by Martin Shaw
To Romany Gypsies, the greatest curse you can aim at someone is isolation. To be bereft of your ancestors, squabbling brothers, inspirations, and livestock is to be only just alive. In their view, we are constantly expanding and contracting into history, berry red forests, dead uncles, the stiffening fur of the black bear. Art, in its broadest sense, is about connections, not distance. It’s easy to feel safe inside the plastic, remote, abstract. But when the boat tips and hail breaks the window, where are the tools for repair?
Our isolation is not to be misunderstood as the need for solitude. This is an isolation that comes from emotional distance and lack of trust for anything of worth to a previous generation. We find in Michael Richardson’s translation of George Bataille’s The Absence of Myth:For Bataille, this absence of myth was merely one aspect of a more generalized “absence.” It also meant absence of the sacred. Sacred, for Bataille, was defined in a very straightforward way—as communication. Quite simply, the notion of an “absence of myth” meant a failure of communication which touched all levels of society.... In a very real sense it becomes an absence of society, or more specifically, an “absence of community.”4
Once communication through the infrastructure of art and culture tilts too far from the Lasquaux caves, or from the words of Rimbaud, we empty our bag fully and are left vulnerable when heavy storms blow the plastic sheets away. Glibness, sound bites, and witty retorts are no kind of currency when we are outside the village gates.
THE UNCANNY FRESHNESS OF DISORIENTATION
The descent is a mythological term for the period
during and after a powerful event in which the ego has
been overwhelmed by a wave from the unconscious.
Energy that is normally available to consciousness falls
into the unconscious. This is known as journeying to the un-
derworld, a state in which creative energies are going through
transformations that the unaware ego may
know nothing about.
Marion Woodman5
This is an underworld detected in dreams, a moment we when brush the wing-feathers of mortality, when we take a rough push into the nettles. Traditionally, it lives outside the walled city of the intellect, in the rough places, or underneath our feet, nearer the extremes of hot or cold. The allure of such a place is fragrance of change, a kind of uncanny freshness that can arise through disorientation. It can be a concrete experience, a metaphor, and all points in between. It is a liminal arena and cannot be completely contained by the attempts of language to define it. Its atmosphere swoops between incident, insight, and dream.
It is by its very name unsettling: underworld, not visible or accessible to topside consciousness to manipulate for gain. In the very otherness of its shadows, however, lies the possibility of fresh perceptions, to glimpse something anew, before the mind has claimed it as conquered territory. Jackson Pollock’s trips to his New York analyst were an attempt to put some tools back in the bag, to claim some magician energy in the overwhelming descent of his depressions. His period of analysis was an attempt to stabilize the velocity of the descent, to bring back one of the Crone’s whiskers. In this descent, many go down and don’t come back. Even the so-called success stories can end in violence. Rothko, suicide at the foot of a canvas; Pollock in a car crash. One perspective is that they were given the wrong response to their work, an affirmation—wealth and prestige—rather than a blessing—a culturally understood act of holding and honoring the visible thread of an energy whose roots are in the invisible world.
There is another neglected aspect of the Underworld: it is a holy place for those ideas to be matured, to brought into physical realization. From an indigenous position, offerings would be left at the site of a hunter’s kill as an acknowledgement of a dialogue, a relationship with the divine. If the artists believes they are the sole producers of their work, what happens to the poetry of that moment of discovery? The bungled etiquette traipses after the artistic shoplifters and will keep twisting the air around them till it gets fed, even if that creates big trouble. What is superstition to some is cause and effect to others.
We will weave three strands to make a strong rope in this chapter. One is the story of Ivan, the second strand is the commentary, and the third is the tracing of Ivan’s steps through the initiatory process up in the mountains of Snowdonia. Each strand winds round the other, strengthening the whole.
IVAN THE BEAR’S SON
There was once a forest on the edge of the tundra, out in the snowy wilds of Russia. Only one hunter knew its paths and was not afraid of owls hooting at midnight. He and his wife had only one great grief, that they could not conceive a child. One day he caught the trail of a large bear and followed her back to her den, where, to his astonishment, he found a small boy with wild hair and glittering green eyes. When the mother bear saw this encounter, she pulled away and allowed the hunter to take the boy she had nurtured these last few years. With great joy the hunter returned to the settlement he came from, with a son at last! But this boy, who they named Ivan, “the bear’s son,” didn’t grow by years, months, weeks, or days, but grew by hours! Before their eyes he was transformed into a being with extraordinary strength; if he played with a child, arms were broken, a head would leave its shoulders. Soon, the community gathered round the hunter, angered at the chaos ensuing from Ivan’s arrival, and the havoc wreaked to the other children. “Banish him!” they cried. So, with great sadness, the hunter informed Ivan, who was now a young man in physical appearance, that he must journey out into the world. As a gift he gave Ivan his own twenty-five pound club, and Ivan brandished it saying; “I am Ivan the Bear’s son, and I fear not even a witch!” Prophetic words, as we shall see.
Well, Ivan wandered out into the world and whether it was a short time or a long time, he had many adventures, trials, and triumphs. Somewhere down the road he fell in with three giants who were all brothers and accompanied him like an unruly gang. Their home was a hunting lodge deep in the same woods Ivan came from. The lodge was made from forty huge trees, and in its center was a huge fire that never went out. Ivan and the giants lived on the meat of elk, enjoyed each others’ company, and that’s where we leave them for now, snow padding down on the huge timbers of their roof . . .
WHO IS IVAN?
We are immediately given clues that whoever Ivan is, he is not entirely human. Some part of him has formed in conditions seen as primitive and dangerous, literally “raised by animals.” Ivan belongs to that small, mythic community of feral children who survive through the fostering of wild animals. The important point is that, rather like Taliesin in the first chapter, Ivan is a kind of bridge between realms; he abides in the physical shape of a boy but reeks of forest otherness.
Though Ivan is not quite as literal a leaper as Taliesin, the conditions surrounding his discovery by the hunter alert us to the auspicious nature of his being. That wonderful clue of the mother bear backing away indicates that metaphorically, the boy is ready for the next stage of his adventure. Who is he? Well, we could say he is a son of Cernunnos or Shiva. Both of these gods, European and Indian in origin, are loyal to the moon, abide in the wild, and are intensely undomesticated. They give voice to mountains, to small birds and crazy ponies; they are experiential, elemental, and remote, all at the same time.
Robert Moore uses the wonderful phrase “appreciative consciousness” to describe the love of nature they bring. The old hunter-gatherer recognition of the necessity of the hunt and also the power of ritual appeasement belong in the territory of these beings: to alchemize destruction through the discipline of ceremony into a legitimate element in the cycle of life. So Ivan is some fledgling aspect of this realm but is not entirely a god either.
THE WILD AND HOLY MOMENT
For an artist, Ivan embodies that moment in the studio that is beyond the manipulation of our ideas, when at the end of a day’s work, one horse we’ve never seen before enters the corral, making the other sculptures
look like lame donkeys, and urinates on the tiredness of our repertoire. Something true enters the room and all falls silent. Those few moments in its presence is often all we have; that root experience, that essence, can rarely be prescriptive. The next five years of our work can be a search for that one moment when we found the wild boy. Antoni Tapies sometimes glimpses him by repetitious walking in front of the canvas, to wear out the machinations of his considered process; Pollock allowed the mercury of paint through air to be the boy’s entry point, to sacrifice full manipulation of the brush. This, as well as many other techniques, illustrates the hunter’s/artist’s familiarity with the forest and the need to travel far from the hearth to encounter the goods he seeks.
Frequently we enter the forest to find false trails—no food this trip. Ivan symbolizes a moment of discovery, both longed for and profoundly mysterious, his origins hidden in the world behind the world. The words fly off the page, the song is completed in an hour, and we just don’t know where it came from. Hilmi Dede Baba sees the place of meeting this way:A tent is erected
Where lovers are slowly cooked.
This stopping place for love addicts
Is really a rose garden if you look 6
UNOWNED LIGHTNING
The claiming of this moment proves more difficult. To the community, Ivan’s is an non-integrated energy, destructive. Like love, he grows at an ungovernable pace; his territory is marked out by rupture—legs from bodies, heads from shoulders. We can see we are witness to an essence, rather than a developed form. Ivan is a moment of polarities: wild/domestic, dismembered/nurtured, forest/village.
This boy is no politician; he carries no diplomacy with him. He carries lightning. Philip Guston turns round in 1970, digs hard, follows his nose, and produces work that cast him out of the village till his death. Every cadmium red eyeball, every titanium white Ku Klux Klan robe is a grotesque aberration to his expectant Abstract Expressionist audience. Ivan is quite an arrival, the real thing, it appears.
The problem arises when we expect this energy to behave itself, to submit to the consensual. In its current state it is not ready to do that, it’s been bred in hard weather, slept in the rough fur of bears, eaten fish raw from the stream. A clue to the insular nature of the community is that it’s only the hunter who enters the forest; our religious perspective on that environment appears to have broken down. We no longer have the sense of a village engaged in initiatory work with their youth, otherwise they would have discovered Ivan many times over in the crooked teeth and smiling eyes of their returning adults. When the dialogue with wilderness is neglected Ivan as Lightning will appear.
SEEING THE WORLD THROUGH THE EYES OF GIANTS
Ivan is now expelled from the village, but not before receiving a gift from the hunter, the twenty-five-pound club. Something of weight has been given to Ivan that he did not have in the wild, something manmade and handed down. The experience of the village is not entirely wasted then, some boon or talisman has been passed to him from the human realm. We could view this club as the father’s collected knowledge, his strategies and the accumulated power of his decades as a hunter. Still, though token of knowledge it may be, it’s not Ivan’s knowledge, and like adolescents forever, he has to go out into the world to speak for his own piece of the action. We see no sign of shame in Ivan as he leaves the carnage of the village, and also no fear; “I am Ivan the Bear’s Son and I fear not even a Witch!”
Robert Bly characterizes this stage in a youth’s development as being “in the Red.” According to Bly, in European mythology we find great attention paid to the colors red, black, and white, with specific characteristics attributed to them. What really alerts us is that when we study Native American medicine wheel teachings that map out the process of childhood to adulthood, we notice the same set of characteristics. Childhood begins in the South, the place of heat, raw emotion, “I want!” The West represents the adolescent passage, hibernation, grief, lethargy, “I feel.” And then finally the North, the place of adulthood that represents community, responsibility, eldership, “I act!” I want /I feel/ I act is a set of distilled essences for each of these three phases.
The fairy-tale hero or heroine—whether in Russian, German, or Finnish tales—who chances to see a drop of red blood fall from a black raven into the white snow, sinks immediately into a yogic trance. This is the path of men and women who want increased personality, more spirit, occult knowledge, who want spiritual lead to turn into spiritual gold. We walk the lead-gold path at the same time we walk the life-death road.7
We can describe the temperament that Ivan shows at this time as characteristic of the red phase. In mood, its attributes include aggression, one-upsmanship, the desire to win at all costs, to be visible, to dominate, to shoot ahead of the pack—in short, all characteristics we associate with the move towards individuation in society. Michael Meade writes that amongst the Gisu of Africa this phase can last twelve years, during which the initiates are painted red, decorated with the feathers of a bird, and the elders fan the flames of their boasting and prowess, shaping this display into a form that in time becomes favorable to marriage, fatherhood, and a responsible place in the tribe. Without this education of the “red” temperament it remains unwieldy, ready to be inflamed in unexpected moments, unowned. To celebrate it in its complexity and largesse over time tempers it: “red” is, after all, a season. Ungainly and in-your-face as a person in the red can seem, they must fully experience it in order to access its energy. Disapproval of the red stage is a kind of avoidance.
Ivan’s aggression and wildness has sent him out into the world to survive or die. There is no fallback plan and that creates a kind of momentum all of its own. We learn through myth that the universe celebrates this kind of risk, that its full support and genius negotiation isn’t released until you are fully committed to the great uncertainty of your undertaking. Often the odds against you look impossible, and that’s the point! Ivan steps away from the village carrying only his self-belief. Given his youth, that manifests as Giant energy. We could say that those three giants represent the swagger in his step Ivan needs as a young warrior. A giant can see over people, houses, situations, and can clear a wide path.
A giant is noticeable, no shrinking violet; his presence wins him the interview, impresses the father (even if they struggle with the suitor’s arrogance), leads the locker room pep talk at half time. Mythologically, giants, who are associated with greed, capture things of subtlety (e.g. a princess) but lack the sophistication to know quite what to do with them (maybe tie them to a tree, or eat them) There is a powerful but childlike quality to their thunderous footfall; you sense you could topple them with a well aimed missile. But it is an appropriate stance for Ivan at this point, young as he is. With the giant energy at his disposal, he establishes a reputation as an adventurer and displays a successful daring. His innate physical strength has helped him build up a “head of steam” (heat is a major attribute of the “red”) that means he doesn’t just survive, but flourishes.
The world responds to the vitality of such a stance. The fire burns bright enough to illuminate the path ahead and also warm the inevitable voyeurs. The problem arises in one detail. A giant, due to his scale, cannot crouch close to the ground and check the soil for nourishment; he can point, flail, and destroy but what can he cultivate? When he has the riches, what does he do with them? The jewels gather dust in the hidden caves. This feels like a criticism, but it’s not, only becoming problematic when the red becomes not a stage but all encompassing. The lack of introspection can be fuel to conquest at a certain point, but crippling to maturation later down the road.
The red’s grip is so compelling that the world at large resists letting the individual grow beyond it. Success too early in life can create a kind of creative paralysis that blocks the natural flow of the individual. Jean Michel Basquiat inhabited, courted, and was ultimately consumed by this energy, Andy Warhol his empty father standing by. His giant nature was reflected
both in the size of his talent and his capacity for addiction. If you are defined by a moment rather than a progression, where can that lead you? The life of an artist requires a listening, an internal perspective, that complete baptism in the red will drown if it stays too long. For one in the red, the world is a place that needs to be conquered, wrestled, voyaged. The red initiates action but is naïve to the price of such movement.
One dusk, when Ivan and the two older giants were out hunting, the younger brother was alone at the lodge and didn’t hear the sound of a huge rock being pulled aside in the nearby forest. Up from the underworld, her world, appeared Baba Yaga, the great and terrible Witch of the north woods, riding a mortar and pestle and brushing her trail with a broom stick. Smelling food, she burst into the lodge, attacked the giant, pulling a strip of flesh off his back like a strip of bacon, emptied the larder, and left. Baba Yaga attacked the other brothers the same way, so Ivan waited behind the door, hoping to apprehend her. Armed with his father’s club, he made a stronger show of himself, blows raining down on Baba Yaga till she beat a hasty retreat back to the rock and down to the underworld. With Baba Yaga seemingly vanquished, the men congratulated themselves on a job well done until Ivan said, “We must go to her world and finish the job, otherwise she will come back and try again. Who will accept the honor of descending down the hole to tackle this great, powerful, and terrifying witch?” Oddly enough, no one accepted the challenge and it was up to Ivan to journey into the unknown dark. He instructed the giants to hold onto the end of a rope he had thrown down the hole and to pull him up when he tugged on it, however long a time that may be.
