Digger, the old man says after a while in which they stand in silent appreciation of the Spring. That’s the real calendar. There’s this modern thing of January, February, March and all the rest, and that’s handy enough, though it makes little enough sense to me. Good for knowing when you have to see the doctor or the magistrate, but not much else. Then there’s the sun and what he’s up to — I’ve more time for that. Whether he’s full in the top of the sky like some hero or skulking down on the horizon like he’s embarrassed by how weak his rays are. The solstices, the equinoxes, remember them? Have you noticed how the wind likes to blow really hard around the equinoxes and how the solstices never seem so hot or cold as they should? They’re about light, Digger, not heat, you see. And there’s the moon, too. Ah, the fickle moon and her ever-changing face. She’s one to watch — her calendar, Digger, always keep an eye on that one, because she’ll trip you up when you’re not looking if it’s a new moon and she’s wearing her dark veil, or make you crazy as a spring hare if she’s coming on full. Remember how you kept losing the spokeshave last time she was dark? And the time before that? It’s not bad, just a different kind of story. Oh, the moon, Digger — set your clock to her rhythms and you’ll understand why poets are like werewolves, why the best parties are on full moons. Well, perhaps not the best, but the wildest anyhow.

Digger letting the words wash over him, thinking: I’ll never remember all this. He wants to, wants to be wise in the ways of the Sun and the Moon like the falconer, but he is too young, too small a container to hold all but one word in a dozen at most. The falconer is silent and Digger thinks he will say no more, but just when the boy is about to ask him about werewolves, he speaks again.

— and there are the planets and the stars, too, Digger. All moving and turning — if you watch them enough, you start to feel like you’re living in the insides of a great pocket watch. Turning and turning and turning... He shakes his head. It’s an art, for sure, Digger, reading that calendar without going mad. He leans down, almost surprising the boy, lulled as he is by the words. But, see this, Digger, hear this now and you’ll remember enough to keep you straight. It’s all different, wherever you are. You’d have to carry an almanac the size of a whale to be ready for it all. So — and this is it — Nature, she does all the work for you, see? The birds and the flowers, the blossoms and the insects, the snow and the wind — they’ve all looked at all the calendars, you could say, and many I’ve never seen and they know when it’s the right time to blossom and sprout and fall and die, so all you’ve got to do is look at them and listen to the sounds and smell the air and it’s all there, around you. And whether it’s June or July, new moon, old moon, equinox or quarter day, you take the air in and that’s what time it is. It’s as easy as that, Digger, easy as just stopping and looking around at what’s really going on. That’s it, Digger. That’s the real calendar. He raises his eyebrows. What do you say to that?

Lying in the grass of Edinburgh May, the words come to his mouth clear as if he were still looking into the eyes of the falconer, the old man’s words like a spell kept safe from time, wrapped against memory until they come back to him there in the shadow of Arthur’s Seat.

The boy, mesmerised, can only say:

— is an almanac like an albatross?

And the falconer looks lost for a moment, then laughs. Laughs so easily, so hastelessly, that before he knows it, tears are running down Digger’s cheeks as he lies in the Beltane grass, tears that are both joyful in remembering and sour with the lost place of apple trees and the grey, grey eyes of the old man, laughing.

He does not want to come back.

If he could, he would stay there in that grove of safety with the falconer, breathing in the season of laughter and letting the man’s words sing like the slow and gentle music they are. Shit, he thinks, says the word out loud in his breath. I haven’t thought of him for so long. My imaginary friend, eh? He feels a host of other memories tugging at the line of remembering, wanting to rise up out of that silent ocean into this day.
He lets himself drift back to the grove, that holy, protected space, breathes in again the early Summer scent. The falconer rising to his feet and Digger following his eyes to search for Charys in the blue sky. The man crying out, hoya! Hoya! That breathless pause in which to witness the magic of words passing across the kingdom boundaries of man and bird, a time so weightless it barely exists; the pause between breaths or the moment before falling or flying. Then a streak of dark colour in the air becoming suddenly larger, taking form as Charys returns; the falconer lifting his arm in an easy movement just in time for Charys to grasp it heavily and utter her harsh croak of contentment. A flash of light across his eye as he regards Digger for a moment with the eyes of the wild, gathering his form into knowing whether he is food or foe or that other class of things that are better called ‘allies’ than ‘friends.’ The flash of his eye like a knife, so sharp it makes Digger sit up in the grass between the hawthorn tree, shiver, pierced in his heart by it.

High above, the crows are still making their crooked circles, the mackerel sky in its constant imperceptible metamorphosis. The day is warming up. Even a peacock butterfly is braving the world and Digger watches it drift in the air, caught himself in the currents of the past, a wind as invisible and unpredictable as any of the world.
When he closes his eyes, still there is the bright eye of Charys regarding him. As devoid of kindness or cruelty as a stone or a cliff-edge — the light in it more made of geography than mind, without hope or doubt, a feature of the landscape.

Opening his eyes, his heartbeat is fast again and his breath tight in his chest — subtle senses of anxiety have been awakened, sparked to life by the sharpness of that eye. Digger is suddenly self-conscious, wants to look around to see who or what is watching him, though he knows that there is no one. The creeping of the hairs on his arms, the tightening of the skin on his scalp; they say otherwise. He shakes his head and smooths the hair on his calves. There is nothing here but myself; no one and nothing watching me. Just a cloud over the sun, nothing more.

Then he sees it, high above. The crows spiralling around some moving locus of their attention, a quarrelsome urgency to their movement. Another bird in their midst, twisting in the sky and falling, feinting, darting, moving so fast. This is the target of their mobbing, the victim of their territorial bullying. The noise of them the only sound he can hear now, watching still almost idly with his hands on his shins. Then realising beyond doubt that the form in their midst is a bird of prey. As if to reward his realisation, it ducks in the high air and drops fast, faster than the crows can follow, much faster. It leaves them hanging like floating leaves in the pool of the air, itself an arrow towards the pinpoint of its choosing. The sense in him that this is a private theatre, that only he in this moment is witnessing the aerial display. This is for you, it says to him. Watch. Then seeing that it is not just a bird of prey, some kestrel or sparrowhawk up there, but a falcon.

For a moment, he wants to rise to his feet, call hoya! Hoya! again like he had done so long ago, but something holds him back. Perhaps self-consciousness; perhaps the army of memories now pulling at him like a siege of the dwelling-place of the Present. Perhaps the awareness that all the time the crows were mobbing it, the Peregrine Falcon was letting them; it had only ever been playing at being their victim, itself knowing the rules of its game far better than they. The sight of it in the sky above him tears him between jubilation and nausea. To see it so soon after journeying back to the dell is terrifying in its power on him, as if the walls of certainty have been breached or the laws of physics overturned. He only knows that he does not want any longer to be out on the hill, so exposed to the peculiar forces of this day. Does not want to be out in the open with a Peregrine above him — it is too complex. Digger heaves himself to his feet and runs almost blindly home like a child running from danger, the croaking of the crows still in his ears and, somewhere beyond the surface of the day, the high, shrill shriek of a falcon, wild, piercing and terrible in a way he would never be able to explain.

Thrice-Nine

2011-07-24T19:48:00.004+01:00

This is how it begins.
In a certain Tsardom of the thirtieth realm, across thrice-nine lands...

Aah, yes...
Not once-nine, or twice-nine, but thrice-nine.
To hear those words, or to speak those words, even to write those words, is to begin something that is so close to my heart, so essential to me, that I cannot tell where it begins and I end. As it is with so many (but not all) of the best things.

Oh, the adventures we have had beyond the thrice-nine lands! Do you remember? Tell me you do. Tell me that you have not forgotten the way there (and back.) The bridge of fire. The forest of thorns. The burning bird, the giant frogs. The time you had to live under a witch's doorstep for two years and I dipped my thumb in the soup. Do you remember?
I do, but barely at some times and mistakenly at others. But I remember.
I promised, long ago, that I would - everything I do now is for that, for remembering, because to forget would be a crime against the life-force itself, that great flowering of wonder that resists the forces of forgetting and entropy and maybe turns the wheel of time. I promised, and so it is. It seems, at times, as if it were no choice at all, but a recognition, as if I were here only for the remembering in the first place. But that is philosophical wondering, and nothing to do with the thrice-nine lands. Baba Yaga would laugh at my bones.

Thrice-nine.
I was born on the twenty-seventh of the month, so was made for appreciating three nines (and nine threes, too, for that matter.) Later, in the calculator-clacking, times-table-tapping schoolroom of maths, extra maths, further maths and speculative equations, thrice-nine became three-cubed, 3³, nothing less than one of those magical, perfect numbers, the sequence of which I don't have the earth-name for, but which in my head exist as The Perfect Sequence:

1¹, 2², 3³, 4⁴, 5⁵ (or 1, 2x2, 3x3x3, 4x4x4x4, 5x5x5x5x5) etc.
1, 4, 27, 256, 3125 and so on.

You know how it goes. Don't you?
Sadly, I only get to see the first four numbers of the sequence in everyday use (and 256 has now been sullied by too strong an association with computer-tongues and machine-codes. Of this sequence, 256 is the swastika rune, the once-great-now-pariah of symbols. Perhaps that's the destiny of a number so squarely rooted [as it were] in the structure of fours. It squares itself into infamy. I digress. A digression too far, perhaps.)

Thrice-nine. 3³. Three times three times three. Three wrapped and wrapped again in threes. A Goddess number, if ever there was one...

Other writers, far more eloquent and persevering than I, have wondered aloud about the thrice-nine lands and the significance of numbers in folk-tales. I doff my hat to them and read their wonderings with wonder and wondering myself^*. But I bow to thrice-nine and would throw my cloak on a puddle for 3125, if it happened to pass by. We don't get many 5⁵ round here. How about you?

Beyond the thrice-nine lands. Let's just say, 'It's far enough...'
Far enough to slip between this moment and the next; far enough to be the glimmer in an eye, the once-in-nine-years dream, the magical moment of meeting and seeing the Beloved in the other. Far enough to be a place neither here nor there. I-know-not-where? That's another story. You know where. Before you decided that here was here and there was there. Are we agreed?

When was the last time you went beyond the thrice-nine lands? Did you ever? Would you even want to, if the invitation arose? (And it does.) Here we are on the (relatively) firm footing of the beginning of a folk-tale and already we're off, gone, gone, gone beyond thrice-nine lands...

Welcome to the thirtieth country.
Everything you need is already here.

I wanted to write to you, to say that I have things to tell - stories, memories, ideas, ravings and ramblings that keep my heart awake or unquiet, soothed or sated. I wanted to let you know that, here, deep in my chest, I am the same as you and him and her and that these are difficult times for this world.

Wherever you stand or sit or lie right now - this was meant to be the first country, the most solid, the most secure, most known. Instead we are all in a land that I, myself, cannot picture in ten, twenty, fifty, one hundred years time. My horizon of time is very hazy indeed, which says it all. We didn't have to wait for it - the thirtieth country already came to us. I wanted to reach out in words across the strange universes of information and give something, because who knows how long we have left, ever. You, me, them over there and the ones in between. The world as we know it and the ones we don't. It may prove, in time, that the thirtieth realm is more certain than this one. Crazy days, my friend. Crazy days, indeed.

I wanted to show you some of the things I love in this here-we-are-both-first-and-thirtieth-realm. I didn't know where to begin, so I began here, with the first words. That's how I came to the edge of the thirtieth country, right here at the start of this thing, already.

Will you walk in-between with me in this strange land full of bears and gods and forests? It is where the best folk-tales happen and where the deepest myths unfold. It is a place of old magic. Here's a secret, right now for free: it's inside you.

Welcome.

Welcome to Coyopa.

In a certain Tsardom of the thirtieth realm, across thrice-nine lands...

Who knows what happens next?

^* I'm thinking here particularly of Robert Bly and Marion Woodman in The Maiden King. I once had a copy of this (two, indeed, at one time) but now it has gone - perhaps it is beyond the thrice-nine lands, but it is probably in Scotland. The two overlap sometimes for me. This is well worth a read, especially if you are already acquainted with their individual works... Other writers too, explore the numbers games. Let me know which ones you doff your hats to.