ANIMISM

Knowing what prevents us from knowing is the first step to knowing.

PART 1

OUTSIDE

BLACK BEAR

On Being on the Inside, on Being on the Outside

Sitka spruce! The seed must have blown in from the great plantation across the mountains. They were, as far as I could tell, the only trees on the reserve. They were, as far as I could tell, the only trees on the reserve, except for those clinging to the inaccessible slopes of the ravine. The white plague—or so I thought at the time—had destroyed the rest.

—George Monbiot, Feral

Before the roman infantry invades mountains and fertile valleys and shoreline habitats, I am here. I am Brigant, and the human Brigant children are sometimes called carvette—the people of the deer.

I am Cumbria, and although this is difficult to define, I will say that I am cousin to rivers, lochs and aft-shot off the western isles. I am the waters of what is called the Solway Firth, just north of Carlisle, that bring us the stories of smelt, flap-footed seals, basking sharks, blue mussels and curlew; Mona—Ynis Mōn—is known in a modern, shallow, know-little-profess-much-dialect, as Anglesey that Tacitus, buddy to the bitter politician Claudius, writes of as a land of druids. I am standing stones and the first forests of oak and rowan, pine, blackwood, birch, spruce and grave-dappling yew.

And let’s not forget the wee islands—named by the Norse—of Walney, Fowdray (piel), Roa and Foulney, all laimrig-safe, for anchorage, amidst the terror of a beum-sléibhe from the west, on trade route currents, puffing out the mainsl’s of the big ships and the bobbing insanity of coracle and curragh, by ocean route twixt Éire, Breize and, well, all lands traversable throughout the epoch known as the bronze age. Lands once also called Rheged.

Have I been fought over? Yes. Am I extant? Well, one woman is still here. One man. The children are here (or else otherwhere, by way of fate or tragedy). These grandchildren are living also, so how can I not be present, wherever governments, traders, invaders and deeply entrenched trauma have driven us? Despite over fifteen thousand oceanic miles between some arcane, vast, unpredictable Dreamtime island, beneath the wide dark skies of Koodjal Djooka and me, this ancestral home.

I am keld and fen. Reed-singing marshland, and I am home to teal, and the Alban grandeur of the little egret, oyster catchers, barnacle geese; the eerie, seelie language—weerloo—of a night-calling curlew. Hence I am

bogs and territories of peat, primordial, drowned plant-people cousins, once vast beyond comprehension, gracing earth from some glacial estimate of twelve thousand years deep. The end of a mythic and legendary ice age, or two. Or three. Or whatever.

I am Edin, river of the black fell moss, cousin of swale, and isurā, and the journey of salmon kin from spawn to demise. Dawn is high in the wild boar fell, and night is Carlyle, 1,824 feet above the shores of our sister lands. I flow east, then north, receiving chat and fealty from the many becks that join me from along the vast mountain chain known, by some, as the Pennines. We skirt the verdancy of a forest whose true name is lost in the dead mouths of ancestors, stolen by the english to now be called Inglewood, in the eleven hundreds.

I froth and blinter, viridescent and storm-tossed, winter-dark and cloud-filled, past Long Meg and her Daughters, to eventually reunite with the sea, amidst the rime and bar’ber—the pirr – all around me. Beneath the lights of an réalta thuaidh, tossing a million years of clitter, gritstone and tuff, to and fro along ancient shores and estuaries that summon smugglers and survivors. Soothed by arctic freeze sometimes, sometimes doomed by hob-gob, often an endragoned danger, seldom by calm or fancy. I am baari river-stone-carved veins, brooks and burns coursing from Solway Firth in the west, to the Firth of Forth, here, choking a bit on the abandoned shopping trolleys, condoms, little orange-tipped syringes, cigarette butts, discarded slushy cups and occasionally, but regularly, the body parts of some bloated, drug-fucked, forgotten, abandoned, mutilated and murdered dead. Dùn Èideann (Edinburgh), that grand fortress made of grandfather stone, now leaning towards me calling, Take me, take me now! On this epic excursion from the Irish Sea to the shock, and whale-mother-depths that human people call Muir Lochlainn, far to the north where the finnock swim. I am heard, but not always seen (by the human eye), in the grimlins.

PART 2

That fen, yes. The tomb where my mother lynx dreams

Of wild green eyes and once unwounded water

Where my black bear father drank deep above the river yearning

For later snow, just in case, and cubs at the breast, all sleeping.

I have not sailed away to a new-old land

But hunt, I really do, as spirit-haunted fog and daylight soft deliverance, among the rain-wet rook heights, and I dream that I remember; that I am not lost…

Crags above the slag heap looking—looming—like old clergy,

Down upon me, clean, buried in memory. I yearn and rage, and I know that I am your wildness, and not also your sickness, or their sheep or that pick or chainsaw-grinding violation. Stone hungry,

For what we are, for who we are, and the winding,

Rambling wolf-howl of us, deep

Within the spruce forest. I do!

I remember because I am you.

The pain of thighs that are wounded by ivy and nettle’s children, twined

With holly-red berry and kelp-snarl. And I am scabby with the

Wind’s snap, the peak above the cliff that keeps

Watch, out on the harbor, for mother Orca,

In the sleet-scoured, oyster-old

Deep dark ancestral blue

Remembering, for all the dead who flood this blood with living red…

Selkies heads above the ebb, all huge eyes and silence,

Stalking, as though they are predators, as though the black lung didn’t break me,

And all the fathers, since and still, who bowed their backs, but not their eyes, to a whip or a banishment, leaving me to cleave the messages, to that otter-lover in the sun-remembered gorse, gleaning meaning from the cloud we thought one day would lift us up to heaven

Before we learned that this, too, was a lie

To mark a shroud of brutal pointless coffin, with a love song and a story telling,

With blades, like runes, to show us that this is always home.

That say, I too, remember.

I am owl-headed, a turnaround, a gift. And I know that Nessie left

Behind his casing on the loch-floor. Is he following some

Wisdom that remains? Beyond the self-absorbed humanizing

Of us all? Our manifest invisibility?

The fathers all died, as men are apt to do, from the wounds of other men

While those who stay are bewildered as cattle that have lost their voices to a careless abattoir.

Women in black dresses and feet no longer calloused from freedom,

Still write their letters of calling, to Mag Tuired, the Dublin post office or the Somme.

I reach into your sludge and pull out gold from deep

Within the pit of ancestral loam. Oaks incalculable once turned to war

Now bound in the hull of drowned ships.

And I am them, a thread of linen picked, kept quiet in the nests of ravens,

Landed—stranded for a while—within a bleaching bright, unfamiliar day

Until a piper summons bears to wake the salmon and drink the honey…

So that, now, and until drenched in distant children

No one—not anyone—can forget.

PART 3

Who makes up this history? This righteousness? Who condones the killing of a river? Who consigns a forest to death, along with everyone who has ever lived with her since before Gondwana? Sanctifies the stealing of children? Indoctrination without their consent? Because they got to please someone; to be acceptable to inside life. To serve.

ON THE INSIDE

It’s not with any sense of pride that I scaled the fence and almost bled to death for who I’d mimicked. I just took it off… the garment of purpose I was told to wear. That lie. I reach across a chasm. Not white. Only nightshade and datura are white. This Blood and Flesh buried in another ancient land that others think forgets about me. When forever is never forgotten by its ownsomeness.

I’m not home, that’s the reality, because the decimated ghostsland of forests and bears, that I am also, is so distressingly far away from here; lifetimes away from this red and black and thirsty land that takes nothing. That demands strength that is not ours to ripen into. That has everything taken. Me, that earth beneath the pole star, with the standing Stones and calligraphic ogham, where Badgers and Robins once dwelt in abandon, hasn’t sunk yet, but it’s only a matter of when. Has been stripped and raped and walked over with heavy boots and open sewers. With the simple fact of ermine, bibles and deportation. Dead woodland. Killed ancestors. Permission never given for either.

I am there because I’m here. We’re there because we, also, are not yet sunk.

And mother, brother, grandmother wise-woman Shark, cruise the oceans between us landscapes, us creatures. Not fenced and farmed like the salmon who will never know muscle. I’m here because there’s no way I want to be in, just to face it all. I’m here (a Milk Thistle beneath the asphalt, green as visible as that Nightshade before the springtime, only seen by critters of the darkness), to bend the knee to those whose eyes dream the long journey, despite massacres and white sugar, despite grog and meth.

With self, shining bright in the sky above ice and snowmelt, lonely pale creature, now, in the slippery, muddy walking tracks that I yearn for, but with Mist and Heather as mother and brother and milk and meat.

But, by all the forces of thunder and shine, walkin tall. Not a bowed back anywhere.

On the inside it’s easy to hate. Aluminium rights, copper rights, sludge and mercury-poisoning rights. Rights taken, not given. We built this fucking country from NOTHING. We have a right to the western suburbs dream, and fake nails that dig no dirt and pull no brumby from the burning. No racehorse from the abattoir. We don’t need your fucking birthing tree. We got hospitals for that baby-borning-business, ya savage, Illiterate bastards that speak that language I don’t understand, for which reason it must be ignorance. Therefore, it must cease, with whatever straight-backedness you think to offend me with. Now, get out of the way of the bulldozers or we’ll imprison your arse. Where you can hang yourself with a shoestring. Or a plain old suffocation.

Deadlock. Not bowing? Someone’s gonna die today. Or so it is thought, if not said. And we do. But do we?

Land-and-body-death is a stupid concept, so go ahead and threaten. But no one, not one, on the outside, says a word. The silence is the honesty. So, when the spoken uses breath to make a listening, it is a hammer to the temple of the god of blonde brick entertainment patios. It’s a Saffir-simpson, category 5, motherfucking Storm of catastrophic honest wordlessness, to the smiling man who signed the permit for the blasting of ancient ochre-painted messages to the future. Can he sleep? Will formaldehyde save his soul and be his resurrection?

How come you die then, when I won’t. Don’t? Can’t? How come you don’t bling the alleys with the kachinkachink long after your kids are dead? Because you’re on the inside and the priests promised you immortality if you just whispered your sins after you turned five? Fuck me, they neglected to mention years in the nursing home. Antipsychotic calm. Tied to a chair to stop the running. They forgot to mention that raspberry flavored, red jelly would mush your brain juices and reek the slick of your own destiny in the aftermath of thinking, Hey! I’m somebody! See how well I did on the superannuation scheme? Wait… what?

BRUISING
A back that is straight, and a woman, inside, who seethes with a hatred that makes no sense. No logical rationale. Because of her, a city is burning. People’s hair is on fire. The wagons are filled with handcuffs made of yet more plastic. Cheap option, I guess, to iron ore and that old thing called a debtor’s prison. Or the workhouse. Or jack the ripper. Oh, how we’ve evolved. And cops, so terrified that their jobs might turn out to be real police work, like protection and peace and all that dibdibdobdob stuff, that they wear black and blue like proud bruising. A threat. Walk bowed, you tattooed fucker! Walk bowed, you black bastard. Head down you piece of white trash. There’s the gutter, motherfucker. You’re all outsiders.

We walk tall. Don’t kid yourself for a minute there’s no inside and outside cause there is. The dead didn’t die, they just passed the Story to the living. It’s a howl out here on the outside. And the howl never concedes a too late.

Dirty, dusty rain-swept, fearsomely-growing springtime morning, and wealth. Such wealth. That I have nothing for the woman in the bank. No smell, no social nicety, no hopeful reading of runes, or tarot, or ancestral song. It’s the breath I breathe and, An’ I won’t never need to be you, relief, this petrichor, this ozone and decay and ancient mother-milk that happens when land drinks from the sky.

And I hold the door handle. The key. But no, I need to bury it in its own rust. Give it to sister-sea, father-desert. It means nothing when it is out of a conscious person’s grasp.

It could be thought to be rubbish or rubble but that’s not true. Never could be. Nothing is wasted. That’s not the meaning here. Despite the dereliction of what was once home. I understand rubble. I have something to build a Stonehenge with when I have sufficient rubble.

WALK TALL

So… Just keep straight; walkin tall. Knowin the way home is way down, deep beneath the canopy some call skin. Where wild creatures mate and rear young. Where critters—called family—watch us, wary, because we haven’t forgotten who is food. Eager, also, because neither have they.

Where wild creatures know a track, marked by stars, in patterns that streetlights try to blanket. That see through our eyes, where skin isn’t.

Roaming without chains. Knowing home is not the house with the pool, surrounded by high fences but, Oh, there’s the view. Safe distance. Security sensor lights. Stuff like that. We live in multiverses of critters. Archipelagos of reefs and shoals of infinitesimal birth-death-birth soup. Soughing Wind of lung and gut and sky. Bloody hands from pulling down the walls—illusions of condemnation and recrimination and resentment, oh, and fear—supposed to keep us from us.

Well, I’m outside. I kid you not. And the being here is terrifying, but that’s only the blade running down the length of deadwood, making a rhino in the whittling thereof. Remember them? For grandchildren. Tales of wonder. If I can keep this back straight, then the stories will be true.

As I told you once already, there is no terra nullius, child; children of us. Be quiet. You can hear the freedom.

The prison is inside. Outside takes a bit of remembering.

INITIATION

WHY ANIMISM IS DISTINCT FROM RELIGION

INTRODUCTION

To understand the mind and living way of animism it is providential to, initially, understanding, then rejecting the majority of social myths: firstly, that of religion, presenting itself as both a moral and factual compass of consciousness and secondly the laziness of neo-theocracy that cloaks itself in terminology arrogantly stolen, through justification, from established, indigenous and socially-agreed claiming of both culture and ecology.

I begin by introducing a concise but clipped version of religion, as I understand it, along a speculative ‘timeline’, taking into necessary account the comprehension by academics steeped in both a religious and arrogant stance of righteousness.

I am not approaching animist understanding from an etic view, however, rather from an emic one. As living.

I iterate that I was born into a religiously-oriented, and religiously and morally aggressive society dumb to the voices of others, thought by those in acceptable authority as less; as other; as both non-living (inorganic) and non-feeling (inorganic and non-human, even other-than-acceptably human, the ideology of slavery and suppression based on a false premise of both skin colour and expediency). There is, in ripping away the band aid of delusion, an alienation from society, admitting to the confusion of other humans clinging to a learned trajectory of acceptability. I do not, however, come from any known ‘other’ culture than that which is abrahamic. What, therefore, has pulled me into the valley and broken me? Any attempt to answer that is a trap. Once escaping what seemed the inevitability of birth and societorially acceptable constraint, however—the taste, and the freedom to taste, an alchemy of familiarity and kin—it is not possible to put the metaphorical djinn back in a bottle.

As a storyteller and mystic, to be authentic, I am fastidious in a use of the eclecticism of a vastly mixed language ecosystem. A footprint left for the hunter being ill-advised. And I will trap nothing because that is the cruellest violation.

Before the journey…

UNDERSTANDING CO-EXISTING and unequal VIEWPOINTS

1. EMIC & ETIC[1]

EMIC

The emic approach investigates how local people think, how we perceive and categorize the world, rules for behaviour, what has meaning, and how life is imagined and explained.

ETIC

(anthropological consideration from an academic & external, non-belonging position towards a cultural understanding)

The etic (scientist-oriented) approach shifts the focus from local observations, categories, explanations, and interpretations to those of the anthropologist. The etic approach emphasises that members of a culture often are too involved in themselves to interpret observation and hypothesis impartially. When using the etic approach, emphasis is on what an acceptable anthropological viewpoint considers significant.

Although emics and etics are sometimes regarded as inherently in conflict, and one can be preferred to the exclusion of the other, the complementarity of emic and etic approaches to anthropological research has been widely recognized, especially in the areas of interest concerning the characteristics of human nature as well as the form and function of others’ [almost exclusively] social systems.

An emic account is a description of behaviour or wisdom in terms meaningful (consciously or unconsciously) and known to the communicator; that is, an emic account derives from within a culture. Almost anything from within a human culture, as well as that of the human culture’s ecology, can provide an emic account.

An etic account is a description of a behaviour or belief by a social analyst or scientific observer (a student or scholar of anthropology or sociology, for example), in terms that is thought can be applied across cultures, both of human species as well as relationship species with whom the human variant is intertwined; that is, an etic account attempts cultural neutrality (and fails), limiting any ethnocentric, political, religious, ideological or social bias to alienation by the observer.

When these two approaches are combined, the most vital view of a culture or society can attempt quantifying and understanding. On its own, and to the etic observer only, it could be thought an emic approach would struggle with applying overarching values to an individual who is educated from an utterly alternative standpoint. The etic approach could be thought helpful in enabling researchers to see more than one aspect of one species culture, and in applying observations to relative other cultures. The etic approach, however, is likely polluted by extant philosophic or socially acceptable norms from its intergenerational background or

heritage.

The terms were coined in 1954 by linguist Kenneth Pike, who argued that the tools developed for describing linguistic behaviours could be adapted to the description of any human social behaviour.

• RELIGION noun

• a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe, especially when considered as the creation of a superhuman agency or agencies, usually involving devotional and ritual observances, and often containing an agreed-to moral code governing the conduct of human affairs.
• a specific fundamental set of beliefs and practices generally agreed upon by a number of persons or sects: the abrahamic religions; the hindu religion.
• the body of persons adhering to a particular set of beliefs and practices: a world council of religions.
• the life or state of a monk, nun, etc: to enter religious life.
• the practice of religious beliefs; ritual observance of faith.
• something one believes in and follows devotedly; a point or matter of ethics or conscience: to make a religion of fighting prejudice.
• archaic. religious rites: painted priests performing religions deep into the night.
• archaic. strict faithfulness; devotion: a religion to one’s vow.

RELIGION ETYMOLOGY

c. 1200, religioun, “state of life bound by monastic vows,” also “action or conduct indicating a belief in a divine power and reverence for and desire to please it,” from Anglo-French religiun (11c.). Old French religion, religion “piety, devotion; religious community,” and directly from Latin religionem (nominative religio) “respect for what is sacred, reverence for gods or a god; conscientiousness, sense of right, moral obligation; fear of the gods; divine service, religious observance; a religion, a faith, a mode of worship, cult; sanctity, holiness,” in Late Latin “monastic life” (5c.).

This noun of action was derived by Cicero from religere “go through again” (in reading or in thought), from re– “again” + legere “read”[2]. However, popular etymology among more recent ancients such as Servius, Lacatantius and Augustine, and the interpretation of many modern writers connects it with religare “to bind fast”, via the notion of “place an obligation on,” or “bond between human and gods.” In that case the re– would be intensive. Another possible origin is religiens “careful,” opposite of negligens.

In English, the meaning “particular system of faith in the worship of a divine being or beings” is by c. 1300; the sense of “recognition of and allegiance in manner of life (perceived as justly due) to a higher, unseen power or powers” (from the 1530s).

THEISM

Please note I am not including what are termed polytheistic, pantheist and henotheist, nor am I including philosophy that has, in a more contemporary era, become thought of as religion (examples being buddhism and a druid way (as can be gleaned from writers other than Tacitus).

I am specific in this, insofar as that which is considered polytheistic or pantheistic isn’t necessarily so. With the extinctions of emic considerations all are generally and historically viewed and written of through the lens of theism, specifically monotheism.

I also postulate, from an emic and totemic[3] windswept moorland holy, that all words relative to the above human worldview are the first to be erased in the journey into a deeper animist ecology: worship, sacred, sacrifice, spirituality (as is nominally understood), soul, heaven, hell, sin, limbo, purgatory, sacrosanct, priest/ly (gender irrelevant), saviour, redemption (as understood from a theist perspective), salvation, heretic, apostate, holy, evil, demonic and supernatural being a few. Oher terminology that I have, as yet, been unable to adequately erase from awareness are salient, worthy, worth and other monetary values that lurk in fiscal relativity to anyone: forest therefore becomes lumber, humanity becomes HR, other creatures become agriculture and cattle. The list is anathema to animism.

PLEASE NOTE: PANTHEISM IS NOT ANIMISM, NEITHER IS THE CONTEMPORARY CONSTRUCT COMMONLY CALLED PAGANISM. BOTH UTILISE ANTHROPOMORPHISM AND BOTH ARE INHERENTLY RELIGIOUS. WHAT WE DO NOT HAVE ARE THE WORDS. THE WORDS ASSOCIATED WITH ANIMISM DO NOT EXIST AS IDEOLOGY.

All contemporary religions are dualist: good/evil, above/below, right/wrong, sinister/dexter, left/right etcetera.

Zoroastrianism—Persia—introduced the known world to the idea of good and evil, as well as all the above dualistic ideas. Zoroastrianism seems to have pervaded all abrahamic cults (in difference to animistic but anthropomorphic cultures such as proliferate in the Levant, Far East, Arctic Caucuses, Nordic, early Grecian and Minoan cultures, those of the Mongolian-Manchurian Steppes or those of the Magdalenian period of what

is called the Upper Palaeolithic) or later. Beginning, to my knowledge, the following:

Judaism: from what I know Judaism has moved from a retrospectively opinioned polytheism (Babylonian, Canaanite, Davidic) to one that is monotheist: From the 5th century BCE until 70 CE, Yahwism evolved into the various theological schools of Second Temple Judaism, besides Hellenistic Judaism in the diaspora, despite its earlier environmental alignment to an understanding of the ramifications of thunder (i.e. that of goat herders around the hill of Sinai. Thunder signifies the end of the dry).

Second Temple Jewish eschatology has similarities with Zoroastrianism and may have grown from that area of idea during what we are asked to agree to as a period of enslavement.

Post-Constantine christianity: this is too huge a topic for me to write about here. The entirety of the cult is delusional and derives from a mashup of Greco-Roman, Etruscan, Canaanite, Zoroastrian and rabbinical Judaism as a result of a need for the population, driven from the Levant during roman occupation to a hostile, unfamiliar mainland, non-tribal culture. It is interesting to understand the Roman cults of Mithraism and also the Greek/Roman Dionysian and Bacchanal cults, from the perspective of both a non-believer and an animist, and that with the history of monotheism firmly rooted in the Talmudic epoch of diasporic Jews, the environmental and seasonal meanings of what are to be, in modern parlance, gods, is misrepresented.

ISLAM

Islam is an Abrahamic-monotheistic religion based upon the teachings of prophet Muhammad ibn Abdullah (l. 570-632 CE). Alongside christianity and Judaism, it is a continuation of the teachings of Abraham, featured in both Jewish and christian scriptures, although it differs in some respects from both of these. The adherents of Islam are referred to as Muslims, of which there are around two billion in the world today, second only to christians in number.

Taking roots from humble beginnings in the Arabian Peninsula, the followers of Muhammad conquered the superpowers of the time: the Sassanian Empire and the Byzantine Empire. At its peak (750 CE), the Islamic empire stretched all the way between parts of the Indian continent, annexed by the anglish war machine after WWII, as Pakistan, in the east, to Morocco and the Iberian Peninsula in the west. Although initially spread by conquest, Islam would later flourish through trade to expand beyond its initial borders and around the world. In the present day, it is the world’s fastest-growing religion.

ALL ELSE

I don’t want to drag other ideologies into this as the interpretations of potentially animist understanding has been tainted, unjustifyably, by the toxicity of religious perspective and the cultures of academia that rely on its own myopic sense of authenticity to self-aggrandise—as well as the money—and from there to exonerate itself as being an antagonist to all hitherto potentially unsullied peoples, specifically for this essay, humans.

MORE QUESTIONS THAN ANSWERS

Animism is either, outrageously misrepresented or ultimately, apocryphal (meant in its etymological origins: to uncover or reveal) to a contemporary evolution of consciousness. Earth as person, season as person, fly, flea, flood and famine as person are seemingly alien constructs to the etic. That is delusional. Even at the quantum level of awareness all can be recognised as electromagnetic or energetic so the ideologies presented by academics (with or without field experience) with any ideological bias become realised as stupid.

Animism does not, ever, accord the abrahamic traditions of blame, shame and guilt to experiences that simply are, its adherents (I know of no others personally) seeking—rather—to communicate, make story and art, procreate, gain pleasure from or kill because of, to bury or dance with, to harmonise and synch alongside whatever is. Awe and necessity that do not require justification.

The difficulties doing and being are voluminous due to the oppression of existential thought in all my conversations with other human people.  Animism is continuous. It does not conceive of a beginning or an end.

As animist, complying with understanding from the mindset of both emic and etic I dive as deeply into whatever I can, deemed as science &/or history, in a form of perennial curiosity, the better to realise the human condition of commodification and egoistic, rapacious violence. Because they are nonsense.

Rianne Eisler, Marja Gimbutas, Jon Young, Robin Wall-Kimmerer and others postulate that we are not an inherently dominator species and that the construct of such, as well as its speculation, arose resulting from the Younger Dryas. There are many obvious reasons for this, and one is the vastnesses of underground cities, those places of civilisations that defy contemporary building and scientific analysis, from the tepes of Göbekli and Karahan in modern day Türkiye to the Yogani Monument within the ocean off Japan, to both the Tassili caves and the art, and living cultures, of what is currently called the Kimberley. Another, hypothetically is the notion of the necessity to dominate the woman of the species because of oceanic feeding, and the small penises of apes, causing an inability to inseminate due to the buttocks of upright females who would otherwise drown while hunting.

SHIFTING BASELINE SYNDROME

When a sudden glaciation period, or ice age, strikes is it predestined? Has such happened in the memory of living beings or any and all species? Herein lies a dilemma. Where are we to hide? Cappadocia? Petra? Scara Brae? What haven’t we remembered that is currently in the landscapes at the bottom of the Mariana Trench? I question this as atop Uluru are shells. Desert has known self as sea, savannah and fjord. We currently experience a memory sickness, that George Monbiot calls Shifting Baseline Syndrome in his book Feral.

Coined by Daniel Pauly in 1995, while speaking of increasing tolerance to fish stock declines over generations, Shifting Baseline Syndrome also has roots in psychology, where it is referred to as ‘environmental generational amnesia’. Simply put, Shifting Baseline Syndrome is ‘a gradual change in the accepted norms for the condition of the natural environment due to a lack of experience, memory and/or knowledge of its past condition’. [4]

AND CARGO CULTISM

There is another term I add here, that can be vastly expanded on, in discussion, if necessary, called Cargo Cult Mentality. I am not citing online sources here because, as I seek data for the purpose of this essay, I only find post-modern opinion. When I first learned of this it as in relation to anthropologists making first-contact in the highlands of what is now West Papua. The human people of this remote jungle had created structures resembling aeroplanes due to the abundance of supplies dropped into occupied territory during WWII, therefore seeming as gifts from large birds. The buildings were in honour of that historic event.

I mention the dilemma some of us face now that information has been uploaded to internet sites as much that I have researched in an earlier era has been re-translated. I cite the discovery of what was, in the 1990s, the burial of a woman, in a chamber beneath four horses, buried beneath the permafrost of the Altai Mountains. Due to the complexity of her grave goods she was considered the first known woman shaman ever to be exposed by the thaw at this, the end of the last ice age, that is being termed global warming. I read of her in several journals of the day and also in the book Entering the Circle by Olga Kharitidi, on her experience of the mummified and heavily tattooed woman and the psychological effects of such a prominent historic human being. Now, when I look up data on the subject, every site I can easily find describes the body as a “princess”, and so we, too are subject to Shifting Baseline Syndrome and are watching the avalanche.

Put the above two terminologies together and an hypothesis, written of extensively in earlier decades, appears like a spectre: we are, in some form, when the theoretical Big Bang occurs. Or we would not be here now. How is technology to be remembered, in the darkness of an Ice Age, should a generation lose all access to recorded knowledge of what was thought normal beforehand? Buried beneath giant oceanic turbulence? Under a mile or two of sand that was, before, savannah? How is it described other than as myth? How can children understand the cubits of a lunar landing module that is relegated, on papyrus or clay, to a fiery vehicle rising into the heavens (once meaning firmament or sky)? Isn’t it all so very Genesis? The idea of vast numbers being destroyed, over and over, in story, with a mere few remaining to repopulate what, under the scrutiny of a modern imagination, is a decimated landscape? Myth.

MYTH

Myth is a story with no known author. That’s it. Myth is not fallacy. It is not delusional. Myth is, however, open to reinterpretation depending on climate and safety. Religion is myth. Religion is simply the gathering of stories that have no recognisable relevance to current known history because history is changed on us. Therefore, history is a lie. Like the woman—shaman—buried for millennia within the depths of a permafrost that once wasn’t. There is Mythos and there is Logos and it is not necessary to resolve the two.

Religion is a both belief and an outright lie. Its origins could be individually undefined awe (mythos) but that is as quickly designated as heresy &/or blasphemy without a dogma to presume sense (logos). Religion removes, for the human animal, responsibility. Religion is actually nonsense. The construct of anthropomorphic deities, as representing human animals, is dangerous and potentially based on a verse from the first tractate of a series of scrolls called a book—the torah (pentateuch)—that “man is created in the image of… (selem elohim)” even though later, in the second book, (exodus 15:3, also in the later peshitta, from around the 5^th century CE) it/he is designated a “lord of war” whereby elohist ideology becomes yahwistic. Although no one has jumped up with any rational construct of the authors of such. So much for literate people being educated, hmm.

Professor Lynne Kelly, in The Memory Code, explains our loss. Through the advent of interruption, via religion, practices of initiation into adulthood are no longer extant in the so-called occident. Indigenous peoples, unsullied by the violation of missionaries, don’t have religion. Whatever wisdom they retain has, in many cases, been tainted by the coercion of indoctrination.

Indigenous cultures are emic. The elders of the Hopi do not call the seven colours of corn “seven sacred colours”. That is a pale-faced people thinking they know best how to describe the practice of the kiva. That anything enduring must have sacred or religious connotations. An elder of that particular tribal group explained to Dr Kelly (not quoting here): for maybe, oh I dunno, seven thousand years, we’ve kept the knowledge of the planting and storage of the coloured corn unchanged. Why? Because of pollinators. Because the kernels must be planted at an exact and specific distance apart, at a specific season in the cycle of moon or sun, so there is always corn (a main staple). So that the year the grasshoppers decimate the yellow corn, the red, blue and others, survive. The process and purpose of a knowledge holder, an initiated adult, is to keep the tribe, clan or troupe alive. If this wisdom is not retained intact and unchanged, and those grasshoppers come through? Starvation would exterminate.

So, on to animism…

ANCESTRY CANNOT BE WORSHIPPED – THE DILEMMA OF OXYMORONISM

I am a mixed-ancestry Celt. My familial ancestry is known, quite late in the life of this body, through the work of two genealogists. Through this process and deep searching of the landscape of available narratives I am able to enunciate the obvious: we are ancestral land-sea-and-sky scapes. We are ice, we are forest, we are weather, we are the seeming barrenness of desert and wadi, we are tropical hurricane and tundra. We are all the corpses that become soil (see the works of Wendell Berry). To presume separation from ourselves is schizophrenic insanity. And yet, academia and religion would have us agree to the chimera.

Amhairghin Glúngheal (white knees)

I begin this section with the translation of the Rosc of Amergin, which is, despite any disagreement to the contrary, a human elder introducing themselves as ecosystem, to the ecosystem of an unrealised other place. It is a manifestation—a verbalisation—of honour. This is recognised in many extant cultures as the way introduction that is necessary, in difference to the anglo-european way: Hi, I’m Laura and I work in mental health.

I once asked Laura (a potential student of a particular workshop) whether that was like being in a swimming pool. She did not understand the irony.

anglish (English)—

I am wind on sea,
I am ocean-wave,
I am roar of sea,
I am stag of seven tines,
I am hawk on cliff,

I am shining tear of sun,
I am fairest among herbs,
I am boar for boldness,
I am salmon in pool,
I am lake on plain,

I am leveller of mountains
I am ancient craft
I am victor and fallen
I am awen that fires your mind
I am dew in the sunlight.
I am fairest of flowers.
I am mightiest of trees
I am meaning of the earth song.

Who knows the ages of the moon, who, if not I.
Who has been to where the sun sleeps, who, if not I
Who touches the stars and knows their song?

Irish

Am gaeth i m-muir,
Am tond trethan,
Am fuaim mara,

Am dam secht ndirend, [dam = ox, deer, stag?]
Am séig i n-aill, [séig = hawk, eagle or vulture?]

Am dér gréne,
Am cain lubai,
Am torc ar gail,
Am he i l-lind,
Am loch i m-maig,
Am brí a ndai,
Am bri danae,
Am bri i fodb fras feochtu,
Am dé delbas do chind codnu,

Coiche nod gleith clochur slébe?
Cia on co tagair aesa éscai?
Cia du i l-laig fuiniud gréne?

Lebor Gabála Érenn (11^th century monastic text)

Lebor Gabála Érenn (literally “The Book of Ireland’s Taking”; Modern Irish spelling: Leabhar Gabhála Éireann, known in English as The Book of Invasions) is a collection of poems and prose narratives in the Irish language intended to be a history of Ireland and the Irish from the creation of the world to the Middle Ages. There are a number of versions, the earliest of which was compiled by an anonymous writer in the 11th century. It synthesised narratives that had been developing over the foregoing centuries. The Lebor Gabála tells of Ireland being “taken” (settled) by six groups of people: the people of Cessair, the people of Partholón, the people of Nemed, the Fir Bolg, the Tuatha Dé Danann, and the Milesians. The first four groups are wiped out or forced to abandon the island; the fifth group represents Ireland’s pagan gods [ital. mine], while the final group represents the Irish people (the Gaels).

The Lebor Gabála was highly influential and was largely “accepted as conventional history by poets and scholars down until the 19th century”. Today, scholars regard the Lebor Gabála as primarily myth rather than history. It appears to be mostly based on medieval Christian pseudo-histories, but it also incorporates some of Ireland’s native pagan [italics, mine] mythology. Scholars [believe] that the goal of its writers was to provide a history for Ireland that could compare to that of Rome or Israel, and which was compatible with Christian teaching. 

The Lebor Gabála became one of the most popular and influential works of early Irish literature. Mark Williams says it was “written in order to bridge the chasm between Christian world-chronology and the prehistory of Ireland”.

The Lebor Gabála is usually known in English as The Book of Invasions or The Book of Conquests. In Modern Irish it is Leabhar Gabhála Éireann or Leabhar Gabhála na hÉireann.

Source: Wikipedia Lebor Gabála Érenn

From here I would like to mention one of the most eye-wateringly mistranslated—therefore, misunderstood and misrepresented—myths/legends/histories attributed to me, as Ireland, according to a native speaker colleague with whom I lived while launching The Quickening in 2006.

I DRANK THE WATER OF HOME

Sheena Keene, Bluegrace Music, my hosts representing the Summer Arts Council, dropped me off at the field where this battle is said to have taken place. We were on the way to Inish Mór for the day and this was a brief diversion while Sheena picked up her daughter, Grace, from the people minding her.

The field is in farm and meadow separated by drystone walls. I jumped a style, crossed into second meadow where a ring of squat standing stones was surrounded by a useless piked fence and overhung by a massive yew tree, liberally hung with clouties.

A grave-like mound was at the centre of the ring. I mention all this because I am a martial artist and I also knew, by those days, that this land is my ancestor, and that, therefore, whatever was buried required acknowledgment. I sat at the grave and sang Dire Straits’ Brothers in Arms. I experienced a sensation like wet silk cross my back and exposed arms. The touch said we remain; we are here. When I later quizzed Sheena about the story and the quote of the greatest battle, she laughed. You’re a trained warrior, are you not? She asked. When I said yes she said nothing. Of course. One of the most significant katas of the school of Iaido is called mushin. The practice requires no fighting. It consists of sitting in seiza, opposite an opponent. The premise being you are the two greatest warriors in the world. In seconds every potential cut and block, move and distance is done within mind. So that manifest fighting is rendered superfluous. There is no need, when neither can win. The correlation between this understanding and that of the Fenians, is obvious.

The greatest battle, said Sheena, was probably between the greatest two warriors. And, she asked, do you think they had to fight at all?

I admit the thought had never crossed my mind until confronted with the wisdom of an indigenous person. We are utterly eroded of mystery by scholarship and the traps set by a custom of violence, subliminal or overt. I refer the reader to the Synod of Whitby, 663 CE, whereby the thus-called chronicler, the honourable Bede, detailed the christian bureaucracy’s determination to have the Irish monks—the céilí dé—brought into line with the Roman interpretation of easter. Or else they were to be wiped out “by way of a hostile sword”.

It is to be remembered that no one was to interpret the rule of church by any other means than that proscribed. From the 12th century of the common era, the church established what it called The Inquisition, declaring thar crimes that they, and only they, declared as crimes by the men of the church were, in most instances punishable by torture, banishment, life imprisonment and/or murder. Little wonder the established clergies throughout the [then] known world bent the knee to the status quo. To do otherwise would prove likely fatal with torture preceding death.

Ergo, no questions were asked.

They seem to remain unasked, but have been recently somehow reinvented as folklore, and pagano/religiously bent, during my lifetime. The misrepresentation is the reason. The assumption that every story and narrative told by a non-literate people would, by virtue of habit, entail revision into a recognisable paradigm: christian.

…

THE GRAND MISTRANSLATION

The Battle of Moytura, or Cath Maige Tuired in Irish, is written as a significant event in Irish mythology. It is a story of conflict between the Firbolg and the Tuatha Dé Danann, a race of gods, for control of Ireland. The battle is depicted as a fierce and bloody four-day engagement, with the Tuatha Dé Danann ultimately victorious. 

THE BATTLE OF MOYTURA AND MÓRRIGAN

1. Key aspects of the Battle of Moytura:

Quotes are sourced from open AI 2025

QUOTE 1:

Two Battles:

The story of Moytura is actually two separate battles, the First and Second Battle of Moytura. 

First Battle

The first battle is depicted as a clash between the existing inhabitants of Ireland, the Fir Bolg, and the newly arrived Tuatha Dé Danann, who demand half of Ireland. The Tuatha Dé Danann, led by Nuada, are victorious but Nuada loses his hand, which disqualifies him from being king due to their laws. 

Second Battle:

The second battle sees the Fomorians, allies of the Fir Bolg, join the fight against the Tuatha Dé Danann. This battle is even fiercer than the first, with the Morrígan, a goddess of war and fate, playing a key role. 

Mythological Significance:

The battles of Moytura are considered to be foundational in Irish mythology, explaining the establishment of the Tuatha Dé Danann in Ireland and the nature of their rule. 

• INTERPRETATION OF Morrígan and authentic meaning:

QUOTE 2:

The Morrígan, also known as The Morrigan or The Phantom Queen, is a powerful goddess of war, destiny, and sovereignty in Irish mythology. She is often depicted as a shapeshifting figure, appearing as a raven or a crow, and is known for her cunning and fierce nature. In the Second Battle of Moytura, the Morrígan is said to have played a significant role, both as a warrior and as a goddess who influences the outcome of the battle. 

From the initial appraisal of the above and all consequent and subsequent narratives the story goes from eye-wateringly repetitive, only site after online site, to downright stupid. I understand implicitly the seeking of identity. I do. But not the need for external acknowledgment, cultism or celebrity status. Yet we are asked to accept the mythological and neo-pagan-styled writings as somehow able to remain—and repeated ad nauseum—without question and without an understanding of a violated language (beginning to be reclaimed) considered literal. The stories passed between neo-druidic schools as though they are historic facts, without the language equation being placed on the microscopic slide of deeper thought.

What I DO now know is that Mórrigan, too often depicted as a battle goddess in the company of ravens on the field of the slain, some Shadow or Phantom Queen, is utter balderdash.

LANGUAGE DEFINES A CULTURE

To begin, Mórrigan is two words: mór translates to large or big and rigan, pronounced ree, is interpreted to mean queen, except the word queen is saxon, the language of a conquering and colonising invader. The word queen, in its etymology means:

Middle English quene, “pre-eminent female noble; consort of a king,” also “female sovereign, woman ruling in her own right,” from Old English cwen “queen, female ruler of a state; woman; wife,” from Proto-Germanic *kwoeniz (source also of Old Saxon quan “wife,” Old Norse kvaen, Gothic quens), ablaut variant of *kwenon (source of queen, from PIE root *gwen– “woman”.

The most ancient Germanic sense of the word seems to have been “wife,” which had specialized, by old English times, to “wife of a king.” In Old Norse the cognate word was still mostly “a wife” generally, as in kvan-fang “marriage, taking of a wife,” kvanlauss “unmarried, widowed,” kvan-riki “the domineering of a wife.”

Source: Online Etymological Dictionary

Rí, on the other hand, essentially means chieftain, or the equivalent of elder. Considering the writings of Tacitus (Tacitus Annals Book 12) the viewpoint of Rome’s invasion of our ancestral ecology, was a horror and disgust that women were in no manner distinct from men. We rode naked into battle, had our bodies coated with bear fat and woad and our hair limed and shaped into configurations of boar bristles or the manes of horse.

Realising that we do not consider ourselves distinct from ancestral lands it becomes obvious that the honoured

amongst us could be considered in the equivalent parlance as “the greatest among equals”, the Uí Néill clan being most famous in Éire, in this instance. Rí would not be understood as a king, let alone a queen, but instead the land of the slain, the ravens that feed upon our corpses so that we become them and the nourishment of our flesh, blood and other matter that transforms into soil, thereby honouring the fertility of death.

Inish Mór, off the west coast of Galway is the big island; Inish Beag, the small island.

The naming, therefore, of the lookout, high upon the cliffs of Moher named Hag’s Head is, therefore, understood to be of a different (saxon/germanic) origin and leads us to consider invasion. The word ‘hag’ is not Irish. The Irish translation of this lookout is Ceann na Caillí and is, ergo, associated with the anthropomorphised Cailleach—misunderstood as meaning old woman when cailleach is winter and is associated with sowin or samhain, called erroniously the day of the dead and taken claim to by xianity, called all hallows eve—halloween (now a dress up and mockery trick or treat night for children who, at any other time of a solar year, are not permitted to take sweets or treats from strangers).

The name Maureen is the same word as Mórrigan.

CONFLICT

The bias of a monocrop curricula of biased history requires that we approach the question of encapsulated mythology by way of the deeper understanding of language and not, as seems to be the pattern, by way of incy wincy spider climbed up the water spout-repetition &/or variations of an acceptable thematic paradigm. I was once asked by a neo-scholar of Egyptian myth my opinion of the “Isis, Osiris, Set, Horus” story. I laughed. I will briefly explain what is generically understood:

Isis was married to Osiris. One day Osiris’ brother Set waged war on Egypt and slaughtered Osiris, scattering his body across the land. Isis wept and was mortified. She went searching for his many body parts and, within a clan of far-away peoples, found his penis. She had sex with the penis and bore the child, Horus/Ra, known as a hawk god and a sky god.

The ridiculous assignation of the death of Set is as follows:

According to some texts, Set’s semen enters Horus’s body and makes him ill, but in “Contendings”, Horus thwarts Set by catching Set’s semen in his hands. Isis retaliates by putting Horus’s semen on lettuce-leaves that Set eats. Set’s defeat becomes apparent when this semen appears on his forehead as a golden disk. He has been impregnated with his rival’s seed and as a result “gives birth” to the disk. In “Contendings”, Thoth takes the disk and places it on his own head; in earlier accounts, it is Thoth who is produced by this anomalous birth.

Am I supposed to take this seriously? As with Mórrigan, as with Hecate, as with so many figures of deep-time

mythos we are continuously and perennially assaulted with this glib rendering of narrative without any understanding of an erased &/or broken branch of world forests.

NAMING IS TREACHEROUS FOR NAMES DIVIDE TRUTH INTO HALF-TRUTH

So what of other names that may be contentious? What of the anglish interpretations that are likely mere renditions of that which has no language?

What is Lilit? What is Hecate? What is Sedna, what is Venus? What is Pan, what is Dionysus?

If none are human figures, while potentially having, or having had, human animal representation within an unrecognisable historic epoch, what are they? Behaviours? Embodied and undocumented humans? Unremembered events?

What is America, for example, when the Mandeans—only re-discovered in the late twentieth century, a people unaffected by modernity and therefore unexplored for at least two thousand years—who speak of a land to the west called Merica, represented by a star? What of the indigenous Amazonian hunter/elder/wisdom holder who, through an interpreter, describes every source of mysticism and spirituality, smilingly, as “meat”?

What of the indiscriminate allotment of pre and post xian values and opinions, overlaid onto people they seek to conquer and steal from (called commerce: think the East India Trading Co and the wholesale slavery of the common person to capitalist ideology and slavish consumerism), to breed in acceptable ways, to shame for being inferior when all earth is in relationship?

What is animism? It is acknowledgment of home as everywhere and everyone—whether diamond merchant or the stones they seek to exploit no matter the skills involved in the equation of the stone-people’s identity?

We have need of scholarship in relation to the many above matters. A re-examination of myth and the integrity of ideas. A challenge to rewild language and to know that the table at which you sit recalls her forest and that, potentially, that will be her destiny again. To acknowledge transience and not seek to dominate the narrative of life with that of (to quote Sherri S Tepper in The Family Tree) “homo-norming”.

…

THE FISHER KING

(by Ly de Angeles)

An animist understanding of meeting with a stranger

Pelles Gwertherion sits at the bar tonight. His cap is dirty, tip pointing back, as though to a conversation he can’t let go of. His hair is tucked behind his ears, pierced with blackthorn and briar. He seems drunk but isn’t. Drugged, but is he? He introduces himself as nobody you’d know. He has badgers nesting in the caves of his eyelids. Mackerel and seals, basking sharks, from the far North Sea, thrashing silver and deep wild water muscle, black within each iris. Albatross, and two Vs of returning snow geese are forging through storm-crazy dark and ominous cloud, thick with ice — sky wracked licorice custard — effortless, from his mind to his mouth. He speaks of magic and druid lore and slaughter, and of all the unborn baby birds that, he whispers finally, might not live beyond the shell.

He has the smoke of peat hearths on his breath like squalid, dangerous perfume. And kelp. And loam. Eagles pipe his name, and hares descend to the valleys of his hands, to rest between the lines that tell of elder days and fathomless drownings.

I want to disbelieve him. That he should even be. I want to think him mad. Mortal. No guardian of any legendary grail should look so derelict and distant. So busted, but who am I to place him?

Dusk, seeping through the sigh escaping from his memories, is some place none of us should ever go. Somewhere between. I know that superstition. Like Oisín, returning on a moonlight horse, with hope that had rules he could not follow. Dust, that was. The loneliness of the forgotten. Its violatory emptiness.

The lake has run dry, he whispers.

Soil, like dried blood, or old loam, is under his fingernails, more lightless than the rooms where he hides the indignity of thrashings. Wild violets crack their arctic sod. Spring snow is still thick. It seeks sunlight that can’t come yet. He holds out his arms, soundless with forgiving.

Do you see me? he asks, disbelieving. Longing.

I hear you, I see you.

Then you belong, he whispers, and coaxes twinned swans from his deep pocket. Willing them their freedom. Some unrecognisable ensorcelment. They don’t go. Some willpowers belong to no one but ourselves, I suppose. They shelter around his neck and touch each other, beak to brow. Lovers from the long ago. Not leaving. Not agreeing to the wasteland. All he knows.

The Fisher King sips his beer. His lips attempt to open with a storytelling of queens and glittering mirrored halls, but they are glued, like swallows to an alley wall, and nothing but a kestrel, from the top of the mountain, sighs its wingspan along the swamp that is the bar, hunting nourishment that used to be in copse, in thicket, in covey. The woman behind it pours a shot of oblivion in amber, watching him, afraid because she doesn’t understand how she knows not who he is, but what. She turns her back. She doesn’t dare any other way. He leaves forgetting on the counter. A tip, sort of.

When he steps out into the terrifying night I follow, wanted or not. Ignored. Old roses and bloated lilies, flaccid, hectic, catastrophic with lost beauty and entertainment, are dashed to decay along gutters of earlier rain before dropping through the destiny of an iron grate. They remind him, and he does not want that. Fur rushes past, grey with old snow, mother wolf searching for cubs amongst the detritus of the city, him knowing she won’t find them.

I am broken, he says, rolling a cigarette but forgetting what it’s for. Acknowledging that I am his company for a while.

I have seen your palace, I say.

He stops.

It’s a tent, he explains. You didn’t see anything. Besides, it blew away.

Like hate, I say.

Like belief, he answers, unsmiling.

And the rooftops are lined with indigo shadows. Pigeons. Noticers of crime and couriers of war, because he is what he says he is, but he is drowning in air. They are here to witness. Crows, the druids of another violated island, rattle down to balance, ballerinas in mourning, on the power lines. I’m fleetingly reminded of a childhood that was someone else’s. Wishing it was what really happened and not what did.

I know, he says.

And paired Orcas ride the roiling surf that foam-flecks through his compassion. He has stars for footsteps,

each soft with a long-ago burning.

I am dead I think, he whispers.

But I hear you. I see you.

As he shrugs, ivy twines a thousand unchainsawed forest giants. It has a right to be here because it always has been. It garments his shoulders with a mantle, a remembered warmth upon which the swans settle, a birdly dark green nest, unmade by effort. Dreams, like icicles in the heart of a midwinter’s eve, weep down his cheeks and holly, oak and graveyard yew, form a procession along the desolation of street tarmac, drinking from him, growing infant mountains from decay. He does this.

I know you, I say.

He touches the muscles of his chest, beneath the thickness of the coat that frays at the slightest frightening, with a hand corded with the gnarled roots of a Brú na Bóinne rowan tree that crowns this king, like early spring, with vivid verdigris, with the courting songs of foxes across the valley, with the sorcery of those thin slivered tattoos, like a lifeline of ten thousand years.

If I hold him will I kill him? Like a coward, I look down, instead. If I know him will they lock me away too? If I tell him that I will remember, and I forget?

Gotta go, he says.

It takes discipline for me to say nothing else. What if I forget?

There is one — he says, over his shoulder, as he begins his disappearance. I know he means a grail. He knows I know.

I am the Fisher King.

Did he just say that and I thought it was the mist soughing through iron bars? Me? Forget him? I beg the night, don’t let it be the other way around.

Ly de Angeles, 2025 ©

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[1] https://boris.unibe.ch/154189/1/till_mostowlansky_andrea_rota-2020-emic_and_etic-cea.pdf

[2] Bearing in mind the collective human persons able to do either being miniscule until the later era known as the twentieth century.

[3] I am not discussing totemic understanding in this essay

[4] https://earth.org/shifting-baseline-syndrome/