The Meat Tree
Page 12
She
The ship is entering another phase, with another species. The story determines what the ship can do physically. It’s turning overtly predatory!
He
So the hunter prepares himself to stand where Lleu balanced beside the river.
She
This is so hard to follow. Till now, the ship wanted us for our imagination. But this intelligence is looking for bodies in which to give birth to their ideas. That’s why they’ve been after us since we first went into VR. The fruit of this tree is always meat and more meat – the babies born from incest. A woman – fresh meat – made of the flesh of flowers. Now that tree is hungry.
Campion! Listen! From now on the meat tree will eat us alive! Not only our minds but our bodies as well! It’s time to leave.
He
You go, that’s an order. I’ll find a point where I can distract them.
She
It’s too late for that. I’m switching roles.
He
Don’t you dare! The hunter asks if he may hold a stone as a shield before him. I say, ‘Yes. I will not refuse you that.’
She
I’ll be the hunter and take the blow.
He
What was that? Say again? I told you get out, and use the pod.
I take my javelin, balance it on my shoulder.
She
He can’t see who’s behind the stone.
He
I think like light and ignore all objects. I concentrate with a hatred so sharp I can place my spear with precision in between molecules of air…
She
The hunter acts out of instinct alone. His mind is clear as the sky above him. There’s not a shred of fantasy in it. He’s a man who’s willing to pay for his actions, who understands pain is never touched by magic. I stand here for Campion, the first real gesture in this whole game.
He
Time slows down, and I see the blade vibrate as it flies. It parts the slate like a laser through dust and finds its mark.
She
The spear finds my heart like a new love. I feel the rhythm of my blood as it pumps out of my wound. As I fall, I catch Campion’s eye.
He
My God, it’s Nona!
She
The meat tree shakes as I become its fruit. Everything concentrates on me as the sweet juice runs over.
He
She’s wearing a flower of red on her breast and, with her blood, she tells me to go. I run.
She
Every grievance, every form of justice played out in the game needs this moment of death. No tricks with birds, no transformations. Just falling and bleeding.
He
I fire up the pod and it works this time. The ship is distracted.
She
Imagination is all very well, but it requires a body, which is its better part.
He
The engine is sluggish, as if it were held by millions of tiny plant tendrils. Full throttle and the tiny ship moves away from the shipwreck.
She
The metal was cold but now it burns.
He
The engines roar, make way.
She
Darkness falls on my face, like an owl.
He
What will I tell them when I get back? We’ll find no body. Nona will be changed beyond all explanation.
I’m away! And as I leave, I hear her:
Campion, remember that you weren’t alone inside this story. That you and I were married, me to light, you to flowers. Look to the skies and tell me that it’s better to see than it is to be seen.
I feel her mind. Nona! So many illusions that the blow of the real…
… is saving.
I’ve seen a rogue cell of alien imagination that consumed a living girl. I myself scarcely survived. And now what? A life alone on Mars surface? Like Lleu, I shall have my domain but rule alone. I’ll live in the loneliness of night.
No, Campion, you’ll have your witness always. And your justice.
The stars are in turmoil, light never dies.
The Fourth Branch of the Mabinogion
Blodeuwedd
Math was the lord of Gwyneth and Pryderi of land to the south. Math could only live if his feet were in the lap of a virgin, except when there was a war.
Goewin, his footholder, was the most beautiful maiden in the land and Math’s nephew, Gilfaethwy desired her. So Gilfaethwy’s brother, Gwydion, the best storyteller in the world, engineered a war with the south and while the king was away Gilfaethwy raped Goewin. When Math discovered this he married Goewin as recompense. He punished his nephews by turning them into animals for three years, deer for the first year, then boar, then wolves. He forced them to breed and have offspring, whom he fostered. The three boys were named Hyddwn, Hychddwn and Bleiddwn.
When the punishment was over, Gwydion proposed his sister Aranrhod as Math’s new footholder. Math asked her to step over his magic wand but when she did so she left behind a yellow-haired boy and something else that Gwydion took and hid in a trunk in his room. Later he heard a cry and found a small boy, whom he took to a nursemaid. By the age of four the boy was as strong as an eight year old and Gwydion took him to Aranrhod. Furious, she cursed him to have no name unless she gave him one; but Gwydion tricked her into naming him Lleu Law Gyffes (the fair-haired one with the skilful hand).
Then Aranrhod swore Lleu would have no weapons unless she gave them to him, but again Gwydion tricked her. Finally his mother swore Lleu would never have a wife from the race that is on this earth. But Gwydion and Math made Lleu a wife out of the flowers of oak, broom and meadowsweet; they called her Blodeuwedd.
Math gave Lleu some land to rule, but while her husband was away Blodeuwedd met a huntsman; they fell in love and plotted to kill Lleu. Blodeuwedd asked her husband how he could die, saying she was worried for his safety. He told her he could only be killed by a spear that had taken a year to make while people were at mass on Sundays. Even then he would have to be standing under a roof by a river with one foot on a bath and one on a goat.
Blodeuwedd told this to the huntsman, Gronw Pebr, and a year later asked her husband to show her what he meant. When he did so Gronw threw the spear at him; Lleu screamed, turned into an eagle and flew away. He hid but Gwydion found the eagle at the top of a tree, and when it shook itself worms and rotten flesh fell from it. Gwydion enticed it down and changed it back into a man. When he was well, Lleu asked Math for recompense. Gwydion found Blodeuwedd and turned her into an owl. Lleu demanded the huntsman let him throw a spear at him, Gronw asked for a stone to shield him but the spear broke the stone and killed him. Lleu reclaimed his lands, afterwards becoming Lord of Gwynedd.
Synopsis by Penny Thomas:
for the full story see The Mabinogion, A New Translation
by Sioned Davies (Oxford World’s Classics, 2007).
Afterword
I’ve been wanting to work with the Blodeuwedd myth since I saw a certain tree one autumn when I was twenty-two. It was in America and the only way I had to describe the incandescent fall of its leaves was to say it was Lleu, an eagle perched in the branches and dropping his bright flesh into the dirt.
Nothing came of this image until I was given the chance to retell one of the Mabinogion by Seren Books. I’ve known the myths since I was a child. In junior school, we put on a show of Culhwch ac Olwen, in which I played Culhwch and my mother gave me a row for biting my nails during the wedding scene with my consort, Olwen.
So, how to retell a story whose lyrical potential is obvious, with the woman made from flowers its most popular motif? I hesitated to make the creation of Blodeuwedd the centre of the story because she appears at the end of a long sequence of previous events. The idea of genetic engineering was suggestive but I didn’t want to make the tale a parable about the folly of man’s tampering with nature because the life of the whole myth seemed to me to lie elsewhere.
The Fourth Branch of the Mabionogion contains rape, incest, best
iality, miracle births and murder. Its characters shape-shift, give birth to animal offspring. It’s a tale about the limit of magic and the ways in which it bumps up against forces that will not be charmed into compliance with men’s plans. The story as a whole, I believe, is about the imagination.
I’ve been a fan of science fiction since I was a teenager and have often noted how myths find a natural place in such writing. So I resolved to try and tell the Blodeuwedd story on a spaceship. I read a lot of sci-fi in preparation, ranging from William Gibson’s Neuromancer to Alan Moore’s graphic novel Swamp Thing. I thought that evolution would have a part in the story, so I found a copy of Charles Darwin’s The Power of Movement in Plants, where he draws diagrams of the winding movements made by all vegetation as it follows the sun. My plant, Blodeuwedd, though, was going to travel much further in her voyage to Mars orbit.
Although much of the Fourth Branch is taken up with the rites of passage which Lleu requires in order to become a man, the main character of the story is Gwydion, his uncle. Gwydion is not only a wizard but also a storyteller. The early parts of the myth are devoted to his education. After he helps his brother commit rape, their brother, Math, punishes them both. The penance is to be changed into animals and be forced to breed with each other and bear young. Gwydion is to learn literally what it is to behave like an animal.
This book was written while I was a Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center in California. While I was there, I met Joan Roughgarden, whose book Evolution’s Rainbow (University of California Press, 2009) argues that:
the most common body form among plants and in perhaps half the animal kingdom is for an individual to be both male and female at the same, or at different times in its life.
I found this fascinating because it gave a biological basis for the education of Gwydion. The great moment for him comes after he’s done his utmost for Lleu, has tricked Aranrhod into giving him a name, arms and a wife. Gwydion follows the sow to the meat tree and sees the damage that his plotting has done to Lleu. Faced with the possibility of Lleu dying, Gwydion has to rethink everything.
I’ve heard poets argue that today poetry is a force that opposes technology. I believe that poetry itself is one of the earliest technologies and that the imagination is a form of virtual reality. I wanted to explore the way in which a certain kind of Celtic mythology is used in computer games and to deploy the convention to make a broader point about the imagination. I particularly wanted to look at the shadow side of the creative mind, the way in which it can consume as well as generate. Every writer is a meat tree of sorts.
I owe a debt to David Grossman’s retelling of the Samson myth, Lions’ Honey (Canongate, 2007). His brilliant critical reading of the story shed some light for me on the circumstances of Lleu’s betrayal by Blodeuwedd. Why was he so willing to give her the secret of how he could be killed? Like Samson, perhaps, Lleu, who was rejected by his mother, felt the need to:
relive again and again, the experience of being betrayed again and again, the experience of being betrayed by those close to him, the compulsion to re-enact, over and over, that primal event of being handed over to strangers, of being given up.
The Mabinogion as a whole give an extraordinarily powerful glimpse into the medieval mind as it explored ways of living and their limitations. My code is that of being a writer and I couldn’t help but see the losses, as well as the gains which that vocation requires. It may demand a certain kind of solitude but when entered into fully, there’s a dialogue with the self, which is much wider than the ego. This is a conversation with other people and minds, even though those with whom we speak – other storytellers among them – aren’t physically present. This is a tree, after all, whose branches are still bearing fruit and on which new leaves can never feel lonely.
Acknowledgements
I’d like to thank Professor Catherine McKenna of Harvard University for taking the time to discuss the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogion with me and for her insights. I’m also indebted to Xandra Clark for her comments on the manuscript.
The book was written while I was Joint Sica/Stanford Humanities Center Fellow in the Arts and Humanities and I’m deeply grateful to both institutions.
p 23 Quotations from Campion’s training manual are taken from Philip Robert Harris, Living and Working in Space: Human Behavior, Culture and Organization (Praxis, 1996).
pp 125-28, 141 Quotations are taken from Sioned Davies’ translation of The Mabinogion (Oxford World’s Classics, 2007), p 55. I have followed Professor Davies’ spellings of proper names with one exception – Blodeuwedd – which is the spelling with which I was brought up.
pp 152-53 ibid, p 58.
pp 179-80, 201-2 The information about perfumes comes from Nigel Groom, The Perfume Handbook (London, 1992). I’m grateful to Richard Mabey for drawing my attention to it.
pp 199-200 Some of the language to describe Blodeuwedd at night is taken from Charles Darwin, The Power of Movement in Plants (New York, 1966), p 106.
pp 207-8 Some of the language used to describe the lovemaking of Blodeuwedd and the hunter is drawn from Maurice Maeterlinck, The Intelligence of Flowers, tr Philip Mosley (State of New York Press, 2005), p 22.
Seren is the book imprint of
Poetry Wales Press Ltd
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www.seren-books.com
© Gwyneth Lewis 2010
ISBN 978-1-78172-125-4
The right of Gwyneth Lewis to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted at any time or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the copyright holder.
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Cover design by Mathew Bevan
The publisher acknowledges the financial support of the Welsh Books Council.