A Branch from the Lightning Tree

by Martin Shaw

  A well is a place where we draw sustenance from what lives in the dark, below us. Often a family will have one or two members who crouch by such an opening, only half-seen by the others.

  Without these figures in the half-light, the water can pour into the bucket, and the family imbibe a poisoned stream.

  The Story says to all bucketers, “Expect an attack from a Witch.”

  Witch energy is a well-documented force in this world that will appear whenever real soul work is being done. It is the gargoyle on the temple gates, happy to devour anyone without the accumulated scars to bear the alchemy of real psychic revelation and change. The Witch has a bag of parking fines, redundancies, and betrayals ready to sprinkle liberally into the life of anyone at the Well of Remembrance. She is a tester of resolve and far more complicated than simply evil.

  She came every morning to draw water

  Like an old bat staggering up the field.

  Nights when a full moon lifted past her gable

  It fell back through her window and would lie

  Into the water set out on the table.

  Seamus Heaney7

  Peter’s magical signing finishes off the Witch (in this story, anyway) and he and an old man unearth his box. What treasures are inside? Death and Old Age, the two figures he had spent a lifetime trying to outrun. When they lay their inevitable hands on him, the race is run.

  If Peter had been willing to befriend them earlier, things could have been different. He’d not have lost all fear, but placed them into relationship with his life. His running lost him the Maiden of the Copper Palace, the possibility of warmth, love, a family, and the chance to grow old with his people. By admitting to our mortality, we unlock something precious that gives everything else greater resonance.

  Only two days ago, at the funeral of my uncle, I witnessed evidence of this. As we looked down the six-foot clay drop to his coffin, I saw in an instant a man who’d never run from death and old age—as a result, all they claimed was his shell—his essence was somewhere else, beyond even the Hut of the Wind. The two hundred and fifty who came to the funeral also carry some energy between them from him, something shared, generous, and unafraid. The more we try to run, the greater the plunder for Death and Old Age. When they got to my uncle, they found little to munch on, for Uncle Bryan never hoarded his treasure.

  As we experience climate change, it feels as though we are peering into the unknown chest, with death and old age reaching out, clutching ice caps. The Witch is the long shadow of that inheritance, spitting Kuwait, the Cold War, 9/11, the relentless pursuit of oil at us. To run from death is to run from forest knowledge, from the rhythms of the land itself. This is the legacy of Descartes, spun into whirling permission for all kinds of abuse. When we lose relationship with the tacit forces of nature, we begin our run from the things of the living world. The Shadow King refuses nourishment to his wider family of ocean and eagle eggs, and that refusal returns as an earthquake or a decimating flood or as a furious, axe-handed baby. The detail of its being a baby hints at an elemental, raw energy, something that cannot be easily negotiated. Starving the Kingdom includes starving all the animals and natural resources in it, and robbing them. Ultimately our actions will take us back to the well of remembrance, where our legacy awaits.

  Besides a great deal of caution in this tale, there are deeper inflections I can’t fathom. To run from an abuse, or the grubby complexity of family, is an instinctive response, but the story urges a journey home, a reconciling with the very things that set us off in the first place; it urges us not to try, as the third son did, to outrun the things of life itself.

  The poet Timothy Young says:When all the plums are in

  you can cook the flesh for jam

  and dry the pits for a rattle

  But you still have to live with the thorns8

  To stop running is to enter the field of longing, to be fragile, to incarnate fully. Our longing is like Blake’s “golden string,” a barometer, a psychic timepiece that connects us to feeling, memory and landscape. Its tenderness creates an inarguable accountability, a “still, small voice” that feeds the Kingdom, and that welcomes the baby daughter but still knows what to shoot and what to feed, a nest of strange compassion.

  Stepping beyond the Red King and the Witch, we enter the moment when Want becomes Longing—the want of immortality opens into the longing for relationship and intimacy. We must gather our inner Kingdom—our one-eyed hags, our bright heroes, our drowned magicians, our sleeping Queen, our depressed artists, our accountants, and our ecstatics—and prepare a feast. Not for peace or any simplistic notion, but to get all the troublemakers under one roof. If we peer at them for a moment or two, they start to look like a family. And that one there, serving the drinks, dressed in white, first on the dance floor? That’s Death. Death in service to Life.

  EPILOGUE

  SEEKING THE NEW ENCOUNTER

  As a storyteller and writer I often ask the same question: How does one stay true to the oral culture of storytelling while committing a written exegesis of the same stories to paper?

  I think that oral culture and literature are tricky but complementary resources. As this book has suggested, oral telling enjoys a decentralized existence, it resists anchoring too avidly to a written form, it retains a lively freshness by living on the un-scripted tongue rather than page. However, it is almost entirely due to literature that we have these stories at all, so it is unwise to attack it too harshly. A tension does arise in the aspiration of both mediums. Literature has often defined, marked out, and emboldened both the author and culture it arises from. In the deliberate assemblage of words an agenda appears, an agenda that is defined and pristine within the mind of the writer.

  Of course the issue of ownership arises, and the compartmentalising of wild image. We have the strange thought of the upheaval and then preservation of oral stories in the literary tradition of the conquerors. However, conquerors have a habit of being clumsy with the myths of the conquered, and much gets lost in translation. Stanzas, verses, chapters, can appear to be prisons for the mythic impulse, reflecting the hoeing and toiling impulse of the human over nature, rather than arising from the earth itself.

  A concern is that the strongly muscled history of literature loses these inflections; there is only one version of “The Serpent and the Bear” and this is its only interpretation. The story now bears the ambition of the writer, often without others in the community who have held the story most of their lives. Stories can get awfully cold this way. Excessive attention to literacy over the complexity of oral culture has been a dangerous business down the centuries. The damage is all around us. I understand the claim that the very act of learning to read can cause an abstraction and distance from wild nature-the feathered pace of the Indigo Bunting or the joyous bellow of the sea lion.

  However, what literature lacks in dialogue it may gain in sharpness of execution; certain processes of thought require expanded, uninterrupted plains of exegesis; a constant back-and-forth may dilute or subvert the original question. The book can also be utilized as a source of discussion when read by a number of readers. Writing is also more than just the transcribing of the oral to the page. As any public speaker will attest, the phrasing of effective oratory can be quite different to the inflections delivered to the written word. Literature offers other opportunities with language; it can sustain complexities that delivered orally would be almost impossible to digest. The reader also has the luxury of returning to certain key phrases, the integration of ideas can be slowed, repeated. In the same moment, if the prose loses relationship with the speech patterns of the author it can appear ornate but cold, and some humanity gets lost.

  It is a complicated arrangement—both traditions are now feeding the other. There have been great losses on the side of the spoken word, but in the same moment it is literature that carries the skeleton of stories to a new generation. It is the job of the storyteller to continually reanimate these literary “b
ones” with a linguistically mutable oral re-telling of these very stories.

  The implication that we need to make a choice—the quiet of reading or the polyphonic scuffle of an oral telling, is to deny the Trickster present in these very paradoxes, that, in the sometimes ungainly combination of orality and literature, lies the very crossroads between Village and Forest we have been exploring. I believe we must be wary about too much nostalgia of an imagined oral purity: it is an insult to the possibility that Lord Coyote is still involved in the discourse between humans, a ploughed field, a waterfall, an opera house, a newspaper. The story is not over yet.

  These arguments are not new, of course: the Athenian philosophers rounded on orally recited myth in favor of an individual’s mental resources to objectify the images personally. Recall Socrates’ reluctance to leave the city gates; “I am a lover of knowledge, and the men who dwell in the city are my teachers, and not the trees or country.” On the other hand, field work into South Slavic oral poetry has revealed that amongst illiterate Yugoslav oral bards, when becoming literate and working with a fixed text some lost the skill and devices to create oral poetry.

  It is undeniable that many myths have been compressed, misunderstood, cut up. The rhythms that we find in Palaeolithic narratives, inspired by the seasons and deep animal secrets, were soon channelled by the Neolithic into patterns that mimic the human reaction to the seasons—the trends of agriculture and the emergence of versification. A culture of giving becomes a society of taking. We become more influenced by the Village than the Forest. But if we are to stay with this notion of promiscuity, then surely we are to ruefully accept the messy accord of words in the air and words on paper. It seems to me that the greatest impoverishment comes not just from the transition from orality to literature but, by implication, a growingly didactic approach to the natural world. What Western literature can seem to represent. A grotesque form of empowerment, a mad pony of gold stamping over bundles of black hair, jade, and old tipi poles.

  What can seem embedded in orality is a remnant of some efficacious relationship to the earth that we feel we may have lost. But was part of that very sacrality an acknowledgement of the place of death? The oral tellers suggest that in some way each telling is unique and so contains a little death, it jumps back into the ground between tellings, it isn’t latent, it isn’t a fixed star, is certainly not imprisoned on a piece of paper. It flies through the hut, hamlet, or hall and is gone. To our world it dies and reanimates, like winter into spring. From this perspective, to commit the story to the page is to keep it in a frozen summer, denying the earthly tangle of seasonal movement.

  There is a power often underestimated in the spacing between words; it is the spaciousness around the word that establishes its significance. Within an oral telling, timing has great effect, but cannot easily be revisited except by repetition (an old technique in oral cultures). We can isolate the gift of longevity to the written word; by scripting it you have anchored it, it can be revisited. The written word cheats death. In this cheating do we meet the desire for immortality? Is the significance of a written word the attempt to unshackle ourselves from the primeval arrangement of life and death, to give up our inevitable wrestle with age and decay?

  The words delivered in an oral telling have a greater diffusion than the heavy ink edges of a letter on a page. They are less bricks creating a house of definition, more winged language quickly crossing the river of death, flaming for a moment and then bending into the inevitable silence that follows voice. It is not my ambition to imply that all is lost by the arrival of written language. Far from it. The Anglo Saxons had a word, giedd, to describe the intensities and beauty of language at its most transcendental, regardless of whether it was found in speech or on paper, in a fireside ballad or epic saga recited in the longhouse. It was what they regarded as the true poetic spirit. The giedd is the delicious scent that Trickster seeks in this confluence of influence.

  Trickster is always snuffling around trying to re-open dialogue to the sacred (his speciality being disintegration, disappointment, and rupture), so the tensions between disciplines attracts his tuning fork; to conduct the dichotomy into something we call art.

  What binds the two forms is the ability to concentrate. It is a growing lack of concentration that is a truly disarming characteristic of modern life, whether reading a book or gathered by a fire hearing an oral telling. In mythic terms, the lack of ability to concentrate constitutes a break, or opening, or rupture—all, as I have written, firmly in the territory of the Trickster. It is sensitivity to associative openings in language and thought that creates the poetry of the Spanish surrealists, or the ghazals of Hafez. That very ability to move quickly from image to image is a vital attribute to the creation of their poetry. However, this means a strong awareness of that moment when language ascends to giedd, without that awareness we are left with the break but not the art. The furious ruptures in Ted Hughes’s poetry points towards rapid shifts in image rather than a complete breakdown of concentration. It is also combined with a later sustained intention that shapes the wider poem. In a situation where an appreciation of giedd has been severely compromised, the bridge between images is severed, and minute spans of attention become the norm in themselves rather than aid to intense expressions of image. Trickster’s contrary, playful push towards sacred rupture gets lost without awareness of giedd.

  Story is quite capable of accommodating both the communal and the solitary, (Village and Forest) and the twenty-first-century mind is able to comprehend as best it can the subtle differences of experience that both offer. But how do we reorient to the great dark caves of story that live underneath our feet?

  The intensity of the earth’s thoughts is a good place for us to begin; a great quieting could be recommended for anyone approaching myth telling. What mad questions get expelled in a winter storm, what thin stanzas of muddy imagination are ruminated by the badger’s hind leg? There was, and could still be, a time when students of wild thought chose such things as their teachers.

  Wildness also has some kind of organizing quality to it; the forest and shaggy mountain (and the plant, animal, and mineral life on it) find some way of negotiating terrain, and are far less chaotic than may seem at first appearances. Without the anxious hand of a human, over time the area takes on a shape and atmosphere all of its own, it dictates its own terms. The garden (as opposed to the wild) is a false economy, its shape is dependent on that anxious hand. Out in the wild the hemlock, willow, and blackthorn bush are all involved in some epic dance with each other, involving territory and compromise. The animals, trees, and minerals of that place have been challenging boundaries with each other for thousands of years.

  We can see that this creates a fresh perspective on the fierce moments in our own growth: our steady garden years may be more fragile than the strange, quick moments when the wild steps in, and with it some deep part of our own psyche that knows how to negotiate its rapid currents.

  Without those moments we are unlikely to encounter our own capacity for wild stabilization. That stabilization may appear to be a frantic juggling act to those still doing garden work, but encountering the wild brings a visual otherness with it—the terms are stranger, the stakes higher.

  Wild stabilization is the contrary force that arises through life’s initiations. The stabilization may look like Coyote running around with his paws on fire, but that liminal orientation is what the old Irish sagas call “learning how to dance on the tips of spears.”

  This also relates to myth telling—both in the memory of the story and the spontaneous images and reflections of the teller. In a split second the two negotiate territory on the tongue, a wild terrain not wrestled into a “garden” by use of a recited script, but kept fluid, reflexive, and curious by honoring the convergence of the two streams. Just as we detect a powerful principle in the organizing of the natural world, the storyteller can facilitate an in-the-moment confluence of energies in the power of a true oral telling.
When this has already been hoed, planted, and weeded into shape by unswerving repetition of language, then this convergence, and thus relationship to wild nature, is lost. Although the practitioner may claim this is an act of oral narrative, its deepest gift—its relationship to spontaneity and the living world—has gone.

  Stories have always appeared robust; a traditional rule in European storytelling being, rather like cooking, that you can add one element to the recipe, normally something subtle. This rule of possible addition is not something I would apply to great sagas like the Upanishads or Beowulf, but in more localized stories and told over time, some spooky detail floats up from the unconscious and adds itself to your telling of the story.

  There is an inherent relationship in actually performing the stories that changes your dialogue entirely, that the whole experience becomes less precious (this is not a word-perfect recital) but reaches greater depth. The depth is registered as move into a vitalizing present—from the unscripted quality—rather than a journey into the ancient past. As we have discussed, the mythic is not the past. A triad of possibility opens up between you, the story, and the listener that maintains a differing quality to the hermetic intimacy of reading.

  Reading is a journey entirely inwards. Much of the work has already been done. Many novels will carry detailed description of the characters, the authors’ thoughts distilled to a polished tip of eloquence. We desire silence, comfort, any number of things. With storytelling the experience is different. For a start it is communal; even if we don’t know the person next to us we are aware of bodies, opinions, mass. The room is full of histories. Of course, so is a library, but in a library the reader is engaged with an entirely different set of root images than that of their neighbour.