A Branch from the Lightning Tree

by Martin Shaw

  Whatever cultural associations we have with the Moon, or whatever gender we regard as the most subtle in verbal nuance, we detect metaphor’s expansive connections. Connotation not denotation. Metaphor engenders the visual in a way that other forms of expression do not.

  In seventeenth century Wales, these kind of expansive connections could bring hundreds out onto hilltops to listen to “theire harpers and crowthers singe them songs of the dooings of theire ancestors . . . and they ripp upp theire petigres at lenght howe ecehe of them is discended from those theire ould princes. Here alsoe they spende theire time in hearinge some part of the lives of the intended prophets and saincts of that cuntrie.” So these minstrels used their speech to make wild links between the ancestors, their own “royal” background, and the religious ecstatics of the region.

  Without metaphor, we keep mythology on the level of an infantile, flattened culture that chooses to only partially see the old stories. In politics it’s about defeating Yaga, not eating fragments of her dress and teeth. Shadow myth is a stripping down to base, fearful emotion, after which one pours the affirmation of god and country onto that incendiary mix. God appears to be a mightily useful figure to invoke in a time of national outrage, despite his seeming rather abstract the rest of the time.

  In our own lives, no matter how small our circle of influence, we can find it nourishing to roll language around our mouth, to spit out unexpected peals of lightning when at a coffee morning, to allow some dense idea to sprout mad flapping wings when in conversation with a friend. When you do this, something scuttles out from behind the sofa and across the brightly lit lounge. For every soul-paralyzing sound bite we take in, we need roughly twenty-six great poems, three rituals involving agitated Ravens, no sleep, and one huge story, preferably from Scotland or the Hindu Kush.

  As you can see, I’m having fun with this idea but heading towards something serious. It isn’t enough just to be conversant with creative, strange concepts. The authentic Elder is still attempting to develop through the initiation experience the sharp light of critical discernment. With the scale so heavily weighted in rationality’s favor, though, we have to make an attempt at restoring the balance. It’s interesting that when a culture that prides itself on intelligence draws on myth or religion for support of a polemic, it manifests such a crude understanding of it. Much unowned emotional intensity pours into its simplistic position. It is a peculiar blind spot.

  THE OLD GODS AREN’T FED BY STATISTICS

  Someone needs to be speaking up for Kingfishers, small English hedges, and lightning storms over New Mexico, and not just in the loud shout of an ecological protest rally. Some sweetness has to come too, some beguilement, some enchantment. Ecological disaster statistics are effective, but can also bring apathy or panic as bedfellows. We need people “with the tongue” to touch the soul as well as the adrenaline ducts. The mythology of wilderness needs to be articulated as the mythology of ourselves. That requires a certain type of education and long periods spent moving and sitting in the wild.

  Bashing a drum of complaint and statistics can still make a shrill sound, no matter how well intentioned, and I don’t think the old nature gods are overly impressed with it, either. Grief has a watery quality that they seem to enjoy, in which we send clouds of feeling back to the sea. Handled well and ritually sanctioned, grief will be eaten by the gods. So speaking out goes in two directions: into the wires and lights of modern living and back into minute caves where the old heroes sleep, one ear open for a beautiful word. Every time they hear one, they blink a tear of oceanic moisture for the tumbling earth.

  ROAD OF SOLITUDE

  This sense of two directions is worth pursuing. It brings us back into the druidic framework of retreat and engagement, with one naturally following the other. We think of extended periods in the forest of Caledon or the hard coasts of Anglesey, but also the reciting of tribal histories, feeding a community through a fierce winter with cycles of old stories. Here beauty lies in the mutual interdependency, an understanding of wild introversion/extroversion that exists within us. No one is entirely one and not the other.

  It is no longer the function solely of a religious order to hold this internal balance. It is a rebel act, even a “practice” as the Buddhists say, to explore roads between deep quiet and expressive articulation. I say “rebel” because both activities create anxiety for the middle road of society that demands oratory as entertainment and soulful nourishment to be contained in a church. We know that Jesus, Muhammad, and Buddha all sought wilderness at the beginning of their teaching work. Heading into the forest indicates both independence and vulnerability. The word “solitude” derives from the Latin for nature.

  This vulnerability is useful because it sensitizes us to the strangeness of our character and intensity of our feelings, and allows them to emerge. When you add the element of fasting to that, the vulnerability grows yet greater. In the empty interior space often filled by muffins, alcohol, and light entertainment, we discover that a tree of memories starts to grow, often within several days of entering the wild. Trees have twigs, sometimes thorns, and for those to grow in your soft gut can be painful. This soul tree’s foliage is wrapped around your head and its leaves enter you as dreams, often peculiar, occasionally rhapsodic. Its twisting trunk pushes against your stomach lining during the waking hours, refusing you rest, like a hawk and a worm.

  This inner work is vital. To repeat a sentence I emphasized previously, “The mythology of wilderness needs to be articulated as the mythology of ourselves.” We have to become familiar with our own depths to re-see the natural world, to recognise its mirrors. It can be a time when visually, very little appears to be happening. To friends, you may appear as a waning moon, if they visit you at all. But this way lies knowing. Anyone invested in a public life or persona would benefit from weighting the scales with this kind of reflection—not the extremity of self loathing half cut on gin, but designated time away from the emphasis on solely human community.

  Bird flight, digging squirrels, a sheep carcass, a wall between mossy gullies, all have a world of information. Basho tells us, “The temple bell stops. But the sound keeps coming out of the flowers.”15 It’s in silence and reflection that we get to access a much wider perspective, the little “i” becomes the big “We.” To be exposed to greater vistas than just the slurry of our own ambition.

  ... All night I heard the small kingdoms breathing around me, the insects, and the birds who do their work in the darkness. All night I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling with a luminous doom. By morning I had vanished at least a dozen times into something better.

  Mary Oliver16

  To emerge back into “outer” life is also vital after a period; we think of Machado, “In my solitude I have seen many things that are not true.”17 To keep fasting after the four days and nights is to miss the point. We need to change gear again, re-approach the tension of our human neighbors.

  Interestingly, for many hundreds of years, wild, remote places were often gathering spots for important meetings, which didn’t all take place at the town square. On my homeland of Dartmoor in Britain, Crockern Tor served as the gathering point for representatives of the four moorland towns. It was another kind of liminal space, where laws and boundary issues were debated. We can only speculate at where the wind, granite, and otherwordly location took these debates, but we know these gatherings convened for centuries.

  CROSSROADS

  In Ramon Lull’s text Libre del ordre de cavayleria we find a meeting place of these two roads, or disciplines. The story begins with a young squire on his way to the High King’s court, where he is to become a Knight. While journeying through a great forest, the young man gets lost and happens upon the cell of an ancient hermit. The hermit turns out to have been a Knight himself, who has spent a lifetime in service to the ideals of chivalry. As their conversation deepens, it becomes apparent that the squire has little understanding of the inner reality of knighthood, being only f
ixated on the external aspects of it. The hermit produces a small book detailing an extensive combination of duties that the squire ends up taking with him to court as a kind of blueprint for up-and-coming knights.

  It becomes apparent in Lull’s text that the Knight is beholden to a morality deeper than the accolades and splendor of his position. He must eschew pride, idleness, lechery, and aspire to wisdom, charity, and loyalty. At the top of the list is courage: “For chivalry abideth not so agreeably in no place as in noblesse of courage.”18

  Any potential Knight was also subjected to a review of how he had carried himself through life thus far, to determine if the life matched the ideals. If he gets through this, then Lull insists on an all-night vigil before the day of his Knighthood. We feel the attraction of this kind of thoroughness, and sense that it would be possible to admire, even eventually trust someone who had gone through this process.

  We can say that the Hermit represents the road of Solitude and the Knight the road of Voice; to carry both, we must abide at the crossroads. The initiatory crossroads, this cauldron, this crucible, is Novalis’s “seat of the soul” the place where inner and outer worlds meet. The encounter in the forest is also an encounter with service, with the knowledge that the squire is accountable to greater powers than his own ambition. It’s an incredibly simple sentiment: accountability, and terribly hard to live up to.

  TRICKSTER LANGUAGE

  I want to deepen this idea of a crossroads, by how it relates both to initiatory practice and the relationship between speech and literature. It would be useful to get a sense of where the ideas in this book place themselves, situated both in oral myth-telling and the page. The philosopher Jaques Derrida maintained that for over 3,000 years of Western philosophy, philosophers have claimed logocentrism–that the voice is the center, from Plato to Aristotle, to Rosseau, Hegel and Husseri. So languages are made to be spoken. Writing serves only as a support to speech. This idea would regard speech as exterior to thought, and writing as exterior to speech. There is a clear and distinct sense of hierarchy—a regression from mind to voice to letter.

  From the perspective of logocentrism, presence is implicit in the communication of speech, but for writing, absence is the defining characteristic. So with speech, the listener and speaker are both present in time, and present to the succession of words from the mouth. The image of letters on a page, wrapped in an envelope, and sent to a distant figure, illustrates the concept of absence.

  So writing becomes marginalized, quite opposed to Derrida’s notion that the development of modern language actually derives from an interplay of speech and writing, therefore one cannot claim primacy over the other.

  Like keen-eye Trickster, Derrida also disrupts this old oppositional thinking by locating what he calls “undecidables.” Specifically concepts or words that cannot be brought into a binary logic. They unsettle. A phrase like Pharmakon, which means both poison and remedy. An “undecidable” within the context of a wilderness rite-of-passage would be contact with a spirit—rarely conforming to a hegemonic form—something neither male or female, a disruption to normality. Indeterminacy–it indicates no precision, clarity, or easy definition. Initiatory process indicates that it is only in the surrender to this difficult awareness that any real vision can ultimately arise (hence the severing from certainty that takes place). Initiation places you in the slippery crucible of paradox. With time this evolves, and insights emerge, but not without the profound drop into this contrary Underworld. You are neither Village or Forest, but some other, subtle thing. The world turned upside down. It’s a hard thing to talk about.

  This book’s position is one of intense interplay, a shuttling between. Speech is occurring within the writing and writing is occurring within the speech. Many insights have come from telling a story orally, which is in turn influenced by years at the desk. What arrives seems to have a liminal touch, a betwixt and between. For the book to work within what Derrida—and Heidegger before him—refers to as “the metaphysics of presence” (the old position), the crossroads motif cannot exist, no matter how nebulous. Interestingly, the logocentric is a position many oral storytellers would support, being central to their craft. I disagree. Where I do speak up is in the call for the spontaneous within an oral telling, the wild intelligence that arrives in the moment—but that does not belittle writing or its influence, just a script used inappropriately.

  Like Trickster, Derrida is not interested in eradicating what came before, but in helping to engender some new constellation. He also draws from the past—writing about literary texts—while using such a contrary linguistic style it appears that the sentences are breaking down and reconfiguring in front of your eyes.

  By working with host texts, Derrida actually requires the oppositions of past literature to find the instabilities that open the ground of uncertainty. Think again of Trickster: “The god of the roads (Trickster) needs the more settled territories before his traveling means very much. If everyone travels, the result is not the apotheosis of Trickster but another form of his demise,” explains Lewis Hyde.19 This is an ancient ritual arrangement, the trammelling of boundaries to ensure that vitality tickles the status quo and life continues to grow. Trickster is nothing without something to rub up against.

  As Derrida shakes the foundations of both structuralism and phenomenology, there is a loyalty to some wild spirit of investigation that is both troubling and refreshing. As an old oak collapses, at the same moment a green shoot leaps from the earth. Speech and writing always hold the energies of history, influence, and repetition among them. Derrida is in the business of hints and diffusion, traditional attributes of the Underworld journey, rather than brightly lit sound bites. Still, when the young initiates are led from the village, they are blindfolded, spun round, turned up side down–they are now in submission to a fiercer dynamic. This is all in the nature of rupture. Derrida is being true to his work.

  HERO IS A GRIEF MAN

  The German artist Joseph Beuys walked the roads of Solitude and Voice. We know Beuy’s often-repeated story of being shot down as a Luftwaffe pilot, lacerated with shrapnel, and then being rescued by a nomadic people, the Tartars, and brought back to health by being wrapped in felt. This conspicuously mirrors elements of the descent, rupture, and renewal process we locate in many of the stories in this book. Rather too well, claim many sceptical art critics.

  In certain initiations, young shamans are invested with “medicine bones” that are placed into the reshaping of the initiate’s body; items such as rock crystals replace the previous body part—the anatomy now containing information from the mineral world, wrestling the body into a new, expanded harmonic.

  I would suggest that Beuy’s medicine bones were the shrapnel lodged in his physical form, elements that collided biology and machinery, colluding in his descent into illness and the rapture of his renewal. The breaching of the skin also perforates ideas of unequivocal containment. In shamanism, these new attachments to the body are seen to contain distilled consciousness of the arena they originate from: mineral, plant, animal, so we encounter Beuys receiving concentrated knowledge of the atmospheric of war, the shadow of his own people’s psyche, appalling in its intensity. In one infinite moment, Beuys is suspended in the death space, is split open by the projected violence of combat and is left changed, holding, through experience, a key to the new images, new art, new stories.

  Beuys was nothing if not cunning (a very tricksterish quality), and understood that controversy will often accompany true art—maybe his scar tissue toughened his skin. Of course, cunning derives from “cunnen”—to know. He has become a dark hero to many involved with the labor of creating art—a kind of enchanter.

  The image of the hero as a generic defender of cultural sanctions is actually tribalistic slander. It’s a kind of Hollywood whitewashing of a much older, rawer picture. In the ancient tale of Gilgamesh, we encounter him as the regent of Ur, a champion who wanders society taking what he wants. To temper him
, the gods create Enkidu, a wild man conjured from mud to stand up for the women Gilgamesh has violated. When the two meet in combat, an affinity develops between them and the champion and the hero become friends. The mundanity of applause has no weight for Enkidu and he refuses to abide by the regulations of society. When Enkidu dies, Gilgamesh senses the authenticity of his friend’s life and falls into grief. We could say that Enkidu rose to challenges but was not hypnotized by collective causes. He continually refers back to a psychic independence and intimacy with the divine that cannot be bought. Carrying the elemental energies of the woods with them, Enkidu’s relatives emerge through the centuries: Herne the Hunter, Robin Hood, John Barleycorn. So something of the hero’s independence relies on connection to wildness, to fresh, strange ideas and keeping an eye upwards towards god. The champion is the one who rolls out endlessly to battle, not the hero.

  The hero stories have their roots in pre-literate mother cultures like Herappa in India, Minoan Crete and the Magdalenian area of southern France—they were not wheeled out to support a patriarchal order. Sometimes, like Anga in “The Serpent and the Bear,” or Cuchullain with Scathach, they undergo an initial education by a woman. One of their distinct masculine traits is their desire to achieve mastery over rather than accomodate certain obstacles, and it is here that their vulnerability lies.

  History possesses a sorceror’s capacity to take this root energy and attempt to separate it from its connection to nature and the feminine. It is a great achievement for bad people when we can’t detect the difference between champions and heroes anymore. We abdicate heroism because we don’t know what it is, and then we wonder why we feel listless and cynical.