Soliloquy for Pan

by Beech, Mark

  After the goat, the tortoise was the animal most sacred to Pan. In ancient times, Arcadia’s Mt. Parthenios was known as a habitat of tortoises desired for their fine shells, which were used to make lyres, but local folk protected them because they belonged to Pan.

  Plants with ‘tortoise’ or ‘turtle’ in their common names include Turtleweed (Batis maritima), Turtle Grass (Thalassia testudinum), Turtle Shell (Dioscorea elephantipes), and Tortoise Shell Bamboo (Phyllostachys edulis Heterocycla). Chelone, or Turtlehead, is named for the nymph in Greek mythology who was changed into a turtle as punishment for refusing to attend the wedding of Zeus and Hera. Its flowers resemble heads of turtles.

  As god of shepherds and their sheep, Pan surely would approve of planting Shepherd’s Purse (Capsella bursa-pas tons), Lamb’s Ears (Stachys byzandna), Lamb’s Quarters (Chenopodi-um album), and Ram’s Head Lady’s Slipper (Cypripedium arietinum).

  Hares are also strongly associated with Pan. In the Homeric Hymn to Pan, when Pan is born, his mother rejects him, but his father Hermes wraps the infant in the warm fur skins of mountain hares and brings him to Olympus to meet the gods. Pan was an avid hunter of hares. He is depicted in many Greek statues and vase paintings as holding a small wooden club. This crooked club, called a lagobolon, is a throwing-stick, a piece of wood similar to a boomerang, used by hunters in ancient Greece to strike at fleeing hares and rabbits.

  Hares and rabbits are treated more kindly in a popular motif in the Romantic art of the Pan revival, with the Goat-God (or sometimes another satyr, Marsyas) playing his pipes as the little lagomorphs look on in ecstasy. Perhaps hares’ and rabbits’ reputation as symbols of extreme fertility linked them to Pan as well. Plants with ‘hare’ or ‘rabbit’ in their common names include Harebell (Campanula rotundifolia), Rabbit Tail Grass (Lagurus ovatus), Rabbitbrush (Chrysothamnus), and Rabbit’s Foot Fern (Davallia fejeensis).

  Deer were another group of animals that were both protected and hunted by Pan. To acknowledge them in a Pan garden, there are Deergrass (Muhlenbergia rigens), American Hart’s-Tongue Fern (Asplenium Scolopendrium), Fawn-Lilies (Erythronium), Deer Brush (Ceanothus integerrimus), Staghorn Fern (Platycerium bifurcatum), and Staghorn Sumac (Rhus typhina).

  Hounds and hunting dogs were bred by Pan to track wild game. Hound’s-Tongue (Cynoglossum), Dog-toothed Violet (Erythroilium americanum), and Dogwood (Cornus) would serve as a reminder of the canines.

  In paintings Pan is often shown wearing the pelt of a spotted lynx, a reference from the Homeric Hymn to Pan. Many plants and flowers such as Foxglove (Digitalis), Pulmonaria, Aucuba, and Leopard Plant (Farfugium japonicum, previously named Ligularia sp.) have prominent spots and will beautifully denote the spotted wildcat in the Pan garden.

  Bees were under Pan’s protection in his function as god of flocks. His garden must have plants that bees need and love if it is to flourish. Many of the Mediterranean plants listed above, such as the herbs, are good choices. Bee-named plants include Beebalm (Monarda) and Lemon Balm (Melissa officinalis), whose genus name Melissa is Greek for ‘honeybee.’

  The idea of making poetic associations can also be employed in choosing design features for a Pan garden. A meadow, clearing, or a bit of lawn would be where Pan dances wildly with the nymphs; a passage from the Homeric Hymn to Pan describes a spot where “crocuses and sweet-smelling hyacinths bloom at random in the grass.” A firepit would represent the flames of passion that drive the god. Lacking a natural cave or grotto, one might choose the largest, oldest, or most impressive tree on the property to represent the temple of Pan.

  Another duality of Pan is light and shade. Think of the evocatively dappled costumes and scenery designed by Léon Bakst for Vaslav Nijinsky’s ballet L’Après-midi d’un Faune: the faun’s fur hide is parti-colored and pied; sunlight and shadows seem to sparkle on the rocky landscape. Variegated plants are one way to mimic this effect in a Pan garden.

  As god of rustic music and of noise, Pan would approve of trees that rustle and moan in the wind, burbling fountains, wind chimes, humming bees, cicadas, chirping crickets, and especially birdsong. A bird’s voice box is called a syrinx. Birdhouses, bird feeders, and bird-friendly plants will encourage a chorus of these tiny avian panpipes.

  One of Pan’s cult names, Skoleitas, is a Greek word meaning ‘crooked’ or ‘winding.’ ‘Crooked can also describe the shape of the lagobolon that Pan carries for hunting hares, as well as the shepherd’s staff or crook he uses with his flocks and herds. This important Pan quality of crookedness could be applied in his garden by creating winding, crooked paths, or by featuring trees and shrubs noted for their gnarled, curling branches or trunks. The Corkscrew Willow (Salix matsudana ‘Tortuosa’) and Harry Lauder’s Walking Stick (Corylus avellana ‘Contorta’) are good examples. Showy climbing plants such as grapevines, roses, and wisteria would also be appropriate.

  A Pan garden is neither a fussy, tidy garden, nor a formal garden. To stand for Arcadia, it must be wilder, with many plants that in the past have been considered to be weeds or animal fodder. With today’s renewed interest in foraging for native, local food plants, some of these varieties are now celebrated for their gourmet appeal. This garden would also reflect a sense of the shepherd’s transhumance—seasonal change and the cycles of flocks and herds on the move.

  The nymphs of Arcadia, as a group, can be included in the garden as Water-Lilies (genus Nymphaea). And Naiads (Najas) are aquatic plants named for the water-nymphs. Near the pond—but not too near, given Pan’s pursuit of nymphs—would be a good place for the tall reblooming Iris germanica cultivar named ‘Aggressively Forward.’

  Areas for indolence and leisure would convey the romantic ideal of Arcadia. A hammock, or a chaise in a bower, would enable restful noonday naps. Pan slept at noon after his hunts and revels, and shepherds knew better than to disturb him.

  But there should also be an area of the Pan garden where one decidedly does not feel comfortable—an area that is overgrown, wild, mysterious, or heavily shaded. Such a spot would symbolize the panic Pan was known to induce in strange, dark, remote places. One may not wish to cause sheer panic terror anywhere in one’s garden, of course, but that aspect of Pan can be acknowledged in a more circumspect way, such as in a night-garden (white flowers and night-blooming flowers), or in a secluded, shaded area with more forbidding plants or spooky statuary. Quaking aspen (Populus trcmuloides) would be appropriate. An area of the garden or grounds that is left undisturbed, uncultivated, and untended is a bow to the wildness of Pan, and to the ancient concept of supernatural forces at work in an otherwise familiar, ordinary landscape. A practical advantage of relinquishing control of a part of the garden and letting it grow wild is that pollinators and other beneficial insects and wildlife are attracted by the increased privacy and shelter.

  The idea of a Pan garden today may seem like the height of folly. If Pan’s Arcadia represents a paradise on earth, by comparison today’s world seems hell-bent, with its endless wars and poverty, elimination of wildlife habitats, and shrinking biodiversity. A specter is looming: the possibility that humankind has engineered its own eventual destruction through climate change and depletion of resources. The specter has appeared before, but now it seems closer than ever. Have we lost our last chance to regain the ideal of Arcadia? Is Pan the Nature god reaching the ultimate expression of his awesome duality of life and death? Perhaps. In the meantime, we could do worse than to seek inspiration for ways in which to be good stewards of our gardens, big or small, even as we sense the panic terror creeping in the shadows.

  REFERENCES

  Boardman, John. The Great God Pan: The Survival of an Image. (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1997)

  Borgeaud, Philippe. The Cult of Pan in Ancient Greece. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988—Translated by Kathleen Atlass and James Redfield)

  Hesiod; Anonymous; Hugh G. Evelyn-White (translator). Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns and Homerica. (London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1914)

  H
ughes, J. Donald. Pan ’s Travail: Environmental Problems of the Ancient Greeks and Romans. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994)

  Grahame, Kenneth. The Wind in the Willows. (London: Methuen, 1908)

  Merivale, Patricia. Pan the Goat-God: His Myth in Modern Times. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1969)

  http://www.theoi.com/Georgikos/Pan.html

  http://www.theoi.com/Cult/PanCult.html

  Pan With Us

  Robert Frost

  (1915)

  Pan came out of the woods one day,—

  His skin and his hair and his eyes were gray,

  The gray of the moss of walls were they,—

  And stood in the sun and looked his fill

  At wooded valley and wooded hill.

  He stood in the zephyr, pipes in hand,

  On a height of naked pasture land;

  In all the country he did command

  He saw no smoke and he saw no roof.

  That was well! and he stamped a hoof.

  His heart knew peace, for none came here

  To this lean feeding save once a year

  Someone to salt the half-wild steer,

  Or homespun children with clicking pails

  Who see no little they tell no tales.

  He tossed his pipes, too hard to teach

  A new-world song, far out of reach,

  For a sylvan sign that the blue jay’s screech

  And the whimper of hawks beside the sun

  Were music enough for him, for one.

  Times were changed from what they were:

  Such pipes kept less of power to stir

  The fruited bough of the juniper

  And the fragile bluets clustered there

  Than the merest aimless breath of air.

  They were pipes of pagan mirth,

  And the world had found new terms of worth.

  He laid him down on the sun-burned earth

  And ravelled a flower and looked away—

  Play? Play?—What should he play?

  ‘Pan with Us’ is a deceptively simple poem. It seems to start out as a gentle pastoral, but after the first stanza moves off into a less tame territory with all the possibilities of adaptation and transformation. The world might well have found “new terms of worth”—but those terms could as much be Pan’s as ours. Humanity seems to be threatening the world—all nature—but we know what Pan is capable of!

  – John Howard

  A Song Out of Reach

  John Howard

  The things Sam remembered about the last time he’d stayed at his friends’ house were the stars and the shining path of the Milky Way. Not the house’s remoteness from the main road—actually, it wasn’t very remote, but it just seemed like it, which was enough—and not so much the empty domed hills surrounding the house where it nestled in a long valley of fields and woods. It wasn’t even the warm and clean house itself, modernised with its en-suite bathrooms, tiled floors, soft sofas, and impressive kitchen. Instead, and above all, it was the night sky that Sam remembered.

  Then, as now, it had been an unusually mild October. Before dinner they had all sat out on the flagstone terrace as the sun added fire to the turning trees surrounding the house with its garden plots and sweeping lawns. After the sun had set, a breeze had sprung up, damp and only slightly chilly from the dewy grass and the mist rising from the small brook that ran along the western boundary of his friends’ property. As the sky had darkened it remained pleasant outside, the six men sitting in the light streaming through the windows and open patio doors. All too soon, except for a fast fading band of afterglow, it had become night before they had realised it.

  Sam finished his wine and strolled across the lawn towards the trees. In the distance a car’s headlights flashed through the hedges lining the road. For a moment he was not able to hear the engine, for which he was grateful. His friends’ voices fell away behind him. He reached the gate to the paddock—empty—and leaned against it. Already the wood was getting damp. Something sparkled, angling down towards the horizon. At first he thought it must be a meteor, but the moving star progressed slowly enough to be a plane or satellite. Sam followed the bright speck as it changed position. As his eyes became better adjusted to the darkness the real stars revealed themselves, sprinkled on the velvet dome of sky and splashed through by the stream of the Milky Way.

  Since childhood Sam had remembered the main stars and constellations, carrying them with him as a souvenir of knowledge from another age. But this sky wore a different aspect, an alien one. The patterns were complex and, at first, seemingly random. They were not the familiar and almost friendly forms Sam had been able to see above the streetlights and rooftops, tracing them with the aid of a dim torch across the pages of his star atlas. For a moment he felt a sense of falling, but upwards; he gripped the gate to steady himself. He shook his head as the star-patterns he knew were there all along gradually resolved themselves into sight. Behind them were all the other stars. Sam shivered. He knew he was the intruder, the prying observer. He put up a hand, blotting out half a spiral arm of the galaxy, millions of stars—but he knew they were still out there.

  Then there was the pressure of hands on his shoulders, turning him round.

  “Steve?”

  “Who else?” He kissed Sam lightly on the lips. “You’re cold. Come on. Let’s get you inside, where it’s warm. Dinner’s ready. I’ve opened some of the wine we brought.”

  “I—the awe...” Sam whispered.

  “What?” Steve said. “Aw, don’t you want anything to eat? Aw, you will when you’re hungry.” They laughed and returned to the terrace. Steve picked up Sam’s glass from where he had left it on the table. “Shut the door behind you,” he said. “We want to keep the light in.”

  Now Sam was with the same friends again, the two other couples. David and Paul, who owned the house and lived there; and Martin and James, who lived in London and, along with Sam and Steve, had been invited to stay for another long weekend. Except that Steve hadn’t been able to get away from work, and had promised to join them on Saturday. Steve had told his partner that the computer systems that he helped to maintain were close to being overwhelmed by irrelevant traffic, and he had to be available.

  Both men knew the cause of the problems. The whole world knew. That tune—just a few notes. It had come out of nowhere and spread: gone viral, as Steve had explained. Overnight it became simply, irresistibly, totally, the Tune. Throughout the world its origins were debated with a fervour previously reserved for political or religious argument. The Tune must have had an origin, but no-one could say with certainty when or where. It never seemed to have had a name. If there had been one, it was no longer known. Commentators said it was the ultimate earworm, but still played it. It penetrated deeper every day. Now no-one seemed to be able to remember a time without the Tune, a time when they didn’t know it, when it wasn’t present in every aspect of their lives.

  Sam had quickly come to loathe the Tune. He couldn’t have been the only one who felt that way, but he often imagined he was, as he considered its unstoppable progress and how everyone else in the country—everyone, it seemed, from royalty to toddlers—showed little if any sign of being bothered in the slightest.

  One thing had been generally accepted: that the Tune had first been heard as a short melody played on some sort of flute or pipes, or a convincing electronic facsimile. In various arrangements and tempi it was quickly taken up as a signature tune and used for advertising. Computers and other electronic devices powered themselves up and down with it. It accompanied a myriad computer games and videos, and never seemed inappropriate. Like a parasite, it fitted itself in. It soon seemed impossible to begin anything, inform anyone, or end a task without it. The Tune was the ringtone for the world’s mobile phones, injecting itself into concerts, speeches, religious services, and legislative sessions; it came an accompaniment to solemn commemorations, funerals, parties, contests, and every for
m of crime.

  At home on his own, Sam would fume impotently. He knew the Tune wasn’t directing itself at him personally; it wasn’t upsetting his life because it wanted to. It just seemed as if it did, and there was apparently nowhere free from the Tune. It was regularly invoked as the cause of any and all disruptions and crashing internet connections. No system or programme seemed able to keep up with the Tune’s endless demand for resources.

  Steve had never revealed if he was in any way worried about the Tune, even as it developed into the cause of major problems for his employers. As a professional, it was his task to try to combat it—that was all it meant to him. It was simply another unexpected consequence that needed to be overcome. Much to Sam’s irritation, Steve had adopted the principle of knowing your enemy. The Tune was his ringtone and his laptop still booted up to it. He hummed it in the shower and joked about buying a new doorbell.

  On the phone Steve’s company even made its customers endure the Tune while they waited to be connected to a real person.

  “You think there’d be a special number to call to get straight through,” Sam had said angrily, after he’d tried to contact him.

  “Well, there isn’t, sorry,” Steve had said. “Anyway, I’m home now. Lighten up, Sam.”

  Sam heard the Tune as Steve answered his phone during their quiet dinners and again when they went to the pub for a quiet drink. Steve laughed and chatted while Sam wished every mobile phone dead, with batteries and credit spent. He pointedly checked emails on his own phone, which otherwise would have remained dormant, waiting for a call, waiting to announce to the world that the Tune was not the ringtone with him. Later, Sam realised that he’d forgotten what his phone’s ringtone actually was.