I have unlocked the stories in my bones. Memories of ancient primordial forests in which I hunted, making love beside a vast still lake. Remembering that my dead mother’s skin still lies there, remembering running silently between towering spruce trees in the snow, following the reindeer along deep ancestral tracks. My father was born on the pelts before the fire pit in a house made of earth, his mother and aunties chanting birthing spells low in their throats, and the small wide eyed children of the horse keeping vigil until the heavily tattooed old woman bites the cord. His child is me. A thousand generations ago you and I were there. Nothing has gone. Life has changed and many have suffered an unbearable isolation because no one has reminded us of who else we are other than beyond the current skins we wear. A walking man explained the Celtic word hiraeth to me as homesickness, a longing, deep and inexplicable because we don’t know what home is. The suffering this causes. Dispossession is in our marrow and that fear, beneath the surface we present to the world, of lovelessness and plastic and asphalt, crowding us into a corner from which we cannot escape.
Initiation is a mapped and charted experience that many people do not understand or recognize when the experience is not on their terms. You will be woken up. When wolf mother takes us in her jaws and pulls us into the myth we must realise we are helpless. Myth is not fallacy. Myth is as real as the skin that keeps our rawness clothed. Joseph Campbell, in Hero with a Thousand Faces, explains initiation as firstly a Threshold. We die to who we have been. And yes, always tragically. We cross into the Liminal World and become lost. This could last a lifetime if we lack the necessary insight to realise what is happening. We need to be on the lookout then, as we travel the days and nights of desolation and confusion, for the signs of the Return. We must keep our ears pricked and our tails bushy. There must be a Return. Someone to know us. To be met and the purpose of this new life be revealed.
When we consciously recognize the place in which we currently live as the liminal world of not-life we may very well be ready to Return. We will know. We will meet the Gatekeeper. This could be someone already there or someone new. They will complement the true us. This is not like any other compliment. The person is recognized for the depth of them and how far they have climbed from that pit. Words will liberate the dark night of the soul. The Gatekeeper gives the keys to a new life. Do we have the guts to walk through? To accept the change with only courage? To leave that lost place, savage forest, mist of futility, cave of self-doubt and take the challenge of being raw, temporarily blind and furless?
No one can hold us should we choose to make this choice, to wear the next mask and to clothe ourselves in this new garment of self. We don’t have to cleave to the identity that we thought defined us. Life is art. Life wants experience through who we are and what we do. Wants the lone wolf to run with the pack.
My most recent initiation took nine years and I didn’t know until I reached the other side.
My birthday 2006. Five hours at the clinic in Tweed Heads while my daughter has an abortion. Arriving home to my eldest son waiting with a bunch of flowers. Them starting in on each other. Him calling her selfish for doing this on my birthday, her not defending herself, standing up to him because what he does not know is that she is bravely battling the comedown from a speed addiction. The conversation escalates to all-out screaming.
I tell them to both go away. There is no birthday. Then I sit on the chair by the kitchen window wondering what the fuck just happened. Absolutely convinced I am dead. Pointless. I don’t know how long I stay there barely breathing. I walk across the road towards the beach. Then I’m sitting in the gutter of the street parallel to the ocean. Unable to move. A stranger comes out of her house bringing cigarettes. She lights one for me. We sit in silence. She must know if not the facts, the feeling.
To take or give initiation at the hands of a person is one thing. Quite another when life is the initiator. Because something is wanted. But first skin is flayed from us, brains are burned to ashes, souls turned inside out and air blown into them to rid them of creases. Bones are ground to powder and this dust is sent, by wind and water, across the whole earth seeking a home to fertilise with memory. To remember a terrible and tragic beauty to drag into now.
Year after year I stripped away the seeming-knowledge I had accrued over a lifetime—as witch, as woman—hunting for the pristine pools of limey water that lie silent within bedrock. A mystery successfully hidden from culture by smug-mouthed old men. Hidden in plain sight but never taught. The delusion of isolation from relationships with other species: rock, tree, sky, everything. The realization that we do live in two places simultaneously: the crass, beautiful, brutal world seen through my eyes as human, and myth world where the stories are that of forest and stone fortress, and initiation understood as clearly as an honest sentence. Where tragedy and ecstasy make sense.
Witch people, like magicians and sorcerers, conjurers, druids and hoodoo hexers, like cunning women and cunning men, kadaicha, shaman, mundunugu, manitou, angakok, curandera, bruxa, enchanters and shape shifters are needed in this world. We are the stories not bound by dogma or preserved in aspic, displayed as relics in a museum. We cause disquiet. We make questions but may not have answers. We are the wildness and the frightening places. The cave entrance under the ice at the base of that crevasse. Blue handprints on the rock face imprinted with an ochre of confusion by people we cannot name and from a time we cannot confirm. One must belong. We are Once Upon a Timepeople. People of the reindeer. Volcano people. I know that air has feelings and that messages can be sent through the earth; that I can touch someone and their lives will be forever changed but that I am not responsible. I know the shape of that cloud is a conversation. That a forked stick can find water. That the ring around the moon warns of rain. What I might tell you can go straight to your gut or the throat, and yes that’s a metaphor, but you do feel anxious because even though we are seemingly separate I can look at you and you might squirm because you know I know you are lying and are so lonely; that anything you do will have consequences. Everything has consequences. Mirrors are all around us.
Mercea Eliade wrote that Initiation recapitulates the sacred history of the world. And through this recapitulation, the whole world is sanctified anew … can perceive the world as a sacred work, a creation of the Gods.[1]
The language that he uses that covers me with wasps. What Eliade wrote is in a dead and religious tongue steeped in Abrahmanic analogy.
Initiation is occult. Hidden. Unexpected. One comes to the Threshold, passes through, crosses over or drops down the rabbit hole into the Liminal Space where one is lost within mists of unfamiliarity because the only mirror we have is who we thought we were, confounded or temporarily mad. Finally, we meet a Guide, the Threshold Guardian and the Return. That return is only significant if the newly initiated individual is embraced into the pack, the culture, held in the arms as newborn flesh. Someone auspicious now drapes you in a garment with which to clothe your wise soul.
This is the deep world. The land of myth. Where we are also other animals and the voice of crow and walrus, both familiar and alien. Where we are torn apart and rewilded.
So now, at the other side of this fearful and fearless journey, I have become La Loba, the Bone Woman. I wear her skin, and my hair, once the colour of night is now white. What is the garment? Not an old language but an immortal one, hidden beneath those same old men’s prattles, their pomposity, dry and dusty with the verbiage of religion and class. Of schooling that does not educate but indoctrinates.
I’d written a book about witchcraft, published in the year 2000. Do I regret that? Not at all, but by locking the words onto the page I trapped brother wolf, manacled sister eagle, put the wild salmon in a pond and said, There. This is what you are and here is where you must abide. I closed an open system that should remain as unpredictable as weather.
I don’t know when the penny began to spin. A while before this initiation, that’s for sure. My coven converged at full moons, dressed in meticulously hand-sewn robes and talismanic ritual jewelery, lit candles and incense, placed athamé, wand, chalice, pentacle, the skulls of long-dead ravens, on an ancient wooden box I called an altar, cast the circle deosil, invoked the spirits of earth, air, fire and water, murmured the incantations to one goddess or another, to one god or another. And deep down I was now thinking I should not be doing this. Knowing in a very fearful silence that I was dressing the wild world in the garments of predictability.
Not long after that birthday and mere weeks before we were given notice to vacate our home of twelve years, I had a dream that gave me the clues I would only interpret, fully, almost a decade later. Early morning, the hazy light of dawn twilight, I approached an old, weary, shabby weatherboard house in the company of several others. We were there to clean. A gnarled, borer-holed, sadly grey plank barred our entrance, nailed like a warning across the front door. The sinewy old man made us wait. From the tool belt at his hip he took sandpaper, cloth and oil. He sat cross-legged on the grass and transformed that plank into beauty, mirroring the day. He nailed his plank friend atop the door and we entered. Come the reds and indigoes of early evening we had travelled all the way out the back and stood above a steep V-shaped valley, leading west to the last of the sun. The breathlessness of that place. Granite escarpments, shadowed and vast, trees high upon the cliff top black against the gloaming. Ravens calling sentinel for miles in all directions.
I stood beside a young woman with a bucket in her hand. She said, what happens if we leave? Do you think we’ll ever be able to find a way back? I, in my considered wisdom and certainty of experience, said, I’ll be the guinea pig, shall I?
Then night. I stood, weeping, on the derelict, deserted platform above a railway track, a young girl’s hand in mine. A station worker, with a broom and one of those long-handled scoops for rubbish on the ground, asked if he could help.
I can’t get back, I replied.
We actually moved to that house in my dream, with the escarpments and the sun setting in the cleavage of that valley to the west. But reality was fog surrounding trees in winter.
Then in 2007 I felt myself dissolving. I was no longer whole. Life made no sense, but I kept on reading tarot and the people kept coming. Many of them also broken.\
Was this what Eliade meant? Was the whole world in liminality? We were a year prior to that global financial crash, the illusion of money built on the same hollow mound as Vortigern’s doomed castle. Lots of broken people that year.
We think we’re the same person just going through travails. That we’ll wake up safe in a few days or weeks or months and the drama will have passed. We’ll be the person we were, hold the values we held previously and believe what we always believed.
Silly me, I still thought I was who I had been. As yet I had no level of insight. I thought the Byron Shire, where I had lived for twenty two years, was still my country.
In truth I had no home and experienced hiraeth, that dreadful longing, constantly.
In Melbourne in the winter of 2012 the fog triggered a memory. Fog thick and silent outside my daughter’s kitchen window. The day Samhain-like. Closing out everything. Reminding me of a lifetime ago. When my children were babies. When I was a child. When I still had all my teeth. I hid in a back room all day writing the since-deleted beginning to this memoir, knowing beyond doubt that home was no longer home. I could no longer pretend that I belonged anywhere. I needed fog, all the many shades of grey, bone-deep cold, architecture older than me. Its history and dereliction.
When I told friends I was leaving they asked why, perplexed at the thought. If I stay, I said, I will wither and fade and have bequeathed nothing of any current value. I will become a bent and invisible old woman.
The friend who was secretly a Guide said why don’t you teach Celtic studies at uni?
I didn’t understand.
I can’t, I explained. I’m really stupid. I’ve just pretended to be clever all these years.
Rubbish, he replied. You can start with a Masters if you want to. You need to meet my supervisor in Hobart.
I laughed but he wasn’t being funny. The fog thinned a little and I could sense the dapple of sunlight.
Later that year I took my twenty nine year old daughter to MONA [2] for her birthday. In Hobart I met that scholar. She gave me the keys to the Return.
The man I initiated thirty-four years ago is also a Time Hunter, one of his talents: genealogy. He asked for my biological records. What? More shredding of secret, long-held delusions of ancestral importance? Bus drivers and servants in the houses of gentry? But for me existentialism is always blended with mysticism and the curiosity to know the treasure at the heart of the Maze. I had new stories and a fledgling new language and guts.
So I allowed this goblin in.
The Time Hunter rescued the roots of my ancestral tree and, week after week he dropped names like nuggets of dull and lead-like information. These long-dead relatives all lived in the north of England. Albion. Generation after generation. I was busy elsewhere and the Time Hunter’s morsels were boring. What a brat I can be. Then he spoke a name. A spell.
Oh, he said, quizzically. They’re not all from Lancashire, Yorkshire and Lincolnshire. You have a Welsh ancestor after all. Caradoc ap Silures.
I must have looked ashen and the Time Hunter frowned.
I did have that strange feeling one gets when one is about to faint or the sensation of dreaming and was I really clothed?
I know that name like the back of my hand. My ancestor is also my hero two thousand years into the past. Those people that never moved were indigenous to that country. Priteni. Ancestral earth.
Born into a bigoted and sexist world, brought up as someone’s fabricated lie, living a lifetime with no family other than my children, their children and the people I adopted, the Time Hunter gave me a core reality. At the conclusion of the initiation he clothed me in a new skin. He handed me the keys to becoming La Loba and I am no longer lost.
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 Romans invade 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. My current positioning, on a nautical map, is Latitude: 54° 29’ 59.99” N, Longitude: -3° 14’ 60.00” W.
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—Ynish Mōn—is known in a modern, shallow, know-less-ness, as the Isle of Man, 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, spruce and grave-dappling yew.
And let’s not forget mo 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 main’sls of the big ships and bobbing insanity of the coracle and curragh, by ocean route twixt Éire, Breizh (Brittany) 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. My 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 has driven us? Despite over fifteen thousand oceanic miles between some arcane, vast, unpredictable dreamtime island, beneath the wide dark skies of Koodjal Koodjal Djooka and me, this ancestral home.
DROWNER WATER
The spirit who bideth by himself In the land of mist and snow, He loved the bird that loved the man Who shot him with his bow. T.S. Coleridge ~~ The Ryme of the Ancient Mariner
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 Eden, river of the black fell moss, cousin of Swale, and Isurā, and the journey of salmon kin from spawn to demise. My dawn is high in the Wild Boar Fell and my night is Carlyle, 1,824 feet above the shores of our sister lands. I flow east, then north, receiving lore 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 name, now, is lost in the dead mouths of my ancestors, stolen by the English to 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 Tràchd Romhra—the Firth of Forth—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) with the grand fortress made all of grandfather stone leaning down 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.
CLOUDLY STARRY SKY
Oh, we are hard to kill. Four thousand years into the long ago is the attributed when of our underearth-ness story but… what about now? Who are those who write about dúthchas (my human children) when most have forgotten the legends of ancestral treedom? Of the hunter and the hunted?
Yet we are dead. Are we? Or so it is written. So. I am confused, and I am confounded because beneath this mighty soil, within the secrets of the mountains and the magic and the mystery of the Northern Lights I am majestic still; enchanted, even, of the sídhe and the nurseries of the cladd. Within the weem, I nightmare, although awake. Roots engorged with life, beneath peat, the heather, the roarie-bummlers, still with sap a-plenty, and ready for man-looking forgetfulness. Waiting until… A thousand, thousand Svalbard globale frøhvelv barrows, of the Celtic human person kind, that nurture unborn forests and foraging memories, that will awaken, in some momentarily unrealized epoch, to the bull-moose trumpet or the wolf-pack howl. In another day, in another century, when liberated (oh, that incessant fear of starvation, of a poverty that forests never cause), by that not-forgotten piping of eagle bone flute, or scream of protest by sister vixen. For Mother to give birth, she needs relax her bothered and relentless rain, release the dormant to be living, instead.
We say, I remember you! as we cut the last lamb’s throat, kindly, holdingly, remembering that once a forest, always a forest, given just enough breathing room to seek the sky, no matter that the air is filled with the detritus of cotton factories and coal mines, and families driven to despair through the greed of some stranger in a bureaucracy somewhere, cloistered and bland, a fact hidden by the façade of whiskey and cocaine; to the violation and carelessness of the dùthchas by thanes, headline-grabbing prime ministers and media, not understanding (or on pretence of ignorance) the rightness of deep-veined ancestry, as though a paper decree holds more weight than a dolmen, a murder of ravens or an ancestral kinship system, remembered long before there were scratches on a page, trapping words into idioms and propaganda.
FIRE IN THE HEAD
These wings are the beauty of the poet’s soul. The songs, thus flying immortal from their mortal parent, are pursued by clamorous flights of censures, which swarm in far greater numbers, and threaten to devour them; but these last are not winged. At the end of a very short leap they fall plump down, and rot, having received from the souls out of which they came no beautiful wings. But the melodies of the poet ascend, and leap, and pierce into the deeps of infinite time. Ralph Waldo Emerson ~~The Poet
And now I feel the need to sleep for a million years.
A human being, or so, might read this letter and think, What do you matter? What does it matter that you are what you are? And I am confounded that you is not I, or even we. As though, at some crossroads, people stopped singing and meeting. Stopped remembering. Forswore knowing me as family. The grief I experience at having these children’s backs turned away from this love is devastating. This tenderness of family, lost. This memory of elder lore seemingly vanquished.
Well, Voldemort, upstart of faux-wizardry that you hide behind, with your Apple smart watch and your Louis Vuitton running shoes, you cannot set your bedding down, up here. My scarped soul. My moss-breek. You will not be lound from me. No imlioc, no glisk, no fardon and no ystafell in which you can hide. That you choose to call a passage to within the earth, and a place of secrets where only they and I can hear and know, a grave (where no ancestor ever was buried) shows only that you believe some resurrection fiction, and not the mythos birth and death that is that, of seed, to stem, to leaf, to bud, to flower, to fruit. That you call worship, where there is no god but us, and I, and we.
What happens if you forget? If you are forgotten? Is there a reason for the idea of death? Are you so lonely you can’t understand our language? Our zwer? Don’t you remember we are knowe? That we are daal’mist? Lighty-dark? Geal-cauld and the plutsh of walking boots hollow-ringing in the dark, hushed, torchlit barrows of your ancestors, telling of Merlin of the Borders, and Mackerel and Morgan le Fey? Children’s stories hiding a deeper wisdom. Just in case?
I am not forgotten, Carvette; not so drookit I can’t feel the sun or raise my voice in sheepy-silver shine at all. I am no ink-drawn border on Google Maps: no England. No Scotland, Wales, Skye, Man, Ireland, Lewis, Harris, Mór, Ratharsair, Orkney, Scilly or Stornaway. These are names that are written to push me from your insides. As if you could. I am, that’s enough to say we are.
I AM FEY AND THAT’S NORMAL
As if the idea of glittery, painted, winged, diminutive inventions of an invader species could diminish us. Call us “fairies” as though we are not I, as though I am not the whole land, the entire sky, the everywhere who is river and underworld cave. Could warp us into a bit of no importance when, in fact I am, we are, Gentry. We are the Good Folk. I am sídhe and Rob Roy and Sterling. Calgacus, Culloden, Annie Lennox, the Monarch of the Glen and—once—elephants with long straight tusks. Black bears were all killed off to make silly hats for some inntrenger-appointed king, or queen (such pompous titling words, as though one person has more importance than another). I am carboniferous limestone formed about 340 million years gone. I am Pendle Hill. Sandstone and shale and gritstone moorlands. I am drumlins, oh, and I am Emily Bronte. I am cousin to the dyke swarm of the Isle of Mull, 56.4392° N, 6.0009° W, off the west coast of Alba. I am the ill-fated, possible vilified in some propaganda-driven, first century media condemnation: Cartimandua.
History is an opinion with an agenda. Its curse is that it is a story written, not spoken, that of men, of what is taken and who is harmed and who is better than everyone slaughtered, no matter the kindred species, no matter that the land burns because of it. History uses words as though they are flosh instead of a winterbourne, in the wonder and bafflement, and laughter and tripple of us.
I am, we are, here is…
DIVERGENT
I am here.
I was body-born as who I am now, in Australia. I was the firstborn and the only born human child of Celtic ness that salmon-leaps as far back as records are kept. Parents forgotten. Here for just a generation. Dead in some high-walled graveyard, or else ashes that are nourishment for controlled roses, with a hint of christianness to dishonour the fire in their blood.
Have I a right to be here? In this landscape? This person of ancient differences and extremes: long-befossilled desert and Uluru stone? No. I have never been granted permission. Not by the First Nation human people, not by emu people, not by a wedgetail eagle-person or barramundi clan. I am the people of so many Celtic countries I forget, just for a moment, how many.
Until the great white shark, the goanna, the king brown, the jumping jack ant colony, red dust, oceanic rip and giant old growth mountain ash say, Here, here, be here and sing to us of unknown or unremembered being, since Gondwana, child of soil and sun and star… I remain a changeling from the Seelie Court, left in a place in which I should not, really, thrive. For that I apologise with the whole of us.
NOW
I bring stories. I will offer them. That’s all I have. That’s who we are. But who we are is where we belong. And what, of that, we can bring to the gathering. Whether we tell of loch or ffrwd, of decimation or invasion.
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.
My 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.
“I was given the casket on the condition I disposed of it in the deepest, most secure underland site that I reached – a place from which it could never return. The second of the objects was an owl cut from a slice of whalebone. It is a talisman and what it connotes is magic. The minke whale from which the owl was taken had washed up dead on the shoreline of a Hebridean island.”Robert Macfarlane, UNDERLAND (p. 19)
INTRODUCTION
Disclaimer: the names and situation associated with the woman called Hecate are fictitious. Any resemblance to anyone living or dead is purely coincidental. The scenario, however, is based on a factual, similar event.
“I’m a witch,” said Hecate, smiling that smile I’ve seen countless times before. “I’ve read your book. It really helped me center myself after my divorce.” “Which book?” I suck on my coffee, a bit blissed at the autumn sun on the back of my neck, despite the intuitive hackles. She’s confused, as though I’d just devoured a baby in front of her. “Witchcraft Theory and Practice. Um…” “You didn’t know I’ve written more?” “Ah, no. It’s great, by the way!” I’ve got a workshop called FERAL, on the rewilding of language, beginning again over the coming weekend. I don’t want strangers hanging about my house. Have I had death threats in the past? Yes. I’m still alive though. Obviously. I prefer to meet those I don’t already know in a café downtown. Suss ‘em out, inoffensively, obviously. “No, it’s not,” I respond, kindly. “I signed the contracts with the publisher, for that book, in 1998.” “Classic!” We’re getting on nicely, so far. Am I about to fuck that up? Of course. “So, you’re Greek?”
She’s forty nine. I remember being forty nine. All my kids grown and gone their own ways. Me thinking I knew everything. Silly stuff like that. Her hair is dyed a precocious and eye wateringly fluorescent pink, and a really lovely septum piercing dangles above her top lip. She keeps fiddling with it. She’s as wildly Bohemian as any goth on the streets of Melbourne and I’m mightily respectful, if not a bit wary. She wears a rustic, heavily tarnished silver pentagram, and her fingernails, while fake, are killer-black and as close to talons as a nail parlor can get ‘em. “Hecate…” I continue. “Myth and legend and all that. You don’t look Greek.” “I’m not. I’m Australian. Hecate is my witch name.” “I’m dreadfully sorry about that book, then.”
PART 1 – WHAT’S IN A NAME?
NAMING IS TREACHEROUS
It’s time we had this conversation. And Hecate, the woman sitting with me, is a powerful case in point. She is not who she thinks she is, and I am about to become involved in her true-life mystery, and a magic that is both real and tactile. But first you and I have some talking to do.
Witchcraft, as an action. Witchcraft is something one does. Witchcraft is often equated with wicca, and wicca is referred to with an upper-case W, to indicate its importance as an entity in the modern vernacular, in the illusionary, non-place, called the West (west of what, I am unsure. It’s a rather silly construct) and is, currently considered a valid religion.
WICCA
But wicca, the religion, is not witchcraft, and does not, of itself, practice witchcraft. It is a ritualized, quite new, devotional practice that I was involved with for many decades but that, ultimately, being a savage and a pedant and an anarchist, I came to understand as a magnificent, utterly well-intentioned form of religion where dualisms and invocations take the place of hopes and prayers.
Douglas Ezzy’s book [1] confirms Hume’s hopes for the future. His volume, published six years later, is essentially a collection of testimonies: fifteen chapters in which sixteen practicing pagans (including Ezzy himself) speak of how the practice of paganism has affected their lives. The tone is warm and conversational, and the pagans emerge as charming and interesting people, ranging from youth to late middle-age. Common themes include the feeling that the Christianity of their upbringing did not fit their view of the world; the electric experience of working ritual alone and in a group; a concern with both feminism and the environment; and the celebration of human life, from birth to sex to death. Source.
I relish ceremony: candles, the cough-inducing interference of commercial incense, the need for an altar, upraised hands, robes, talismanic jewelry and charms, pentacles and salt or chalk circles, or else those drawn with a stick, a staff, a wand, a gesture (or a dagger… we’ll get to that) in sand or soil; on the lounge room carpet or cellar dust. The list is long, and many are the commercial outlets that will provide us what we seem to need to enable us to be well-prepared to function within the ideal parameters of this chosen way. To sell us stuff that, according to the books, is appropriate for witches. To authorise meaning. Because, Hecate forbid, to work a ritual in jeans, socks and a woolly jumper is just plain, well, plain.
SPELLS PART 1
People often write to me asking for a spell for this-or-that. Some claim to be cursed. Some ask for the cure for fear, or as a way to get rid of someone, or to find love. To attract a job or cause world peace. Do they work? See SPELLS PART 2, as I’m about to get distracted by the other side and its use of word magic (or, in the case of the Synod of Whitby, “a hostile sword” quote is from Bede) to utterly change the course of human thought.
Thus…
“What must it be, then, to bear the manifold tortures of hell forever? Forever! For all eternity! Not for a year or an age but forever. Try to imagine the awful meaning of this. You have often seen the sand on the seashore. How fine are its tiny grains! And imagine that at the end of every million years a little bird came to that mountain and carried away in its beak a tiny grain of that sand. How many millions upon millions of centuries would pass before that bird had carried away even a square foot of that mountain, how many eons upon eons of ages before it had carried away all.” JAMES JOYCE, on hell: Source.
NEVER BOAST, NEVER THREATEN
I guess witchcraft has its perks because at least there’s no threat involved. To anyone or anything. Despite the bad rap. But hell? It took Zarathustra to invent that and, a millennia or so later, zealots of the cult of the dead god to use it to threaten small children, sensual women, anyone with an alt-sexuality that’s anything not bogun, Trump oppositionists, child-sellers &/or dying soldiers.
This is not it. Where is the wisdom in any of it? And if there is none—almost a need to coerce and prove oneself alternatively worthy—why is the practice (or the idea) still adhered to, even after a hundred years of failed propaganda and, also, failed claims of authenticity? Like christianity, even buddhism, that offers the adherent an afterlife of vague cloud-and-right-hand-of-godness, terror—that mountain-pecking-birdiness, that is hell—or some flight into the body of a newborn someone or something.
But what has this got to do with witchcraft? And when did the word become a being thing instead of a doing thing? Have I been down the road of claiming? Yes. Did I know I’d bought into a cult, like any of the above? No. Did it gain me notoriety? Yes, but mainly in the minds of people who’ve never met me. Who are looking for a mirror within in which to see themselves. I understand that. Because there is a ‘ness’. A ‘something’, that implies that witchcraft is witchcraft.
But “a witch?” Houston, we have a problem (and yes, I know that’s a meme) or, in this case, Hecate we have a problem. Love and kisses xoxoxox.
SECTARIANISM, FEAR AND SPLINTER CONFORMITY
BACKSTORY
The early era of when a spotlight was actually claimed by an individual, rather than media, or theocratically-imposed rhetoric was in the latter part of the 1960s. Prior to its romp towards acceptability, in the form of Wicca, witchcraft was not even considered a something, outside of the mind of men, religion, the church, particularly peeved women, pulp fiction and B-Grade movies.
Witchcraft has about it, in populist consciousness, a dirty little bitter woman-face of dumbness and hysterical, disease inducing scandal. The foul and uneducated scowls of old women, with crooked backs and single eyes, living deep in forests, eating children who have become lost, or else, if in positions of prominence, within a highly christianised and suspect society, the secret queen of the castle dungeons, holding center stage, naked or slightly-so, albeit grandly draped, in a position of power, endowed by the attending acolytes and adherents, who wantonly lust after her alter-prone flesh-and-blood body whose spread legs temporarily encase whichever man is considered sufficiently well-represented within the court of kings, the crimson choir cassock of a papal cardinal, or the top hatted, mustached and monocle’d among the monied 1%, the aristocratic, the nobled or merchant-membered of a popular East India Trading Company equivalent (in the twenty first century) like BHP, Goldman Sachs or the Epsteinian uberclass.
These images, and fetish ideologues, were food for the press and the McDonalds-minded. Or else, particularly in the new diadem of defamation, Disney.
TACITUS, BOOK XIV, states – 30: On the beach stood the adverse array, a serried mass of arms and men, with women flitting between the ranks. In the style of Furies, in robes of deathly black and with dishevelled hair, they brandished their torches; while a circle of Druids, lifting their hands to heaven and showering imprecations, struck the troops with such an awe at the extraordinary spectacle that, as though their limbs were paralysed, they exposed their bodies to wounds without an attempt at movement. Then, reassured by their general, and inciting each other never to flinch before a band of females and fanatics, they charged behind the standards, cut down all who met them, and enveloped the enemy in his own flames. The next step was to install a garrison among the conquered population, and to demolish the groves consecrated to their savage cults: for they considered it a duty to consult their deities by means of human entrails. — While he was thus occupied, the sudden revolt of the province was announced to Suetonius.
It was from the voices and pens, of the supposedly, recently vindicated, that a hypothetical modern witchcraft spat I am here, and I will claim a tax break.
Without going too deeply into the repeals, by the British Commonwealth, of a law passed in 1735 and called The Witchcraft Act, that changed (slightly) its veil of godliness in 1951 to become the Fraudulent Mediums Act, these mothballed condemnations allowed for the emergence, into a public domain, of Gerald Gardner, a bloke sprung from the cabals of nineteenth century elitism—well-traveled to places considered the antithesis of an entrenched and self-certain christianity, such as Ceylon, Malaya and Cypress—and a family made rich by the timber trade, to become a member of a Rosicrucian order (circa 1930), practicing—or so I spae—out of Christchurch (in Dartmoor, not the New Zealand one), the territory of the invader/colonizer Saxons, who referred to the place as Tweoxneam, and that was stolen or misappropriated from an hypothesized indigenous Celtic tribal affiliation known as the Dumnonii [2], Deep Valley Dwellers, in a land of mists and mystery, once covered in oak forests.
The following legends show a progression from giants to witches to pixies and, of course, the Evil One also makes an appearance. Naturally there are also ghost stories. Source.
EMPIRE
Was Gardner’s fascination with the folklore and indigenous practices of other cultures his reason for consorting with the figure of the rich English woman he coined as “Old Dorothy” Clutterbuck, and whom he claimed initiated him into a coven in the New Forest, England? He certainly had his days of notoriety: claiming a philosophy degree from a suspect American consortium[3]
In 1910 he was initiated as an apprentice freemason into the Sphinx Lodge No. 107 in the British occupied Colombo (then Ceylon), affiliated with the Irish Grand Lodge (the leader of which was a member of what is known as the hellfire club). Gardner placed great importance on this new activity… Source
STOP NOW
That’s enough of that. Gardner, Valiente, Crowley, Leadbetter, Blavatsky, Budapest, Simos and, eventually, (at the small-scale end of this) me. We have all perpetuated (and in some instances, still do, extant) our own brand of misappropriation and, even now, in the era of social media, we can add the coagulant diatribe of multiple religious, anthropological (indigenous and/or conspiratorial) constructs to the mix.
So, to unravel. To finally stop. Because the sectarianist mine-is-realer-than-yours-ideological inventiveness, and fiction, has reached an inevitable dead end. Why? All are based on figment, guesswork, desire, theatre and, at the core, deceit, on both sides of a suspect righteousness and equality debate. Wicca is a fuck-you-I-won’t-do-what-you-tell-me [4]snub of orthodox behavioral demands by people with intentionally thin lips. So far, so great, but wait…
The indescribable lostness of a usurper people-animal, has condemned the softer voices of near-extinct environments, cultures and species to derogatorily-penned fauna, non-European indigenous languages to brute-speak that we, as an Arctically-pale-skinned human multi-product supermarket aisle of societies, unable to justify our own inadequacies, are determined not to care about.
Until late in the twentieth century (and probably even now—I’m such a fucking optimist) our fore-parents were, and are, hoping they can pretend to ignore the voices of terror and the crash/boom of calving ice that is now ominously and inevitably raising sea levels, to the degree of drowning small, inhabited Pacific islands, while also (unfortunately continuously) raping and plundering, bombing and poisoning, as companies, corporations and governments have done throughout recorded history, all that does not conform to our netted, gilded desire for more of N… (insert something).
The above practices are now, in politikspeak, called Free Trade. Is this in the vain hope that the word “free” will act as a blue pillfor all this plastic, and all these oil and chemical spills, deforestation and destruction of biodiversity and habitable non-structures, unparalleled, aberrant soil degradation and river-killing? All the smiley-faced conspiracy theorists, lower down on the hierarchical pyramidal diagram, many of whom remain utterly caged in the zoo, who suggest the wealthy drink the blood of human babies in ritualized debauchery, to… to what? To enable the accumulation of more? To grant eternal life? To appease the deity that abrahamic theocrats have conveniently termed satanic because no, they don’t drink the blood of a man who died, mercilessly, sort of like anybody the master race deems problematic, every Sunday, sometimes even daily, because he/they held/hold the keys to the previously alluded-to cage?
All while awaiting all the dead to rise up, as was once upon a time promised (because that tortured, murdered man didn’t really die, he just ascended. To where, some of us are yet to imagine, because, as the late, great John Lennon once sang “Above us only sky…”) in all their flapping, grey skinned, eyeless and lipless, forested world of proteobacteria, pseudomonas, firmicutes, peptoniphilus and clostridium [6], like something H. R. Giger will only ever dream of.
Are we, as a society historically drenched in the blood of collusion, in genocide and slavery, replete with a colonialist, destructive and overtly fundamentalist ideological attitude, going to continue to claim a radicality that is, if honest, the binary offshoot of monotheism?
Are we, as supposed anarchist, heretical radicals who refuse to kneel before the symbol of torture, in an ostentatious building owned by the governments of a deeply flawed patriarchal, misappropriated spin, actually perpetuating the same pomposity, but with a twist that sticks its tongue out at daddy, in a gesture that says fuck you, that is mere posturing because we have nothing better, wiser or unfettered to leap onto and claim?
Well…
SPELLS, PART 2
50/50 – great odds
That’s your chance of having a spell work. No matter how many candles are carved and shaved with some form of boline or other, no matter how many letters from the tetragrammaton one writes with the blood of your pinkie, whether in sigils-in-clay, carved onto dubious Hebrew-tinged Rosicrucian amulets, hung about the bed of a newborn, to repel Lilith, or onto a rune-like, or ogham-like birch, hazel or rowan branch (perhaps an oak one—although that’s just a radical and uneducated guess at specificity; oh, lambs-to-the-slaughter, I sound like I’m serious) stripped of bark and tied at each end with red thread, sealed with black sealing wax bought for this explicit purpose and, once passed through the smoke of incense, is buried in the back yard with a so mote itbe as the spade is put away. Whether one entombs a cat behind the chimney bricks, buries a boot under the paving stone of the family home or fills a jar with urine, bent nails and hair from an enemy’s shower stall plug hole that is, once chanted over, consigned to a cemetery plot or a building site where the concrete is due to be poured in a week because one has done one’s research about this.
I have been part of the running-away-from-home movement, loosely called paganism (a word I emphatically dismiss because I am not Italian… although I do seem to have a thin green line of ancestral DNA along the fault line of the Tiber) for several decades. On the downhill slide away from same, for several more.
If spells worked, every beauty in the Miss Universe pageant, asking for a wish to come true, would have made world peace happen. So would christmas, with its peace on earth, good will towards all men chauvinism. But they don’t. And, by dungeons and chains, why would any sane person summon love from an individual who doesn’t? Why would one lay healing hands on a person whose destiny it is to die today?
ARE ALL SPELLS SELFISH?
What about the woman who comes to me asking me to work a spell to stop her daughter being raped by her own uncle, because the police can’t do shit when the child says nothing, and medical examinations are inconclusive? Well, I am certainly going to piss in a vegemite jar for that. Because the alternative would land me—&/or the mother—in jail for first degree murder, despite the abused child’s silence for fear of consequence.
SO, WHAT IS WITCHCRAFT THEN?
Truth is, there is NOTHING definable about it. The being, knowing practitioner of a something that could be classed as witchcraft is not going to say. If they do, they are boasting and, while I have no problem with boasting per se, I do have a problem with The Complete Book of Spells, Ceremonies and Magic, and every other book on a similar trajectory (my wall) that I gave up exploring thirty years ago.
The equivalent word—almost the anathema of the word witchcraft—is miracle. A seemingly supernatural outcome to a threatening or doleful experience that cannot be considered ‘normal’ or ‘predictable’. Being found alive, in the rubble of a bombed out neighborhood, in Syria, eleven days after the buildings were turned to ash and debris, stunned and confused but otherwise unscathed. How is that possible? It isn’t, apparently, and therefore it is a miracle. A “wondrous work of God” [7]. No thanks to the audacious will to live that many, many species continue to display, despite all the vain and economically-sanctioned cruelty we, as a human animal, can inflict, just because we think we’re better. And made in the image of some supreme, omnipotent deity.
Or CALLING OUT the RELENTLESS ASSUMPTION because, while thusly named, the woman sitting with me, with pink hair, a septum ring and a seriously impressive tattoo sleeve, is not it. Could Hecate, then, be a species, or a landscape? Or an ancestral, tribal name? Or a collective noun for a pack of stag hounds?
Dogs were closely associated with Hecate in the Classical world. “In art and in literature Hecate is constantly represented as dog-shaped or as accompanied by a dog….[8]
I have to stop here. I want to raise a supposition with you. The concept of both sovereignty and lineage. That all the ideas promoted by academics over the past few centuries encased in the righteousness of the written word, are wrong. They are biased. The bigotry of grave robbers and Mengele-style categorisation of non-Europeans by way of skull measurements.
Whether promoted through tomb meddling, or the guesswork surrounding deserted metropolises, villages, buildings, menhirs or painted underground archives (archaeology), or whether through the finding, and subsequent classification, of human-like statuary, from the small figurines given the titles of Venus of Willendorf, the Minoan Snake Goddess, a figurine unearthed at the mythical Aratta, the guesswork, after the brain-frying indoctrination of almost two millennium of purposeful ambiguity, needs, from my perspective, to be challenged. This male female, human/god divisiveness… time’s up..
Minoan Snake Goddess Statue, Knossos Palace, 1600 B.C. Archaeological Museum, Herakleion, Crete, GreeceFound at the site of the mythical Aratta
GOLD IN THE COALMINE
It would have been a Sunday because in 1982 we didn’t have the internet and I never bought a newspaper on any other day. The Herald. An article that caught me. That stopped me. That challenged everything I thought I knew. And these were the days of Erich von Däniken so that’s saying something.
An image on page 4, of a small gold object on a clear plastic plinth. It was now on show in the London museum. It was impossible to tell what the object was from the first photograph except that it was definitely, I reiterate, made of gold. The second image, however, had been photographed under a microscope. I was looking at a detailed carving of an F-111 aircraft with its landing gear down. That’s not the oddness, though. What boggles the mind is that it was discovered during the drilling of a new shaft—through a deep vein of coal—intended for an additional metro train tunnel. SOLID-FUCKING-GOLD! Hand-crafted: “Coal formation began during the Carboniferous Period – known as the first coal age – which spanned 360 million to 290 million years ago. The build-up of silt and other sediments, together with movements in the earth’s crust – known as tectonic movements – buried swamps and peat bogs, often to great depths. With burial, the plant material was subjected to high temperatures and pressures. This caused physical and chemical changes in the vegetation, transforming it into peat and then into coal. Source
So, who made it? And when? And what—by the love of earth—why and how is it there? And what of the consensus that promotes the concept that we’ve ‘progressed’ up some evolutionary ladder to be the elite species we are now when, it is just as plausible, EVERYTHING postulated as a straight-line-time-construct is utterly wrong and that we, as a species are under the thrall of some Cargo Cult sleeping beauty spell and that all our technological advancements are because we’ve done this shit before.
CARGO CULT: The term is now broadly used to describe behavior where people mistakenly think they can summon some benefit by going through empty or unimportant motions. They don’t understand the real consequences or causes, but they try and get a result anyway. You can see this is science, in programming, and in agile software development. In fact, it is quite common indeed. Source.
I could be called a liar because, in 2003, when I traveled overseas on my first world tour, I asked about it at the museum while I stopped over in London on my way to Mme. Tussauds and, hopefully, Camden Town. I was smiled upon by the woman at the information counter. I was informed there was no such item. So much for truthful journalism and fake images, eh? Back then, even! Before Trump! And what has manipulated our thinking? And could all these academically clever bastards be absolutely guessing, based on (and to justify/sanction/federally fund) their crimes?
CRIME AGAINST THE PEOPLE
We are in the internet age (I know, I know, fish are wet). That is sometimes wonderful and at others, confusing. When the original story of the many-beasted, tattooed woman, entombed in the permafrost of the Altai Mountains, beneath the mummified remains of four horses, was first presented, again in a newspaper, back in the 90s, it was proposed that she was a shaman. Entering the Circle: Ancient Secrets of Siberian Wisdom, was written byOlga Kharitidi, exploring the effects of such a powerful figure on all who came into contact with her. Now every search engine titles this mummified individual as “a princess”.
What are we? Idiots?
JUNG AND HIS ARCHETYPES
No. Just no.
It is unfortunately plausible that these stiff-collared gentlemen are as much the problem of hierarchy as the rest of the so-called free West. The years of Jung’s life were the height of The White Massa, a Europe, Britain and now America deep in the throes of misappropriating lands, resources and species, in a worldwide blanket theft. Most religious, governmental, corporate and academic institutions were also seduced (as were the Grimms Brothers, amongst a plethora of others) by their own arrogant stance of conquerage and misappropriation. As accomplished in the brutality of others, by acquiescence, as King Leopold II, Hitler, Pol Pot, the entirety of the so-called British Empire’s elite and military prowess, up to, and including, its stance on nuclear experimentation at Maralinga and the American War, called the American War by the Vietnamese, and including the bombing of Hiroshima and the subsequent trials of such weapons of mass destruction on the peoples of the Marshall Islands.
What are we to believe? That men like Jung were valid exponents of wisdom? His treatment of a collective unconscious based on his own, and his poor mad mother’s, sad spack-outs? Was laudanum, thought a cure for a woman’s hysteria, her only escape when, perhaps, all she needed was be heard? Europe’s elite boys basked in the educational institutions that were glorying in a golden aged renaissance, particularly in England, during the brutal poverty and disease the rabble needed to experience for them to remember their place (a jolly cool way to prevent a revolution, eh what)? An historic moment—the height of empires—when pulling teeth was thought to cure insanity in the brain, and heroin was the cure, du jour, for a cocaine addiction?
The late nineteenth century was an era steeped in the mysterious and the suspect-occult. Séances and spiritualism, masonic and grail lodges and African/Graeco/Egyptian orders, the secrets that explorers thought they had discovered: black magic, voodoo, pointing the bone, the skulls of massacred Zulus, the severed hands of Congolese, the remaining drums of murdered Saami. Perhaps exuding some mystical power that a pale European with a gun and a private army could claim and wield against satanic corruption.
The pale-skinned man’s pith-helmeted condescension, entering the approximate 70,000 year territory of the Arrernte people and thinking to understand a culture utterly unremembered as having once been his own? Him walking amongst what remain of the survivors of the Trail of Tears and asking whether they will now accept jesus into their hearts while handing out smallpox-riddled blankets and 80% proof rum while, for god’s sake, put some fucking proper clothes on! Hanging out with the Inuit and trying to understand a language of clicks and throat singing, gagging at the thought of seal blubber as a staple food source whilst, simultaneously introducing them to the sugar so brutally harvested by slaves in the Caribbean? Spending days, stoned on coca leaves, or intoxicated on whisky and their own sense of imperialist Gauguin-ness, in New Zealand and Tahiti, while being fucked by native girls and misinterpreting ancient lore into something like a dictionaried language?
Agreeing to a straitjacket and a metal-framed cot, including wrists straps, in Bedlam? Criminalizing the remembered ancestral knowledge of Africans now enslaved by the Portuguese in Brazil, maybe? Or, as in the Congo, with the severing of hands that Little kingly Leo (the second one, not the first) figured was a great idea if the people who had actually always lived there didn’t meet his concept of a rubber quota?
King leopold of Belgium and his amputees (because he could)
PART 3 QUESTIONS, QUESTIONS
TERRA NULLIUS AND SHEEP
AUSTRALIA. The Killing of Ecosystem (oh, and people): “For most farmers, land is their most important asset. Agricultural land is also an integral part of the Australian ecosystem and has a significant environmental value, of which farmers are responsible for managing approximately 385 million hectares (or 58 percent of Australia).” Source
AFRICA. The Killing of Dignity (oh, and people): “Those who survived the desert were herded into concentration camps and were forced to dig up Herero graves to retrieve the skulls of their dead relatives. Women were forces to skin and boil the skulls, which were used in German experiments to prove Aryan superiority and African inferiority. Of the more than 80,000 Herero population, only 15,000 survived.” Source
IRELAND. The Killing of Self-Determination (oh, and people):“British viewers were truly shocked to discover the brutality of the Great Hunger Many of them had not previously known of the death of at least one million and emigration of a further million of their closest neighbours in what must be regarded as the darkest and most horrifying seven years in Irish history.” Source.
SCOTLAND. The Killing of Heritage (yep, people): “In the first place, the Highland Clearances transformed the cultural landscape of the Highlands of Scotland, probably forever. In the space of less than half a century, the Highlands became one of the most sparsely populated areas in Europe. And, it should be remembered, the Highlands and Islands comprise an area bigger than some industrialized ‘first world’ nations such as Belgium or Holland. But it was not only the people who disappeared. The settlement pattern, the homes of the people for a thousand years or more, has virtually vanished, becoming no more than an archaeological feature for those who stumble across the remnants.” Source.
SKYE. The Killing of Their Own: “It is hard to read any historical account of The Clearances without a deep sense of injustice and a bewildering disbelief at how one of the most civilized and generally prosperous nations of its time could inflict such wanton brutality on its own people – and adopt widespread indifference to their plight. By the early 19th century Rubh’ an Dùnain had, some archaeologists suggest, endured perhaps 6000 or 7000 years of continuous habitation; there is tangible evidence of Neolithic, bronze and iron age activity and of early and late medieval settlement. Climate change over the millennia had a direct impact on the enduring patterns of life, society and culture; piracy, pillage and clan warfare were survived. But ultimately human greed and pitiless cruelty proved to be the more effective purgatives driving every last simple, hard-working person from the peninsula. Source
WALES. The Killing of Language: “Welsh must be one of the only languages in the world that is hated simply because it exists. Simply because it defies Anglo-Saxon and Norman history. Simply because its existence seems to be such an embarrassment to some of the English. The angry blog posts written by monolingual students are almost embarrassing enough to not warrant a response. Because it is only a monoglot who cannot understand the importance of language, because they have never made the effort to learn another.” Source.
Of course, the above references are a pittance. And just about now—before I head into the wind of misappropriation by those wishing to claim an ancestry neither honest nor theirs—there’s this:
Two years later, in 49, Ostorius confiscated land in and around Camulodunum to set up a colonia. This was a town for retired Legionaries, in which each veteran was granted a homestead. The town gave the veterans a secure retirement and concentrated an experienced reserve force in the new province, on which Rome could call in case of emergency. In theory, it was supposed to provide a model of Roman civilization to which the natives might aspire. Unfortunately, the colonia at Camulodunum caused more problems than it solved. As it grew over the next decade, more and more Britons were driven off their land, some enslavedby the veterans, others executed and their heads exhibited on stakes. Source
THE POINT
Who are we? You, me, the people four suburbs away, the farmer on misappropriated (that means stolen), beaten, poisoned and degraded soil? The person giving a talk at the gathering? What is pagan if not an Italian word, and why would I perpetuate its use as a designation for animism when I am not Italian? What can I call myself to belong? Is that why we do it? We are, perhaps, clannish by our very nature. A pack animal. Are our tribes prone to violence and hooliganism, at a football match, because of a pent-up frustration at not being an honest species with a clear understanding at whose side we’re on? Is that why the so-called British are such boozers? Alcoholics? During the COVID-19 pandemics the libraries and bookshops closed but the bottle shops didn’t. Do governments know what would happen—en masse—if they closed the licensed poisoner joints? What? Even more dead wives?
And we have been taught to name everything. To objectify everything. Despite a thing being a public assembly or a gathering for whatever reason, and not an object with no previously-identifying division from any other thing. If I was Irish, I would say a ting, or ignore the existence of the ð altogether (Tuatha is pronounced too-ah) while, if a Cockney or a Maori I would pronounce a thing as a fing. Let’s face it, on the whole, generalizing as I am not usually prone to do, we’re fucking lost.
We’re wingin’ it. We’re still relying on antiquated texts and innuendo that are written by an elitist, classist, religious and sectarian anti-linguist with a permanently hunched back from bowing so very lowly, because to do otherwise ensures a whipping, a fifteen year stint in a Siberian gulag or a trip to colonial Australia where, like Angus McMillian, born in 1810, and whose family was subject to the savagery, of those aforementioned Highland Clearances, blokes in the English (NOT British, mind) queen’s blue, and, as such, blessed by god and gun, authorized to just slaughter every rightful descendant, of a minimum 70,000 year inhabitation, because they were here first and that just won’t do! Not when what happened, to your own family in your lifetime, actually and really happened. Despite it being three months away, by ship, and the colonizers not knowing one fucking word of the First Nation elders, especially not the word NO.
After all, you behaved, din’t ye laddie, and got the fuck out, like a braw wee man had to do? They gave ya a gun, didn’t they? The lairds who took your land and sent you to this abysmal blue-skied anomaly?
Wheat and sheep and coal and all that hardwood! While we continue to be the problem of head-in-the-sand bigotry towards anyone unlike us, we’re busy seeking to legitimise ourselves in costume and device.
I’m not being mean. Why would anyone think that?
GO BACK WHERE YOU CAME FROM
Cronulla Riots, Fairfax Media/ Photographers Nick Moir and Andrew Meares
I’m first generation born within the sprawl of Sydney; a mere six years after America bombed the living fuck out of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, heralding the onset of a nuclear proliferation version of don’t touch my toys that has not, yet, ceased. And that certain nations continue spruiking is the road to the final, holy grail of acceptance: one obtained by the gilded front teeth of a bully-state and a ministry of nuns with whips and scissors and lye soap. Oh and starch.
And all the while there’s this new thing. Is nationalism, the invention of a cultural identity, a copout? When racism is dividing humanity? Well, it has done all my life, so it can hardly be called new. Segregating us along skin-color lines or by the construct of worthiness-by-wealth-or-title, is about as rational as cutting down a forest to plant a lawn.
I love a sunburnt country, A land of sweeping plains, Of ragged mountain ranges, Of drought and flooding rains. I love her far horizons, I love her jewel-sea, Her beauty and her terror – The wide brown land for me!
A stark white ring-barked forest All tragic to the moon…Source.
There was a version of this, circulating when I was fourteen years old, that went: I love a bombswept country, a land of sterile plains, of battered fallout shelters and radioactive rains. Dorothea MacKellar [9] who, while enjoying the sights of Sydney harbor from her very, very wealthy and acceptably ‘Mother England’ heritage, was still Dundee. Because how can a body be rid of lore? Of deep belonging? Of a few Ice Ages of drinking from that burn or eating from the body of that boar?
DUNDEE (Dùn Dèagh) A Neolithic cursus [10], with associated barrows has been identified at the north-western end of the city and nearby lies the Balgarthno stone circle. The circle has been subject to vandalism in the past and has recently been fenced off to protect it. Bronze Age finds are fairly abundant in Dundee and the surrounding area, particularly in the form of short ‘cist’ burials. Source
I neither justify nor overly-examine my tendency to ramble. I could walk through a forest following a straight track with signs, written in English with some form of subtitling just to be sure I don’t get lost, or I can learn what I’ve been at for decades, which is to recognize landmarks, and leave accounts of them, rather than the signage, as, hopefully, the forest will outlive the signage. And when you and I both comprehend the marks carved in dolmens for precisely this purpose, both of us, and our children’s children’s children will be able to discover an ancestral home that legend continues to say is hidden in this vast and ominous green.
Your and my recent ancestors have subsumed and consumed other people’s lands and ‘resources’. Countries have been claimed (despite who was here beforehand: those indigenous ancestors’ skulls and jawbones that rage-in-amber from the dusty cellars of museums half a world away) and pitched, claimed and uniformed, through enforcement and subsequent acquiescence, to the point of a Cronulla Riot or a #blacklivesmatter campaign, or even more perversely a Go Back Where you Came From slogan: For a white person — and it’s almost always a white person — to say “go back” to a Native American, whose ancestors were here long before European settlers colonized this continent, betrays the real, white supremacist meaning of the phrase: We don’t want you anywhere at all … Source
… and you want to call yourself A witch?
MISAPPROPRIATION
Irish: The Butcher’s Apron
Splinter groups of thus-called witches have evolved, somewhat like clusters of bindweed or cinderblock towers, that claim a lineage, a credentialed but quirky righteousness or, again, a fuck-you-I-won’t-do-what-you-tell-me mindset, are no different to those who drape themselves in the Australian version of the Bucher’s Apron (that includes the centaurus-pointing crux—the five stars that make up the Southern Cross of alpha, beta, delta, gamma and epsilon crucis) and think of it as some authorized national identity (despite Australia remaining a colony) who can beat the living fuck out of anyone with skin that’s darker than a second generation girl from Blackpool with a so-called (but deadly) ‘healthy tan’.
What’s the point? Are we that lost? Yes. Why?
I am a Celt. Are you, really? Yes. Are you sure? Yes. Okay. Aren’t you going to ask me what that means? I know what it means. What? I dunno, a white woman? A descendent of Finn McCool or Vercingetorix? Do you know how to pronounce Vercingetorix? Yes. Say it, then. Fuck me, you’re pushy: Ver-sin-get-or-iks. Um… What? There’s no s in the word, and get is pronounced like jet. Fuck you, bitch, I know what I know. Oh, sorry, not sorry… was Vercingetorix a bloke or a woman? A bloke, of course. Why are you so sure? Men are always warriors. What about Budega? Well, she was different. Why? I dunno, because she raised an army? Is that what defines history and a culture? Sure, it is, all those academics can’t be wrong… and she was magical except the hare got away and she was defeated. So you know the story? Yep. She must have been a fuckwit, though, for misinterpreting the way the hare went. Wow, is that like Trump is a good guy because he wants to make America great again? What are you implying?
Language is, or can be, like photography. People can talk and talk and talk and say nothing. We can write and write and write and just be repeating what has been said before, like a many-balled butt plug on its way out of its temporary anal incarceration. But then there’s this:
And sometimes one word is enough. Horror. Evil. Beauty.
So much is written in such as way as to roll off consciousness as a set of self-described facts. We can all do it. It’s acceptable.
It’s nothing.
These facts will last five minutes, or for the extent of an argument, perhaps even to delineate an identity but none of them can match that photograph.
And here we are again. We have been caricatures for so long now that no one takes anything we say as valid or even real. It’s all recreationist, or re-enactment movements or more troubling and offensive, an excuse for far-right political extremism. A kind of still-white-bitches mindset.
Celticity is “an attractive set of symbols and identities that come replete with popular recognition and a supposedly ancient past that can be invoked by people for many purposes, from ‘new age’ religion to popular ‘world music.’” Historically, however, that “ancient past” is hard to pin down. Hague et al. explain: The very flexibility and the vagaries of archaeological evidence regarding the original Celts enable multiple political and cultural meanings to be invested in the form, whilst retaining the symbolic value and historical authority accrued by the reference to a supposedly ancient Celtic culture. “The Celts” can and have been envisioned in all sorts of ways: as a warrior class; a pan-European people; as the epitome of whiteness; “whatever version of the past seemed nationally expedient.” It’s a cultural identity that has come into vogue in recent decades. Source
BREAK AWAY, BRIGHT EYES
I come to the point of all this. Genealogy. It seems that for a narrow window of us-as-human-data-retention we can do this. I know aristocracy, royalty, several extant indigenous kinship recall systems, and horse-breeders all keep lineage records. But until the twenty first century people have been too busy recovering from 1848 and gender disparity to concentrate much on their family trees. Why?
Because they haven’t meant much. Your grandma on your mother’s side comes from Belfast and her mum was married to someone named Richard Dawson Bates, and so… Who? Doesn’t matter, does it? And my great grandpa, on dad’s side was born in Prague… but he never said anything about anything, so he was pretty useless, wasn’t he? He’s dead now, anyway. We didn’t visit him much and I don’t know when he emigrated here, but I think it was around 1945. What was his name? I think it was Tom Kubish, something like that. Nothing to talk about here, folks, I suppose. He was old when I was a kid and didn’t really speak much English. He was a heavy drinker and angry all the time. He changed his last name to Cubby to make out he was one of us, I think.
And? So what?
There must be some kind of way outta here Said the joker to the thief…
From All Along the Watchtower, Original lyrics, Bob Dylan, 1967 Re-recorded by Jimmi Hendrix, Electric Ladyland, 1968
In the booklet accompanying his Biograph album, Dylan writes: “I liked Jimi Hendrix’s record of this and ever since he died I’ve been doing it that way… Strange how when I sing it, I always feel it’s a tribute to him in some kind of way.”
STORYTELLER
What we are experiencing, in the above quote, is how a story evolves, depending on the storyteller. Genealogy was first realized as important when the names and the years of life and death coincided with either local, national &/or world events.
How could my made-up buddy John Cubby know that his poor, now-dead grandfather was Tomáš Kubish, possibly the brother, or cousin, to the famous Jan Kubiš? How did he come to emigrate here? Why does his steamship travel document mention him as being from England when the notation on the family tree clearly states he was Czech? NOW are we are getting somewhere? Now does our bland, bitter, invented John represent a mystery to be researched? Does it matter? DOES IT MATTER? Do John’s unborn children matter? Well?
Perhaps it’s true that things can change in a day. That a few dozen hours can affect the outcome of whole lifetimes. And that when they do, those few dozen hours, like the salvaged remains of a burned house—the charred clock, the singed photograph, the scorched furniture—must be resurrected from the ruins and examined. Preserved. Accounted for. Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Imbued with new meaning. Suddenly they become the bleached bones of a story. Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things
I won’t say lineage is a pure thing. The hand that documented all that information was so often pissed drunk that my friend (and the person who extracted my own family tree from the occult archives of a careless bureaucracy) who is a genealogist of at least forty years, will sometimes spend several hours in front of a twelfth century document that, looking over his shoulder is—to a peasant like me—indecipherable gibberish.
They wrote between the lines when they remembered they’d done a baptism, he says. That s is an f. the y is th and looks like a d. Ye Olde Bookshop is actually THE Olde Bookshop. Fuckwits. He snorts derisively, tucking one hand to within the folds of his long sleeved dark wool robe, pouring and downing a shot of Jamesons, his best thinking done when he is out of it on something, as many geniuses are apt to be.
Shall I try to read the page? No. Do I give a shit when he traces my matrilineal ancestors through the sap of winter silence? No. They seem boring. I relate to the names just like John did his Tomáš. And all the while my OCD compulsion draws me to Thetford Forest, Inish Mȏn, Culloden; to Cú Chulain, Scáthach, that bastard Suetonius Paulinus, yes Vercingetorix. And Julius Caesar’s penchant for torturing the native captives of Albion. Why?
I was there.
I’ll repeat that.
I was there.
Or, if I am a proper storyteller, I am there (and ‘there’ is me).
That’s the realization, when my huffy, Bill Nighy-type friend eventually prances into the room where I am sprawled, watching Botched with unconscionable fascination, and lays down the throwaway line I found you someone who wasn’t English. Oh, yes? I say, hardly pulling my eyes from the image, of the deviated septum, on the telly. Yes, he’s Welsh. I turn towards my old friend, more out of politeness than interest, and he says the long-dead relative is Caradoc ap Silures. Only he pronounces it as sy-loooo-rez when, to be proper, the tribal word is pronounced shileresh. SILURES? CARADOC? How far, the fuck, down that root have you gone?
Turns out, as far back as taxes.
And the Roman Empire taxed, or extracted goods, slaves and tithes, from everyone. Records were kept. Census taken. If a body owned land, cattle or other people that were negotiable, their names were recorded. Through war, invasion, conquest, religious persecution. We’re there. Somewhere.
You’re also related to Charlemagne, he adds before leaving the room. But so is everybody, the randy old bastard. But I’m still in shock. I know this man. This Caradoc, who is not an ap Silures, but who fought with them. The Silures is a tribe. In what is nowadays called Wales. Good Sisters of the Night, I am found!
The question is, did I know? Is that the fascination many of us encounter with the ‘ness’ of certain peoples of the world? Is this some phylogenetic, common ancestor memory? Of course it is. Of course it is. And it doesn’t matter if we travel the coastline from Unst to Nunavut, in coracles of willow, covered in seal hide, and waterproofed with pitch, for many thousands of years.
Until the ocean becomes too vast for such trading options, with the dramatic recession of the permanent ice, so that we only get to go as row as Kaffeklubben until, of course, someone rigs a knörr and brings the fucking sheep.
The above image is a page in Luna Baily’s book A Modern Witch’s Guide to Happiness, and the blurb on the Booktopia site states (as, apparently, a promotional tag):
“It’s time to give your inner witch a voice. Unlock the magick of modern witchcraft and infuse your every day with happiness.
This is your essential spiritual guide to happiness. Including everything you need to know to become a modern witch, from working with tarot cards and healing crystals, to taking direction from the stars, this book will teach you how to harness the power of the natural world, dispel toxic energy and develop your own psychic ability to find happiness.”
I wasn’t looking for an article on this book but I stumbled across it anyway and figured this was the exact article in which to mention it. Buy it and do what thou wilt, I say. Good luck to you, Luna. I think it’s fitting, before I complete this article, to give you an idea of what is out there, and how witchcraft is now perceived. This and the glossy PR website of specific Sydney “modern” witches (in difference to what? An old fashioned kind?) who make a killing (excuse the pun) selling courses on how to do this stuff and charging a few months wages to take your pale, talisman-endowed, light, white summer frocked, Anglo-European self to “places where Goddesses still live and where they inspire us to let go of the burden of the everyday”.
JUST VISITING, CAN’T STAY
I watched a hastily-shot video of a friend giving a talk at an eclectic gathering of diverse Anglo-European pagans in Western Australia. She talked about authenticity. Her ancestors are both Albanach and Norse so she chose to discuss two ideas, relative to Norse mythology: the concepts of Wyrd and Orlog—examples of which are blogged about here or, Mother Time forgive me, and here. My friend is as authentic as that indigenous Pictish Druid (fuck me, I mentioned him somewhere) who met me at Rock n Roll Café; as authentic as I think I am.
I just wonder about the summoning of language and meaning, from an archival burial ground, to indicate that we, too, have something of a story to tell. To justify our right to be here. An ancestral heritage that can endow relevance onto a reconstituted, pre-industrial, pre-decimated elder lore that is almost as extinct as records of us.
We KNOW we are lonely. We, of the pale faces and the hot showers. We, the secret consumers and money makers, from off the backs and cultures of stolen, dawn-of-time spiritualties. We, the homeless, living in houses built on the backs of the extinct and the driven out. We the segregationists with the thin veneer of #blacklivesmatter solidarity; the Brother, we march-beside-you. We do! We do, until the rubber bullets and the baton-bashings that won’t affect us because our skin is that of an obviously fog-and-ice hue, and we’re wearing Gucci–or Target–so get off my fucking neck you dickweed, fucking, copper! We are. We. Are Fucking. LONELY!
Using traditional Aboriginal Australian songlines as the key, Lynne Kelly has identified the powerful memory technique used by indigenous people around the world. She has discovered that this ancient memory technique is the secret behind the great stone monuments like Stonehenge, which have for so long puzzled archaeologists. Source.
I attend a talk by Dr. Lynne Kelly on mnemonics, from her book The Memory Code. I listen to her discuss her precision understanding, of the vastness of knowledge, carried in the memories of non-literate people, and I am lonely.
Of the King Penguins, Île aux Cochons, a barren volcanic island halfway between Madagascar and Antarctica: Nearly 900,000 of the regal, meter-high, black, white, and orange birds had disappeared without a trace. “It was really incredible, completely unexpected,” recalls Weimerskirch, who works at the French national research agency CNRS. Source
All these people seeking to present us with themselves. Asking that we (I use the word loosely, apologies) see them, because corporations and institutions are still steamrolling cultural and land practices, slaughtering wolves and whales, poisoning waterways and fracking a limited future at the expense of uniqueness and places that we (any of us) have no business going near, without permission and grace, and the other people-animals of earth and sky and sea are TRYING to get us to FUCKING-WELL BEHAVE.
One word: ooshies. Is this what we have to offer tomorrow?
PART 4 – SEISMIC SHIFT
CAUGHT IN A LANDSLIDE
LOST
The stories we perhaps tell now, around huge fires before the onset of an indefinite winter, nights reminiscent of long, ectoplasmic mists of another age, often summon a longing so overwhelming it is an ache. One that has me holding my ribs and turning away from the crowd; of an age before mobile phones, before social media, school, job applications, dentists, ties and high heels, before ooshies. Because these stories are tedious. They serve as no navigational education whatsoever. They do not advise me of how to make an awl. They are twee. Memoraphobic (is that a word? It is now) and meaningless with 16th Century monkish babble, considered, quizzically, as valid… somehow.
Time: you twisted motherf#*^er.
We don’t know, at all, when this is. When we are. When anything. This era might not happen for another thousand years. Until after another Ice Age. It might not have happened in the era we call time because that word—time—does not exist in the languages of certain cultures. And yet most of our stories, the ones mummy reads us before we can do so for ourselves, begin with Once Upon a Time. And the problem we face here, in the regurgitatedly abstract West.
“For the Amondawa, time does not exist in the same way as it does for us,” he says. “We can now say without doubt that there is at least one language and culture which does not have a concept of time as something that can be measured, counted or talked about in the abstract. This doesn’t mean that the Amondawa are ‘people outside time’, but they live in a world of events, rather than seeing events as being embedded in time.” Professor Chris Sinha, Language and Cognition, Source
Preservation of stories such as those related to Lebor Gabála, the Iliad, the Eddas (poetic or prose), all things Bible, are useless, garbled, misunderstood and meaningless. I won’t justify this to make it easier. So, also, are the stories presented to us, as a human animal, as history. That last one is a doozy.
Western history is written as an abstract. If not consisting of bloodshed, conquerage, hierarchy, political upheaval, conquerage, discoveries of people, objects, a Rosetta Stone or a Nag Hammadi codex (that oops, already existed—you can’t find what isn’t there), conquerage, war of any kind, economic or religious, um… conquerage, it’s not, well, history. You don’t exist. I don’t exist.
But we do. So how is history an honest record of human being, when we, as human animals, are peaceful? When we are non-literate?
In the words of Tacitus, Christians showed “hatred of the human race” (odium generis humani). Among the more credulous, Christians were thought to use black magic in pursuit of revolutionary aims, and to practice incest and cannibalism. Source
From what I remember Tacitus said the same about us Celts, oh, and the Gaulish. Anybody not Roman. Most, if not all of the stories, presented to and by anthropologists relate to people of non-Anglo-Europeanness and ‘interesting’. Or ‘unique’. Or ‘primitive.’ And, until recently, as ‘uneducated’ and therefore subject to the rules of a taker/consumerist/stockholder mentality: dispensable.
The same applies to language. To the practices of hunter-gatherers and nomadic herders that do not concede ownership of the person the Aymaran and Quechua languages call Pachamama, that my own Brigantach and Catuvellaun ancestors called……….
Who are we without language? What have we become and who are we to believe?
“Not only did William the Conqueror have the nerve to, well, conquer, he also nicked our woods. England had always been a paradise for trees, covered from the end of the last ice age in increasingly dense forests of oak, hazel and birch, with some pine. When early islanders began farming, the tree cover slowly began to give way to pasture and cultivated land, but under Anglo-Saxon kings, the forests still belonged to the landowners and their subjects. William, however, introduced “Forest Law”, which claimed the woodlands as the hunting grounds of kings. Anyone stealing or killing a deer or boar would be in a whole heap of trouble: by the end of Richard the Lionheart’s reign in 1198, that punishment was mutilation, including the removal of your eyes and other unmentionable parts. Source
After all is said and done, the situation is like being trapped in a funfair’s Hall of Mirrors. Deceptive. Inescapable. Quite possibly the cause of a lifetime of physical dysmorphia, and also, quite probably, untrue. One can get lost in images of oneself or others that are warped and slanted to appear the way some sniggering malcontent decides they will.
Until what is know as the 17th Century common land was forest, river and fen, shared by everyone within the vicinity. Then the fences went up. Then the starvations got worse. Then the transports. Once the travesty of enslavement of mainly Africans, for free labour on the colonialist rubber, potato and tobacco plantations, now focused on England, Ireland and Scotland, calling poverty or activism a crime, and if not executed, this desperate or angry population of beaten people, dismissed as pointless flesh, was condemned—individual, family, or entire tuath or clan, to penal servitude for however long the lairds, clergy, sheriff—or the Old Baily—decreed should be the penalty for standing up to the destruction of ancestral land or the theft of a sausage to feed the kiddies.
WHO ARE WE NOW?
Australia is not our country. Australia isn’t even a country. Not in any real sense. “The name Australia derives from Latin australis meaning southern, and dates back to 2nd century legends of an “unknown southern land” (that is terra australis incognita). The explorer Matthew Flinders named the land Terra Australis, which was later abbreviated to the current form.” Source.
I’m not trying to be argumentative, just getting to the point. This… this theft is still being perpetrated, exploited and overridden by an attitude that says, just shut up, believe you live in a democracy, that you are not part of the problems associated with environmental vandalism, human trafficking, classism or the chasm of extinction that threatens EVERYONE. Burn some incense, hang a dream catcher in the window, perform a ritual to save Ronnie from heroin, and his mum from eviction because he stole her monthly rent, or cast a circle, deasil, to celebrate midsummer three days before you go to your nan’s for christmas dinner.
About now, as I’ve mentioned somewhere before, I bend the knee to the Wurundjeri and the Boon Wurrung, the traditional custodians of the land where this house has been built, without their permission, without consideration and without negotiation. I offer respect to their Elders and, in unquestioning sincerity, without saying “past’” and “present”, rather preferring the truism “always”.
BACK TO HECATE
She’s forty nine. I remember being forty nine. All my kids raised. Me thinking I knew everything. Stuff like that. Her hair is dyed a precocious and eye wateringly fluorescent pink, and a really lovely septum piercing dangles above her top lip…
“Here’s an idea, Hecate. Why don’t you tell me the name your mother labelled you when you were born?” “No, that’s just not—it doesn’t reflect what I believe.” “What was it?” “Simona. Davidson is my last name. It is my married name so I’m killing it eventually.” “Why did she name you Simona?” “I don’t know. It’s Polish or Czech, I think. It reminds me of that old seventies Knack song My Shirona. My mother used to sing to it when she played the cassette, but she’d change the words to My Simona. Which is why I hate it.” “Your mother is Polish?” “Was. She’s just an old woman now. No accent or anything.” “Were you born here or in Europe?” “Here. My great-grandparents came here to escape the war. To Sydney. From somewhere near a place called Dziedzinka.” “How’s it said?” “What? Why?” “There’s more to this story of you than you’re telling me.” “You know that how? Oh, sorry. You’re psychic… I wish I was psychic.” “I’m just REALLY nosey, is what. And I love a good mystery.” “Jijenah. She called it Jijenah.”
We sit a while in silence. She’s all of a sudden become very withdrawn. Then she seems to shake it off and, when the waitperson comes our way, she orders the vegetarian special off the board, and another coffee. “Whatcha thinking?” I ask.
Observing her is like watching a storm roll in off the sea. It’s almost ominous, and I say a silent thank you to the land that I have met her here, and not at my house. Just in case, like.
“Mum wasn’t their only grandchild. They had other kids—my great aunties and uncles—but they acquired Mum, daughter of their disappeared own daughter. At least, that’s what I remember. Mum doesn’t mention anything if she can help it, and as far as I know everyone she’s related to is dead.”
I search her face, examining, so obviously un-English. “Come again?”
“It’s like my great-grandfather. He had a glass eye, but I was always so used to it I forget to mention it. I don’t know if they were real family or not. Nothing is clear. Once, when I was little, our Babcia–that’s Mum’s great-grandmother–said getting Mum took a day’s paperwork to fill out.” “She was adopted?” “Sort of. Yes. No… She was taken in. The family name was Kossak. I remember, years later, thinking that was what Russian dancers were called. What has any of this got to do with witchcraft and the workshop?” “Everything. I agreed to meet you to find out who you are, yes?” “Yes.” “Then, who are you?” “I think I probably should have a talk with Mum.” She fiddles in her handbag for her phone. It’s vibrating. She switches it off and dumps it back into the gloom. “But we don’t get along. She shits me. She’s moody and angry all the time. Silent. It gets hard to be around.” “You got siblings?” “Nah,” she smiles. “I don’t think she liked sex. I asked her about it once. I had to clean the bathroom for a month.” “Simona, will you find out? Will you phone me when you know her story? Yours, really. Anytime, eh? I’m up for it whenever you can. But yes, I’ll see you at my house next week for the workshop.”
We eat in silence. The mynahs are relentless. As each table empties they swoop. Taking whatever is left over from the plates, siphoning the sugar from the cannisters. They are so brave; so fearless. I wonder, for the thousandth time, about size and how we presume that because a critter-cousin is smaller than us that they see us as bigger. Or is that some mental construct? A duck attacked my car one time, because I drove too close to where his mate and their children walked, in single file, towards the creek out back of my old house. That duck didn’t care. My big black Toyota fourby was a threat. He would have killed it if I hadn’t kept going.
WHAT DO WE DO NOW?
I’m putting my few things in my bag. I’ve had enough of company for one day.
“Her other relatives were killed or taken; disappeared.” The intensity on her face is like when the kindling finally catches the flame from the match. I feel something in my gut. “I think that’s why she was in the orphanage. How the family found her. I have no idea, really, but I’m sure they knew how to find her. Knew of her. They were allowed to take her. Nobody says anything to anyone in my family.” “How much do you know?” “Snatches. Bits and pieces. I don’t know if she’ll tell me because I’m pretty short tempered towards her.” “How old is she now?” “I’m lousy at math. She’ll probably be dead soon, though. I think she was born in maybe 1942? I know she was four when her grandparents found her. The war was still devouring the world. I don’t think any of them were Jews though, so I’m not sure why it all went septic.” “Hang on. What?” “She was in Kraków. Or was it Warsaw? She once said she was surprised they’d come. Like it was magic. Even though they never found my grandmother…” “Records were very explicit, even then,” I add, remembering. She’s weepy, and has to blow her nose on a tissue. Then she doesn’t know what to do with it so she shoves it deep into that abyss of a handbag. She is rattled by our conversation. By what she’s remembering. “They were actual blood family. The only ones left alive, it turns out. They paid to find her. If they knew what happened to Magdalena–their daughter, my grandmother–they never, ever said. Is this confusing?” “No. Was she dead?” “Oh, god—” She doesn’t understand, yet, that I’m usually unforgiving towards throwaway, unconsidered religious terms like that, but now’s not the moment to be pedantic. “I have no idea. Mum told me she remembered her as young and very pretty. That she was taken away after she gave birth.” “Taken where? Who was your father, then?” “She only talked about it once. Just after Nicholas was born. In case–you know–he got sick or something. She said there were papers… Stuff I’ve never seen; never wanted to see.”
She looks at me like she’s drowning. We do that, don’t we? Dismiss the stories of our parents, or their parents, because we have a mark to make upon the world. A reason for being here that we have been inculcated into presuming is just about us, when it isn’t? When, in reality, we are the product of so many other people who have, literally, made us… well, us.
By taking herself a “witch name”, she is trying to free herself from being invisible and neglected, but owned, by a husband who has nothing to do with her heritage or her deep cultural roots–offspring that don’t contact her more than a couple of times a year. So much so that she has almost closed the door to a great, brutal, terrible and ultimately liberating ‘ness’ and witchery that she could never, until months later, comprehend.
Within a narrow, shabby St Kilda apartment, on nights of lamplit, cigarette-smoking, vodka drinking, onion-unfolding experience of enlightenment, Simona listens to her mother intently, knowing that she needs, for once, to shut up and not criticize the older woman’s unstable use of English.
Mandy—Amanda Katarzyna Wysmułek-Kossak, whose married name became a respectably Anglo Amanda Burnley—explains what she remembers (which is all snow and grey, cold, metal-framed beds, and shouting, fattish women in uniform) of her childhood. Some deep recollection of bullets. Of the terror of letting go of a loved hand. Of feeling nothing. On purpose, feeling nothing.
Of the day her new, old matka and tata came and took her with them in that big car. To the warmth of a coal fire. In an actual house. In the little village she came to know was Białowieża, not far from Białystokw where her own disappeared mama had, she learned, studied veterinary science and had fallen in love with a Communist man whose name no one knew, only that he got sent to a gulag, called Karlag, that was somewhere way up near Kazakhstan, 3,000 km east of Moscow, for the crime of having had an opinion. Forced onto the back of a truck with another thirty young men, dragged unwillingly from his love, leaving her, a slightly pregnant Magdalena, to face the consequences of her sin, in a hospice for disgraced women, and who then vanished.
Then, finally, the ship, and the sensation she will never forget, of arriving in Sydney and experiencing summer for the first time. “I found out that I still could have relatives in the area,” she informs me after the first day of the workshop. “Mama and I, we didn’t stop crying when she told me. I had no idea. Sorry, I’m such a ditz.” “That place. What’s it called?” I pull out my phone and pass it to her. She types in Białowieża and the search engine brings up a listing for a world-heritage landscape: one of the last and largest remaining segments of the immense primordial forests that once stretched across the European Plain.
To the story of another Simona, not a Davidson or a Burnley, not a Wysmułek, came to light over the coming weeks. A Kossak.
“She spent more than 30 years in a wooden hut in the Białowieża Forest, without electricity or access to running water. A lynx slept in her bed, and a tamed boar lived under the same roof with her. She was a scientist, ecologist and the author of award-winning films, as well as radio broadcasts. She was also an activist who fought for the protection of Europe’s oldest forest. Simona believed that one ought to live simply, and close to nature. Among animals she found that which she never found with humans.” The article enchants us to read further with this heading— Simona Kossak: They called her a witch, because she chatted with animals and owned a terrorist crow… Source.
My new friend would disagree, now, with the terms tamed, owned and belief, because we are already into the third week of the FERAL workshops, on rewilding language, but her life has just taken a turn into a hidden peculiarity that many discover, when the pretence, and the hurriedly-woven shawl, that hides the escape map, begins to unravel. Her grandmother’s disappearance is unresolved. Passage to Poland is already booked, in hope of answers to both her parents and her grandparents. The airline is holding her ticket until the COVID-19 scare passes.
Simona is only beginning the search of her identity. But consistencies with fact can sometimes be unusually compelling. They could lead nowhere, or they could expose who she really is. Her middle son, Frank, suffered night terrors until he was twenty. From as young as aged fourteen he has had a fascination with Poland, and especially with Treblinka, the Nazi extermination camp. He now lives in Warsaw and is studying. He learned the language almost as though he had no choice, and is working towards a doctorate in environmental science. Simona has asked if it would be okay for her to stay for a while.
CONCLUSION
I am not audacious, arrogant, or stupid enough to suggest the legends, lore and mythology—the folktales—of any of many indigenous lands and people are better forgotten, because, at some moment in the course of being born and dying and being born the warnings, or history-couched-in-metaphor just might—in retrospect—be understood. Some unexplored Newgrange may yield a Rosetta Stone-style lexicon for translating the urgent need for remembering. And awe at the true meaning of Scáthach, and her mythological ‘sisters’, will come to light.
But to learn of them, and to create a caricature of identity around them to indicate you or I belong, is not an answer. These do not yield clan. Nor wisdom. Nor witchery. They do not mean you are their current familial representative of ancient and ancestral lore. Because to lose the hyperbole, inflicted onto us and demanded of us, as a christianized people (whether we realize it or otherwise), is to seem to leave us rudderless on an endless, compassionless and seemingly-inhospitable, all-powerful sea.
In Robert Macfarlane’s book UNDERLAND, he writes of his exploration of the caves of the Slovenian Highlands—
“Nailed to the trunk of a beech tree near the lip of the sinkhole is a metal sheet, two feet or so high, and blotched with algae. Written on it in black ink is a long poem in Slovenian, entitled ‘Razčlovečenje’. At the bottom of the poem is scrawled the word ‘PAX’…and later, on the same page, I feel a sudden horror reaching up and out of the sinkhole to coil around my heart. Something terrible has taken place here, and continues to reverberate… What happened here? The mouth of the chasm says nothing. The trees say nothing. Leaning over the edge of the sinkhole, I can see only darkness beneath me.” [11]
So, instead, tell the children the wisdom songs of your youth. Give them folk, and punk, and Stairway to Heaven and The Wall. Tell them of Martin Luther King and Eddie Mabo. Mary Wollstonecraft and Germaine Greer. Yes, you can tell them about Adam Goodes and Dame Kiri Jeanette Claire Te Kanawa. Tell them about Budega and… tell them of my ancient father. Have fun with old sex manuals and invisible hemming. They won’t know about any of it. These are new/old stories. Culture stories for the moment, easily lost. How to grow mushrooms and which ones will kill you. Which one’s will open their eyes. Let them know you know.
Late into the night I sit on the back porch of this cottage at the base of Mother Mountain. Besides the brook, that has snow in her, as she swifts and chatters on her way to become sea. Wraiths are odd, though. And there are a lot of them although they were absent most of the season. Some illumine the willow like car lights passing but there are no cars. And besides, I have sat in cunning, to enable me to tell the difference (because a road cuts the track up, now, so yes, people pass in their pods. But the light is other). Some are gossamer in the limbs of willow on the bank opposite me, ragged as fog, but not in dissonance, more like lace with a design alien to my understanding of pattern, as is the me I think I am.
They were absent last winter but they’re back now. I’m a rationalist and, for a mystic, also, I retain a chunk of scepticism just to keep me sane, because potholes of confused ideas abound and I must decipher and decipher like a never-ending abacus.
I know that calling these phenomena “wraiths” is appropriate, so I’ll sit on the word. As I wonder. Who are you?
This speculation sometimes yields diamonds. I understand, or think I do, what night shows, that day can’t. With or without mist and fog and cloud night is crusted with stars. Whether we can see them or not. I breathe in, I breathe out. My eyes adjust to the light because night is never dark but is simply other than day. It is daylight that obscures, I contemplate, by nearnessing how far we can see.
The shock was there and gone, when I breathed one in. It happened so quickly but was unmistakable. I was washed in instantaneous comprehension. I didn’t realise it would almost kill me with the following illness, so certain was I that I am clever and these wights are benign.
I will admit to you that this is simply an epigenetic awareness. But. What if everything that earth is, in continuity as light bound in greens and blues and whites and blacks, informs our first indrawn breath at birth? Flooding our nervous system, merging, symbiotically, with who we are to become, other than animal flesh, in order for earth to know herself? Like an infinity of pores? That every aspect of earth—all perceived 4.453 billion years of our paltry calculations suggest (when in actuality we were everywhere, anyway, before ever gravity caused ellipse and spiral galaxy) forms our thoughts and the multitude of threadlike bytes of enlightenment that rise from seeming nowhere, some inner fathomless ocean, to provide excitation—an awareness of belonging—hence a pre-emptive to action and art? Hence consciousness? That it is not simply a matter (excuse the pun) of individuality as mutuality, but that because of the sheer endlessness of symbiosis, cannot be comprehended in entirety? Yet. That we reunite with this family of dance and infinitely huge, infinitely small light upon the thread, at the time of externally-observable death?
None of this denies instances of grief and sadness. Or confusion. Or self-doubt. None of it explains away the seemingly-odd behaviour of clusters and biological zap, but it’s the observation, isn’t it? The humanity, the individuality, that seems to die and compost down. Either singularly or as the result of a volcanic plume, a nuclear bomb, an avalanche of mud, or a starvation of millions. Extinction is impossible, you see? Isn’t it? What about thought, though? Where does the wellspring of inspiration come from and go to? For art, for revolution, for love? What if the wraiths are intelligence? What if each is a note in an impossible symphony, seeking vessels, planting difference, notes upon a keyboard so huge we are unable to comprehend; that compares itself to itself so that it’s voice will but heard, for a second, in what we call life?
An unquantifiable bigness that is home.
My question rings of, I realise, an almost intelligent design-like idea, but of an earthy, atmospheric, atomic—no wait—they’re all too large—kind. What if there is a ness in our genetic soup that attracts unique, vast, eye wateringly unexpected, wide, deep information that forms and shapes destiny Life to fulfil that which is impossible to comprehend other than by singularity?
What if wraiths are atmospheric things? That the mechanistic, Victorian-era machination of reductionism that allows destruction without thought.
What if, however, despite scientific rationalism, other?
And that each of them is, for lack of a more explicit explanation, entwined within the synapses of our flesh and brains and saliva and core, that when felt ‘inwards’ juxtaposes externalities with itself and therefore refracts back into earth’s self an equation of beauty when the flesh wears out?
Because no one cannot sense beauty; cannot recognise, eventually, a threat. The recognition may be unique to each individual but imagine, for a split second, if that’s all we ultimately realise.
Whether the person is three or a hundred and three.
Animism is the knowledge that all things are significant. Are themselves. Rock, sand, bed bugs, rivers, noise, violets, camels. They all exude stories. Memory and atom are woven together. They make tomorrow. No one thing has precedence, yet all will do what is their nature to do.
What did she know? That woman, yesterday, in the thunder, on the street, soaked and angry old woman with fag stuck to wet fingers, stained with brown. Her mouth yelling at the dusk, at anyone. Scaring them when it is she who is fragile. I saw. I walked a way away and saw the people walk past her, cringing. And pretending they didn’t hear. I don’t hear. It’s pissing down rain and her trolly is full of black plastic bags. But I walk past her, and she stops calling for a second. And she looks. And she knows I know what she has gone through. Who has abandoned her. Why she was lied to. How hard it is to stay alive. How much she wants to stay alive but cannot do more than rage, because she was beautiful. Is that it?
No one sees. No one asks. No one holds her. Promises cannot sustain her. What does she know? How does this happen when we are told we deserve good things and they never manifest? How do we come back from the lies?
BORN A BASTARD
I think I am two people. Well, maybe more. They—we—all have voices. I look out through eyes at what I think of as world, but I see only streets and cars and walls, and yet I think I am an aspect, a mote, of earth’s hugeness. I think of fjords, and desert and gorillas and wide sky but then I realise this is me thinking.
LAND, WATER, FIRE
An invisible person’s imaging. From what? Books? Opinions? Social media image postings? I think I know Cuzco and Hippopotamus and mange on dog’s back, and the ways of love and raiding of ancestors, but is that true? Except boats. I have lived experience of ship and boat, and I am called Captain by a bank.
Images are made from books, unless I stand, one day, before the weight of Lascaux, within cave of Binomil, upon the sand around Uluru where lizards watch like old people, or under green lights called Wawatay by some and guovssahas (the light you can hear) by ancestors of this flesh and bone and blood. I have not seen.
I have to see or else I am full of deception.
WALLS AND DESKS
From the tellings of a school room that had four walls, and desks to divide us and keep us from sitting in long grass or beside Mother River, and bells and rigid standards of behaviour. And uniforms. And god save some queen who didn’t do the same for what Gondwana has become, or India or Africa, or America, or—oh stop this mind from ranging like a satellite, recoding digital frames of reference that are made of ones and zeros. Is the I of us mere interface? Perhaps. Different schoolroom to the one around the corner, or catholic one, or Steiner one, king’s college, mission school. Or the many ones that sit around a fire with elders who tell stories that sound real but might not be.
ROOT WISDOM
One person is deep-voiced. Rich in root wisdom. Not afraid. The other lives in that person’s shadow. Hears and sees the past, the reality that a past thinks it has created, or that created us from a pierced cell. But is it real? Was it real? Do we remember what we are told to remember? Do we ask questions of people of authority who have learned wrong things and yet now are bowed to, called expert, as though what taught them was important because of a thought? That importance is a box? Expert is a box. Knowledge is information and so is persecution and loss? And grief and howling and the groan of giant tree as she breaks from her growing at the axe who was invented by thought. Who became expert. Who is killing, when killing is what brings life? Or so it is said.
MIND
There’s this cube. And there is light in here. And cube is made of mirrors and I sit in a centre and observe infinity. Which person—amongst that countless terror of an overpopulated me—is sitting in a centre? What is a centre? When Mind leads me, like I am a clan and a population of perspectives and images, to think of me as me, can I have got it upside down? This body.
THIS BODY
How is it that I was convinced? Was I convinced? I don’t remember. That there is one of me. And there is also the question of who that is? Is it the name I am called by? That seems way too limited, when thoughts come from unknown directions to colonise consciousness with importances that are dust, really, when the whim of flesh is misdirected. When the big dust rises and chokes. When the mold inhabits joints and lungs. When the Hidden, that cause diseases and despair, refuse to show self. Themselves, itself, self?
I live in a tragedy. And I live a life that is heroic. And none of it is real. Except this room and these words that somebody else is writing. How do I know the writer is somebody else? Because she is braver than I. I am beaten by memories that highlight wonder but hides bruises and humiliation because they might mark me. Might lay a scent on me that attracts daemons.
Daemons
A word that once meant gods.
Words are all we are. And meat. And a mess of conflicting realities all overlapping to produce some kind of relativity that seems like self. Oh, the stories we have convinced ourselves to be.
I am not one person. So “I” is a misnomer. I have to choose one to present to others. I have to wear a thought-form that represents a series of strung-together concepts that cannot all be real but feel as though they are.
I know this to be true because I don’t know anyone outside me—not really—because I think… I think… I know them, only. But that is them doing that, and I make up a collection of observations and listenings, and I call that “you”. But that can be such a lost way of thinking.
WAR
That’s what is done. Then action based on thinking. Especially if we connect with a construct that has an equi-distinct construct: thinking that seems like same. We then think, Ah! So thinking has mate. Has threads that seem like others who think. Has companionship. So war is made.
This morning I read a friend’s question: what is freedom?
LIGHTNING
Freedom is such a within-thing. It is terrible, because do I even know what this word means. Is it a word that emerged to cause a memory? Yes. But we are back at the beginning of the circle, because memory is one way, or another way, depending on who does the thinking.
I’m sitting on a chair. In a small room. With light from a window. And two people talk as me. Me and me. One is wild and untamed and courageous and intelligent. What a baseless sense of self is that? An amalgam of words that indicate a ness. I have created her to enable functioning in a world that I only think I know. The other cowers behind her and darts, like a squirrel, from memories of worthlessness and invisibility, to remembering a newborn at my breast. Which is real? Or is cube real and we are impossibly all that ever could be, hiding in the seeming-smallness of a single body. But that’s not true either. Because someone told me that human animals are bacteria and viruses and atoms of vastness and electrical storms of synaptic relationship.
And we all wear skin, as though separation is the reason for thinking and doing being different, eventually. But who is in skin? Who is this I?
THE LIE
Is this what modern texts term “mental illness” as though mind and thought and brain and consciousness and conceptualisation are somehow separate to self? Separate to body? Is that what the pills (called medication) are for? I—this person who is courageous and intelligent—hides from those who would label her. Who would pill her and say, there, we were right. We are always right. While squirrel says please give me the pills and doctors kindly diagnose neurodivergence; a problem stemming from being sold when I was woman-born.
But I keep her silent.
How dare I? Think. It’s a god-thing. A complex of importance in consciousness that has no validity to mountain and river and fjord and forest and desert. Or is that all imagination because of this little room? And people like Jane Goodall are stories? Of species encountering species that should not, could not, dare not be in communication anyway. That that is all made up and Jane is dust in a tomorrow that never comes because none of this is real and someone else, who also thinks they’re me, has agreed to the deception. No, not deception, imagined ness?
TWO SPIRIT
I agree. Not that there is necessarily a choice. That’s also a stream of consciousness. But I know I am more than one of anything. I think that if I sit and really listen, others will come forward, like whales breaching in Antarctica seas, silenced because of how deep I imagine is ocean. I have never been to that depths, you understand, so I am conceptualising. Is conceptualising a lie?
NESTING AND SHINY BITS
Conceptualising is the gathering of twigs and dried leaves. Bits of string and sparkly things that we have agreed with ourselves to be words. Important words. Like love. An abstract unlike mud and blood and sweat and mucous and thunder. Those last bits—we have experienced those last bits—so there is that, to break down mind from vastness to something else.
DISTANCE
Is a concept. Like hours and minutes. Like age. Like yesterday. Like memory that may or maybe doesn’t have existence, except as pieces that can be snapped up by squirrel; that can be for the last moment of what life has been when we think life as “self” is over.
COVE
How can a body harbour so many people? So many words that get cobbled together to sometimes form things like Frankenstein’s creation. Nameless and misappropriated as a cobbled together life:
“The name of the creator—Frankenstein—soon came to be used to name the creation.”
ADAM
“Mary Shelley’s original novel never gives the monster a name, although when speaking to his creator, Victor Frankenstein, the monster does say “I ought to be thy Adam ” (in reference to the first man created in the bible). Frankenstein refers to his creation as creature, fiend, spectre, the dæmon, wretch, devil, thing, being, and ogre.
Sort of like civilisation.
I am inside and yet I see skin. I see as I write. Inked skin. Conceptually beautiful. But this skin is not befriended by the uninked. By the flesh and blood body who thinks in a way I do not. This is a flesh and blood and sinew and neuron and muscle and gut and hair and vein and capillaried expression of… probably all of us.
A SIGN
Yes, that also. To beggars and what people of other ways of thinking call “homeless” and “addicts” and “dropouts” and (funny one) “reprobates”. But we are acknowledged by them. They know us. Nods. Shy smiles. Even an occasional bow. Fisher King in ragged lands. Clans of madness in somebody’s or some bodies’ thinking.
ALBION
That we build up images? And we are told stories that promise nothing, because there never was a fact to any of it?
Like wild white water falling over a cliff. The division wilts. The separation cannot be maintained. I reach for squirrel, but he is gone. I know he is still busy and how sad he is that his forest is now concrete, and his mate never happened. But did. Then didn’t. And all this storing away of food that might one day be necessary is just an excuse to not stop.
I am the canary in the coalmine. We all are. Whether in one body or he body of earth. And I am terrified.
SITKA SPRUCE
I dug deep into my flesh. Covered her in ink. Ancestral storybook and no, I’m not nothing, when I touch…
the wildwood and fen and hunter and hunted
frost and rock render and mist heart of the lake
mountain broken ships curraghs off inish mór
peat rain rot upon this forest floor
reindeer wolfhound boar cattle
hen black bear and quiet after crying
tectonic plates to the chalk of the conchearca
ash of volcano and stone out of brodgar
midnight sun rent arctic river wind’s warning
mother ocean seals snow geese and dead mariners
bell of the red stag and map of my coastlines
piper of eagles and clan gathered for winter
drums of all people the roots of vast forests
what am I if we are forgotten bee swarm and owl head
How did it start? Was there some calling, or a plethora of inexplicable awes and confusions, when you were a child? Was it seen? Heard? Was there a something that is no longer remembered? Were you too afraid, or was the experience so profound, you told no one. Because you didn’t understand, so maybe were scared. Not of the it, but of what could happen to you if you told?
RUNG TWO —Religion
You create a form of prayer. Something apart. Seemingly both holy and special. But it is nameless because it has been smothered by religion, the only mirror in a concrete world. So you do what is both rebellious and same. Someone has invented a new one. I know about that. Did you know I know about that? Of course. Because I, also, have been there.
RUNG THREE—Specialisation
So you hunt stories that fit. You transfer worship from a word called god to a word called goddess. Sometimes you put the two in the same sentence, thinking that’s fair. Can’t be biased. What do women think? That we have left rung two for rung three? No. Divisionism is created.
RUNG FOUR—Importance
Now come the predictable accoutrements. You have heard of robes and candles and incense so you create patterns that set you even further apart from others. This often causes deeper rifts. Within families — apathetically, inconsequentially or emphatically — enmeshed in the behaviour of rung two. They don’t want you to do this journey down. It is radical. It is sinful. They are afraid for you. Of you. You offend them. They have been advised about what happens to bad people when their flesh dies, and they are terrified for you. For a soul. A word without meaning. Terror can go one of two ways, aggression or retreat, and you stand your ground because, you are certain, you are on rung four and they are back there on rung two. To your mind, kudos.
RUNG FIVE—Holiness
So now you have it set. You do all the appropriate things for one who is stepping deeper into the labyrinth. You have your robes, your incense, your candles, a recipe, also, by other radicals (you think) who carved this territory. You raise your arms to the full moon and you invent and agree to a gender. You gender earth. You who are woman, supressed, shut up, shut down, forced to breed, have your teeth knocked out and your body used to satisfy, while wondering should I also feel something other than this expansion and contraction of a vagina around whatever? You seek to experience rung one, but, you think, on my own terms. Do others resent you for it? Of course. This is what rung five is all about. Being appropriate. Men are left to compromise. Get batshit angry at exclusion. Continue to aggress earth. To be excluded, or revered for serving those who desire war or whose maiming fascinates the self-righteous.
Is any of it right? Who defines right or wrong? Are the two not constructs, flaunting galaxies as less significant than an opinion?
RUNG SIX—Theft
You raise in the invented hierarchical rank to claim some title that, despite the warning, silently remains the confusion of rung two that, in some, artistic but artificial way, induces a feeling of both euphoria and altitude. You are climbing down, down deep but you convince yourself (maybe others) that this is ascension. You are better than anybody else. Not free, mind you, just more important. You name stuff. You claim credentials as high priest or high priestess. Of something. You now possess an authoritative opinion as to what that is. I know, I’ve been here. I believed it also.
So somewhere you learned of initiation. That’s akin to when a relationship is told by someone, somewhere, to go to the next level. You add that to the mix. Initiation at the hands of another human representing whatever you have been enticed by that has the most danger, but no consequence.
Because there is an illusion of danger (like being initiated at the point of a sword and threatened and devoting yourself to some invented deity, oaths you ought not betray, secrecy akin to the food of faerie) but without recognisable consequences, you eventually think what or who, in a so-called past that is both mysterious and other than white bread and margarine, can I use as a mirror?
Oh, that would be Egypt, or the jungles of the Amazon, or the inhabitants of the lands and species all but conquered, and ravaged, that either face extinction or have ceased, altogether, being what they once bred as. We will raise them up in our image. Or, at least, what we romance — seduce — ourselves into thinking were/are/represent.
You want to be them. You take what you want. Or think you do. Dust really.
So you take up the colours of Africa, Turtle Island, Gondwana, India, Persia, the South Pacific, or those buried in endless sand and tundra, but that archaeologists dug up, and mutilated, calling the corpses and grave goods discoveries. For display and academic recognition, even while secretly knowing someone who came before them actually put them there intentionally. A bit like saying fuck you, I don’t care.
The mummies are all royalty, you are told, or were in some way wiser than you are now, so you must learn the surface of the Rosetta Stone and mimic what you guess. Who, you conclude, after hundreds of years of specific religious indoctrination, they were.
RUNG SEVEN—Ritual (repetition)
Then you’re stuck with it. For what? Six months? Six years? A lifetime? For however long another human agrees to what you are pretending. Your specialness. And even while doing so you attend the gatherings of those on rung two because you really haven’t moved from there and deep within the secret rooms of your consciousness you know that. And you also fear the ramifications — and rightly so — of being cast out. After the xmas lunch you go wherever home is and sigh. Then you get on the phone, or visit other seekers that look and think like you and sigh even louder. You must cling to, and gather with, others who believe as you have learned to do. If you don’t the darkness, below what hints at being some final rung, is what? Bottomless?
You cling to rung six. The candles, the incense, the accoutrements. But you add stuff. Stuff you have stolen from others. People with a culture you neither have, nor are. You learn to make the dream catcher, to beat the drum while singing with the invader’s tongue, explaining in the invader’s accustomed narrative. To speak of Earth Mother and Sky Father, as though this is your real language. Very often suggested by a half naked and nubile warrior-looking cartooned girl/woman with extreme breasts and a leopard by her side that is obviously present as a companion, or else a bearded warrior man, with leaves weaving in and out of his face and mouth and a sword, or an AK47 in his hands. The people throwing rocks at tanks not part of this.
Yet.
Do you secretly know you do not honour those from whom you steal but mimic? Still stealing? A culture not your own. Bitter, within the shadows, that you have not been claimed by them despite how you lie? But you did it first. You made it known beyond the privacy of your four walls or the asylum outpatient clinic. So others will follow. There was a movie called Field of Dreams, oh, in the deeply historic past of 1989 and don’t even know that if you build it they will come is the screenplay version of Canadian novelist W. P. Kinsella’s 1982 book, just as Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land was the inspiration for the current group titling themselves Church of All Worlds (for the tax perks). Please read that group’s title again so we are certain we are on the same page re this rung. Certainly, nothing comes from nothing but, then, where is your research?
RUNG EIGHT—Convincement
You realise you can make a buck from all this gathering of reasons for existence. So you experiment with different products to make incense. You get good at making crowns to sell because aren’t there queens and kings in all this? Significant things. Stuff beyond Marvel, ergo it must be real? You get a gleaning that your own DNA thread may have something of significance to it so you might read the writers, like Margaret Mead or Joseph Campbell or even Carl Jung, and patchwork together an even more complex self. You dress in clothing that you think reflects what indigenous people wear; their shamans. Some allude-to ancestors. Or some ascended masters business model. You have to get fancy though because your history has been blancmange for centuries. Made beige under the weights of the persecutions of those calling themselves holy. Being beige and goodly is a. what you hate, and b. unforgivable. You can’t possibly be descended from slave owners or murderers-in-perpetuity. Can you? Or worse, peasants and factory workers. But from the depths of the labyrinth comes the breath, barely above a whisper: oh yes you can, oh yes you are. So you keep an even more delusional distance from rung two and get loud. Defending rights. Anyone’s rights. Anyone you consider also repressed, because aren’t you? Weren’t you? At two or three or four or five. When you opened that first gift under the tree, or searched for that first chocolate egg that was supposedly from a bunny, that you have told yourself is really a goddess of spring, condescendingly because by now you are sure you know it all.
Then your mother dies. Your best friend is gang-raped. Your home is razed to the ground or you lose your job and you wonder where a next meal is coming from. Or you tried that drug and phew, doesn’t that take the pressure to perform down a notch? Or the ritual wine becomes wine-o-clock and one more can’t hurt, and besides, you were offered that by the priest or the representative of this god everyone talks about and despite how they violated you, the wine was good. But let’s not remember that, unless someone speaks out first, and then it’s okay to rage.
And you wonder where all your chutzpah has gone, but you don’t show it. Somewhere, someone said if you show you’ve been harmed you might not be the all-powerful representative of some deity named for a landmass or a season (that’s conveniently forgotten or else never learned). You wake sweating, knowing none of it is real. You look the question in the eye for a mere second. You ask what’s real because everything you knew on rung one has tattered in the broken bodies, bloated on white flour, their lungs collapsing from mine dust or asbestos. Their brains turning to mush from the lollies still at the counter of the newsagency. In that split second you are afraid. In that split second you acknowledge, silently, that it is all pretence because death is real but if the crown is gold-looking enough, it could actually be gold but after another fashion. Maybe.
RUNG NINE—Existential
There you are, a long way into the abyss, checking the safety of this rung, as it is potentially the most dangerous of them all. You could fall here. Get angry. Get bitter. Make division your weapon against being nobody special, after all. You see your grandmother buried and, although she was a poet and an activist against the poaching of elephants or in defence of the whale or the endangered penguin, she got old, became incontinent, got put in a home and conveniently dies, her legacy forgotten, her will empty of useful things like money. And the people from rung two still hold all the aces because she is put in a box. There is a nice xian service. The box seems to burn in some 2000 degree Fahrenheit fire intended to erase her completely, or else she is put in the ground with a plethora of other corpses, all in neat rows until a housing development is approved, and stone (in some deep parody of ancient memory) erected that says when she was born and when she was dead, and who loved her, as though she hadn’t also lived for a trillion years in some form or another until she became what we recognise as an individual of a particular species. In difference to every other species, that we cannot consider, because if we thought we were as impermanent as them we could not destroy them as we choose for the newest iPhone or Adidas trainers. No. We take the position as vegetarian. We add that to the list of holy things and we do not ask what vast forests were destroyed for the almonds or the soy.
But the rats are now free of the laboratory cages and the seed of pointlessness sprouts on the kitchen windowsill.
Is any of it real? Has anyone got the truth? Are their aliens among us? Are you descended from angels? Is the awakening 888 when once it was 777 and before that, it was Crowley’s 666. No. Between them is/has been 11:11 therefore you are important and your god is sending you messages so just keep up with the trend.
But then even that popular phenomenon gets old. Cotton now killing water. The proponents of that yesterday-trend shuffling like crazy and oops, fuck me, you better garment yourself in the title of elder and make that the significance because otherwise… well, we know what happened to grandmother. But you still need the wine. You still need to be a radical pot smoker but now you call it cannabis to be on trend. And act all smug despite what happened to all those kids who smoked your hydro too young and felt the need to kill their bodies at twenty three.
And you get fat. You are allowed. All the other pagans are fat, aren’t they? You go to pagans in the pub and eat a meal and wonder what to talk about and hope you are seen, are recognised as belonging, got the outfit right, know the true way. But then the diabetes kicks in and the hips become sore and you have to hide all that because you’re supposed to remain forever-young.
And alone at night. Or with a wife/husband that you love, don’t you? Despite not really being yourself around them because they, too, could leave, even if it means living on the street in a tent. You think, I could do that, don’t think I couldn’t except you haven’t, so far, except on that camping weekend.
RUNG TEN—Don’tLook Down
Now, here you are. At a severe and very real crossroads. You’re back is to the wall in your secret place. Your adamancy for self-expression and being appreciated now for show because how else to remain significant? And you look down. Your foot feels for the reassurance of yet another rung but there isn’t one. It’s all fall from now on.
You have two choices: one is to cling to the significance of every rung, just a bit of each, and hang there until you are a cadaver on the slab in a morgue, being filled with formaldehyde, after lying in the stark hopelessness of a hospital bed still believing in meaning but knowing that, with depths comes an erasure of self because no one can tell you what happens in the blackness of that potentially endless fall.
Or you can let go. And find out.
When does this happen? Is this death? You can be twelve or ninety eight (random ages). Still wondering what death is. Being deluded into believing it won’t happen if… if….
The thing is, no one has come back from the real thing to explain eternity. Having your bits seeming to stop for seconds, maybe minutes, until the defibrillator shocks your heart, is not an experience of death but a pause in life. Anything you have to say does not explain the abyss because you’re not still flying.
RUNG ELEVEN—The Calling
Did I know rung ten? Yes, and no. Have I died? Very young, yes. Then several more semi-deaths and deaths that didn’t remain. Was I resuscitated? Obviously. Was I called? Yep. At rung two. The question has always been obfuscated by every other rung I climbed down to this point. By what?
By what was I called?
By what were you called? Or were you? Or was being a brat to your sister or your mother or your father the entire reason for challenging rung one?
Bob Dylan won a Nobel Prize in the year (on the Gregorian calendar) of 2016. Did you grow up with his poetry? Did you hear the lyrics and fear? Did you experience a visceral reaction when you first heard Desolation Row? Do you understand his prophesies, in retrospect? Because you’re there now. Even if you have a top floor apartment, with subtle lighting and Uber meals delivered at your beckoning, overlooking the bay. With the dog. The question becomes the only light bright enough to see by. Because this is better, I have the ketamine. I can get away with snorting a little more cocaine.
What happens when you let yourself realise that in the hugeness of an observable, named-by-some-fucker universe, you are nothing? When all that remains of all this seeking for meaning, that became something else, something tainted, something caged, is the question what was it for?
RUNG TWELVE—Seeking Rung Thirteen
When you first began this journey down the bone ladder you were so full of hope. So nourished by delusion. So adamant. So certain of your rightness. That you had meaning. That you could heal or make, or speak or decorate or sing or drum or play the harp or the uilleann pipes or, or, or.
You know you are nothing.
Except…
One might ask oneself is there a difference between falling and flying? The outcome is generally the same. From the observation of what is known as gravity, anyway. That’s the problem with observation. It is not realised from the point of view of the observed. Usually. At least not the object that didn’t walk away. Observation is not experiential. Observation is the perception of an experience. Is it often repeated? Well, that’s the difference between falling and flying, isn’t it?
Crack. The resin buried deep within the log could no longer remain dormant under the intensity of the fire. The tiny explosion adjusted the blaze in the hearth. The embers momentarily opened their impossibly red eyes and a shower of sparks sprayed up the chimney.
Fáith is not distracted. Not one part of her. She holds the ash shaft securely in the vice while she shaves the fluff from within the follicle of the feather.
She takes it gently between the tweezers and releases the vice. She uses the tiny badger hair brush to line the follicle with a breath of glue. She fixes it to the wood, equidistant from the two white gander feathers. They face towards the bow. The black, the king fletch—the goose fletch—faces away. She does this arrow after arrow. Hour after hour.
Outside the cottage is a world of silence. That certain blue that only seen on a frozen landscape at night. No wind. Utter stillness. The air thin. Birch and rowan bejewelled with icicles, spruce tufted with snow, the ground thick with it, both powder and firn.
The wolf lies on his rug at the grate, his lids half closed, his head on his forepaws. Both he and Fáith seem at peace, relaxed. Like sister and brother from the same mother their hearing is flawless. If there is a sound to be heard—the jangle of a bridle, the kick of a heel against a flank, the sound of breath they will hear that. From miles away. Whether on foot, on horseback or riding the reindeer-pulled sled, if the otherkind try to approach the two will be gone. There is no other way to travel this far into the forest. Any petrol-driven vehicle will run out of fuel at least a day before it reached this remoteness.
Fáith was not born here but she has grown up here. She is this place.
Her da had lived to forty but her mam had died when her child was just one year old.
Her da and his wolves had stalked the kill with Fáith secured to his back in a finely crafted leather-and-weave cradle board. To get her used to their territory. Her mam had hunted those razor-toothed, iron traps the otherkind had ordered set to catch the wolves. Or the people.
She’d missed the one that took her leg off at the ankle. She died before Fáith’s da found her, the blood like crimson butterflies on the snow, her mam seemingly the creature itself, just sleeping.
Fáith knew they were after her. The Church. That crazy species of two-legged otherkind with their vengeful god. Their belief that their species was superior and chosen. That hers must be saved. Brought in and saved. She knew they lied about her people, an Lucht Súille. Indigenous hunter gatherers.
Wolves are always wild. There is no such thing as a tame wolf. When the otherkind had first contact with an Lucht Súille they had thought the wolves that travelled with them were domesticated. They shot anyway and those not struck down had fled, the people not shot rounded up and herded. They had been forced to walk that long walk. It was only then that the otherkind realised that two-legged and four were pack and that both were wild. It was the word wild that was the confusion. Tame was what? Safe?
Tame is not safe, Fáith muses as she attaches a nock and a broadhead to each of the twenty four arrows. Tame is vulnerable.
To make this forest safe for their enterprise the Patron, the title of the leaders of those who claimed an Lucht Súille’s ancestral lands—before the burning of vast tracts of forest, before the railway, before the cities—had devised the systematic hunting of her people. When they worked out how to parley, the interpreters gave an Lucht Súille two choices: adapt and settle in the cities or live on the land allotted them. Land without forest called a reservation. They were supposed to make do and not hunt anymore. They were to have nothing to do with wolves.
Some of her people thought adaptation might provide better for their families, in the fast-growing cities. Working for the foreigners. They left the reservation. They lived in small rooms, crowded, in upright coffins. Cinderblock flats. Alcoholic. Shunned because of the slight slant of their eyes, the clan tattoos. Thought of as barbarians. Eaters of the raw dead.
They ate what the shop owners sold them. They ran up debts because they did not understand money. White flour and bread. Sugar, a new food. Canned staples. What meat they could pilfer was old or rancid. No fish. They worked the roads to pay their bills. They had nothing. A relentless cycle. They were subject to disease, to liver failure and diabetes. They got fat and died young. Their children lost their language and their lore.
Many of the people who used to live where Fáith now sleeps had fought back. They had fought from the tree line, not wanting to venture onto the wrongness that was now pasture where once the forest had dwelled, habitat and mother, from before time. They all died. They brought down a merciless punishment on the women and children, the elders, who had not fought also. It was all slaughter then. Just forty-seven years ago. The otherkind had guns, Fáith’s people the axe and the bow.
Fáith’s parents were second generation reservation people. They had become lovers because their own parents were all close: knowledge holders. From different clans they shared secrets freely now. Those secrets, and anLucht Súille lore of both clans, were told to Fáith’s mam and da. In case of hope. In case of a future. So that the knowledge of who the people truly were did not vanish from the world.
Her parents had escaped, and it was years before their absence came to the attention of the authorities. Punishment had been the murder of all the known knowledge holders, including Fáith’s grandparents.
Her mam and da had known how to call to the wolf in the correct manner. Politely. How to honour the hunt trails. To honour the kill. To stay alive. To live well. To follow the dragon lines, the ancient ley lines the nomadic must travel in order to honour the seasons of the year.
The wolves understood the nuance of the language of their two-legged cousins. They had hunted and shared the hearth with them for millennia. They remembered. They led the runaways to the furthest, still untainted territory within the forest where they lived in isolation. Where Fáith was born. The wolf, upon his rug, is the son of the pup placed within her crib on the day of her birth. Fáith has lived twenty winters and this pup, five.
The second last thing she does for the night is to clean the tools her da had made for her. Put them into their individual compartments of the chamois bag with the straps. Stow this into the pack—tough leather, reindeer hide—that she keeps beside the door alongside the quiver of twenty-four arrows, just below the frame that supports the recurve bow. Her da had made that for her from the wood of the mountain ash just a year ago. He had crafted it especially for her. She was given it the night of her initiation. The night her da had inked the first of her clan tattoos into the skin of her face with the ink made from the soot of the mountain ash. The perfect blue line from her left ear, across her cheek, over her nose just below her eyes and on to her right ear.
Just months after he did this for her he died. She gave him to the crows and hawks and bears, the way she had been taught, for all of us are food.
The last thing she does is to pull down her snowshoes. The wolf is instantly on his feet. He prances to the door in anticipation.
They move in silence deeper into the forest. Far enough so that the smell of their urine will not attract anything back to the cottage.
That night they sleep curled together on the rug before the hearth, like puppies, the smouldering back log sending off no sparks. This is how it is done.
The next day they hunt from the hint of silver-pale predawn until well into the blue and shadow of the night. Fáith carries all her weapons and wears her pack on her back. Game is scarce this deep into winter. All they bring down are two hares. White. Only visible by their movement. Fáith shoots the one and has time to slit it from throat to groin, gut it and skin it before the wolf finally stops tormenting the other, with a defining snap to its neck. A race the hare would have won a month earlier or a month later.
The wolf carries his quarry back, tossing it high in the air and pretending it is still alive. Fáith eats the rich, warm liver and heart of her kill, tossing the remaining offal to the wolf. She guts and skins his trophy before returning it to him whole. As is fair.
Winter fur. Good hides. She will use them to thicken the lining of her boots.
Splitting the silence of the night, the jangle of harness. A baying. Fáith and the wolf are instant stillness. Which direction? They waited. To the south was the high squeal of a winter hawk echoes through the rarefied air. A warning.
Now attuned, the pair wait. Their enemies are many miles away. Still unknowing. The advantage is with the hunted.
The whuffle of a horse’s nostrils, the snow giving way beneath hooves. Four horses. Two hounds. That means four men; less probably because they’ll need at least one horse for supplies. Even odds if confronted. Unless they have rifles. They are bound to have rifles.
And the scent of blood is upon the snow. The red of it a deep stain. None of the hunters will know what had been killed or by what. Woman and the wolf still hold the advantage.
The otherkind will burn the cottage but she is not attached.
They run. Most of the night. Mile after mile deeper into the snow, higher into the alpine raw.
Daylight is four hours of grey becoming white becoming grey with no horizon within the perpetual mountain. What’s the plan? None. Not anymore. They follow the caribou trails north through nights lit by green and amber borealis, grandmother of rivers, teaching the deepest ones the sorcery of silence that the brooks and burns are too young to comprehend. It is the silence of the oldest boulders that pock this tundra.
She gathers kindling and easy to snap elder wood, uptorn roots from this or that ancient storm for nightlong warmth. She builds their fire to the side of the entrance of shelter to dissuade the curious predator from trespassing a sleep of peace. These sanctuaries are lava tubes, remnants of the mountain’s savage and molten history, countless millions of years ago.
Freedom. No domination. She will not let them down. If they are all that remains, so be it. They are these mountains, this snow, the ways of the thunder and the black water beneath the frozen river. The two are bonded for life and, while with this land there is no death.
They sleep curled together for warmth beneath a vault of the blue ochre handprints of once-upon-a-time children.
If we have the distinct and unfathomable continuum of living in a body long enough for it to age, we have choices. How do we do make them? What is life for? Can we distance ourselves, in the so-called West, from the contagion of disrespect and yes, assumption, of expected disintegration? We do slowly discorporate. Of course. But the external pressure to be thought of, by both ourselves as well (if not moreso) by a wider public, as decrepit with advancing aging, has been entrenched in society as long as I’ve been aware.
The phases of being alive have been forced on us. The delineations. I consider them immature and limited. No one does so with magpies. Or sheoaks. Or sky. Why do we accept this enforcement?
So don’t. It is insane.
A POTENTIAL BLUE PILL
When I had lived a nineteen/twenty earth-to-sun ratio I conceived and birthed a child. Due to my insistence that I could raise him non-traditionally he was not taken from me, as happened to so many young women who did not ascribe to the marriage experience.
There was no government assistance so from that infant’s initial months of living I I had to have a job. I was employed as an assistant nurse in one, of what would become many, geriatric hospitals. The first few nights were tricky because I did not take medication to dry the breastmilk, electing, instead, to wrap my torso in cottonwool, and to wind clingwrap around it all to avoid the inevitable leaking.
Nightshift. Old Peoples’ Home. One way door to a coffin for the rejected. That’s what ‘retirement villages’ were called in the 1970s. I cleaned the bedsores of 50 year old women who had been partially paralysed by stroke. I dressed the Orkney ex-soldier, of two world wars, in his best tweed, because it was his birthday and he thought his family was coming; they never did. I saw his eyes. I assisted highly-qualified health workers to tie people with dementia to chairs to stop them wandering to where they thought home was. I wept when the women was left under a shower without the cold tap on to mitigate the burning. That no one noticed until too late. My disgust, at the estimated thousand ‘nymphs’, sucking the life from the person trapped in an immovable, but breathing, body, when I pulled back the bed covers to clean her because of incontinence.
I know horror.
The senior staff and I racing two adult, captured, cockroaches down the corridors at 3 in the morning to keep ourselves awake. The inmates (erroneously called patients) fed a semblance of food, who received no compassion, were admonished when the drooled: pills in a kidney tray with their name on it, the effects unknown to staff. A slow erasure of individuation and identity.
WHERE DOES THE OLD IPHONE END UP?
No one came. They–you–were (are) discarded. I have left out the more nauseating cruelties I have witnessed, as that is not the point. These discarded people travelled, wrote or painted, were survivors of hurricanes and holocausts played chess, gyrated to the rhythm of the erotic, drank absynth, defied acceptability perhaps, were academics, walked the streets by the thousand for fair pay, fought against the White Australia Policy, raised families in an era of strict gender roles and intense xianity. Knowing that to deviate was to be shunned, some did so anyway (I know, I asked for their stories, over tea and toast, and the centrefold of Cleo magazine at 11 PM, and was graced and astounded).
They were being punished for becoming “elderly”.
CONTRIVED GRAMMAR
What I heard, and am still hearing, in the word “elderly” is feeble. A fragile, redundant human animal. I was always offended by the word. It may have been to do with what I had seen, the shocking treatment of people who had once held, so lovingly and wildly, to hope. That there was meaning to being alive. Instead I stared into the eyes of despair and confusion. No wonder, never wonder, just a dreadful realisation.
The point? “Elderly” is a description. NOT a noun. It wasn’t until I was driving to the gym one morning just five years ago, in Melbourne, that I saw a sign directing the public to the Coburg Elderly Citizens Centre that I realised what had irked me for all those years. We don’t see it, do we? A statement is repeated enough times it ceases to be questionable. I DO understand how this indoctrinates. Others, perhaps, drive past thinking (if they even take notice), ‘that’s not me. Not yet. What do they do there?’ Not even questioning the phrases we have simply been taught to accept.
WISDOM-HOLDER
Oh, love. A person who has lived twenty years; a person of the age I had been when I gave birth and then worked in those terrible places, if called elderly; if intelligent, would be complimenting them so–by community, family, peers, society–because they are wise. They are elder-like.
The elders of many tribal and indigenous groups, worldwide, are revered. They are wisdom-keepers. Memory-palaces. Are we also them? If not, why not? We have stories of a social and environmental era that someone of fifteen could never imagine. Life before screens? Before mcdonalds and uber? Before superannuation? Long before we realise that The Truman Show is a horror story and the Hunger Games is herding us through catastrophic competition.
Why we live, whatever ideology or philosophy is picked up along the journey that provides a potential glimmer of meaning for being in a body and self-aware, requires vigilance. BECAUSE IT MAY NOT MATTER. How we live, what we learn, being strong, daring, communicating, listening, being heard. Awake to some exquisite unrealised energetic arrangement of synaptic lightning, with secrets that the caterpillar cannot know… while caterpillish.
40
The transition to that of an elder begins around forty. What to release? What to mirror self on? Panache and a grappling; with unique style. With words and story–no matter the art–that is relevant. There’s the key.
THE RED PILL
We are starlight. Is that literal? Yes. From all I have learned, yes. There is so much hype to deconstruct. If I advise anything it is to not only be wild but intelligent. To break the mould of societorial derision and…
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