In the long ago when the world made sense and humans didn’t do so much talking, wolves ran free across the world. Then the new people manifested from some hidden old greed-land, that the badger folk forgot to close the door to, and they decimated the people of the old ways, killing their stories which were also their souls. Killing off the wolves if the wolves were their totems. Scared of everything.
There are hides and hollows and hedges in the world where the otter people and the raven people still live, keeping the stories of the long ago alive for those willing to listen.
The story of La Loba is that of an old woman living hidden in plain sight in places that everyone knows that most people don’t know. Clarissa Pinkola Estés says, She’s been seen travelling south in a burned out car with the back window shot out… or riding shotgun with truckers[1].
When she’s not getting up to mischief with other animal people La Loba gathers the bones of the long dead wolves that lie white under moonlight, scattered across the ancient land, until she has a complete skeleton. Then throughout the depths of night she works her magic, finally giving her breath. Come dawn the wolf is enchanted into life, yips with laughter, licks her face, pauses for mere seconds before running, wild and delighted, toward the tree-line.
MYHIC REALITY
When I first learned this story I thought it just another folk tale because I didn’t understand. Now I do. She has been in a desert that sooner or later we all travel. A seemingly barren place that, in truth, is not. Finding sustenance there can only happen with familiarity and through the teachings of the old people who know these stories.
La Loba is in every woman, as is the wolf, as is the free woman she becomes.
The many mythic people in my story are to remind us that we are all still in the long ago. That the people in mythworld are very real and that we are being fooled by creatures not always like us. Not always with our stories or our best interests at heart. That we have as much right to be here as they do. That they should not fear us just because they do not remember the way of us.
We must protect La Loba wherever in the world she turns up. Offer her a place beside the fire. A bed for the night in exchange for what’s in that pouch hanging off her belt or what she’s got clutched tight in that fist. Or in her remembering. Or maybe just because of the relief we feel when she comes to our door in the first place.
A MEMOIR OF THIS
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.
SOMEONE TO KNOW US
Initiation is a mapped and charted experience that many people do not understand or recogniSe 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 realize 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 realize 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 recognise 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?
RUN WITH THE PACK
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.
Water, water, every where, And all the boards did shrink; Water, water, every where, Nor any drop to drink.
A person who has died and finds they are awake, as though death was but a dream, knows not, if they are honest, what was experienced between.
Terror shrouds experience with a warning barely whispered, though none know of what is said, and when another tries to comprehend the words, there’s nothing, because no one can hear what they don’t understand. We only think we listen.
We don’t. Listen. Is it that we don’t or is it just too overwhelming to hear some challenge to good cheer, and to remember how to think? How we think? What they are saying? What we say and how? What they think.
I’m sure, I’m sure I saw, I did, I saw the Raven blink. With throats unslaked, with black lips baked, We could nor laugh nor wail; Through utter drought all dumb we stood! I bit my arm, I sucked the blood, And cried, A sail! a sail!
Those stairs around the spiral wall are dented smooth as pillows Where nuns once led into the darkened crypt and told you without words; that no, not sky above but more, that doom is question’s destination And manacles of iron that blunt memory with deceit and land you, instead, In an open sea of mental-hunted monsters, amidst sharks that still have fins, Or else a field of blighted hunger, mostly rotten for the poor, White flowers for a wife’s bouquet of years before, but wait… Is that the raven at my door?
And every tongue, through utter drought, Was withered at the root; We could not speak, no more than if We had been choked with soot.
You bought it all, that life was best when death was done and dusted But they lied and now you have no choice but to remember It’s late December and drought defies the sentiment that snow will surely come. Did I have a voice this time last year? Or was I that fucken dumb because I KNOW there should be snow, so… And that the raven’s curse has come.
The many men, so beautiful! And they all dead did lie: And a thousand thousand slimy things Lived on; and so did I.
Living is a paradox of lies and love, and waiting for some recognisable something Burning hope in ribboned packages that will take a memory To break the story and set the listener free. That’s christmas. It never was the childhood thing once told to me. A homeless man so desperate for what is called a family. So now he waits, just like predation, to tell a story that he wishes had died instead of everything he thought he had that drowned in that shimmering sea. That blew him apart with all that hated, fated insane hope. Be careful, I’m like him, I took the bait and raised the sail And watched her catch the wind.
Beyond the shadow of the ship, I watched the water-snakes: They moved in tracks of shining white, And when they reared, the elfish light Fell off in hoary flakes.
A person who has died and finds themselves awake as though that death was but a dream knows not, if they are honest, what they experienced was thin air. So they listen to the music until their ears rot black with blight And hide that beast, that hulking thing that said this stuff is meant to feed the hunger, When no one remembers who they once had been and how they should beware, That the raven is the sorcerer of the darkest night, or here, too full of light.
But destiny demands her alms, her story that is twisted, like witches in the aftermath of christmas, she is pregnant with the silence of a tale I should remember of some bitter cold December, and I am doomed to tell the one who’s happy please, just go; to quickly, fucken quickly, fucken slam that fucken door, because this killer heat should be just one degree, ice heavy on the river,
But canisters of snorted snow have not enabled us to know That the raven’s in, ragged with dust, and he whispers, Nevermore.
All in a hot and copper sky, The bloody Sun, at noon, Right up above the mast did stand, No bigger than the Moon.
Day after day, day after day, We stuck, nor breath nor motion; As idle as a painted ship Upon a painted ocean.
Water, water, every where, And all the boards did shrink; Water, water, every where, Nor any drop to drink.
So the woman and the raven ask two question: why do we do what we think is important when we can never know the consequences until retrospectively? And then repeat it as though it will work out better the next time?
if we don’t dissect these stories, if we just them without seeing our situations reflected in them or if we don’t learn the inherent message they convey.
THE SECRET LANGUAGE OF MYTH
THE REAL SNOW WHITE
Quite possibly we’ve lived through centuries of propaganda. Stories and news and traditions that we are told represent us. Or the truth. Or things we must believe. Stories we either simply enjoy without realizing that they were actually sticking to the ribs of our sense of ourselves or, eventually, take for granted as commonalities within ours and others’ cultures. Sometimes quirky tales of fairies and seal people, bigfeet and wicked step-mothers, other times messages that we eventually wear as spiritual and mystical garments, like underworld and afterlife, reincarnation and justice, karma, you create your own reality. Yes, and happy ever after.
How do they stack up under an, empirical perhaps, lens?
When I was little I was given a big thick book of stories. Not like now with Where The Wild Things Are or How to Train Your Dragon but old, old tales, from Alice Through the Looking Glass to the Pied Piper. Even Dick Whittington and his cat.
And, speaking of the Pied Piper, has anyone guessed at the date at the end? Or wondered how the Sword in the Stone proclaims a destined wisdom holder and teacher (forget he word king, it’s loaded), or what Snow White really is about, and how the brothers Grimm seduced us all long before Disney?
We grow up with a skewed view of the human race, even other species, earth, language and truth, if we don’t dissect these stories, if we just them without seeing our situations reflected in them or if we don’t learn the inherent message they convey.
SNOW WHITE
That Uppity White Woman
Mother tried to drown me when I was born. Our culture does not allow albinist children to live. Bad luck. I’d cause pointless hunting. I’d dry up the milk of cattle. I’d be responsible for shriveling the penises of men, and causing babies to be spat out of a woman’s womb not a month into pregnancy. We reminded them of the old days. The stone and antler cave days. We reminded them of who we truly are before the world seemed to become tame. I arrived, unfortunately for her, at the time of the deep, dark, frozen cold.
But Father—crow-black hair and amber-eyed, a mouth full of laughter, strong-armed and deep-voiced—stopped her, and spirited me away. He took me to Manna, a miniwikin not long birthed of a dead person, her big, full breasts futilely overflowing and causing her pain. He carried me through fear-high drifts of snow, keeping me alive bundled in goose feather pillows and fox skins, and he dropped me down into the midwife’s lap, even without her say-so. Men. Go figure what they see in some of us? He told me later that her eyes went wide with both fear, and that other thing that happens to some at the sight, smell, and touch of a newborn, though mewing, violet-eyed kitten of a kid that I was. She told me, in later years, that her milk dripped right off, making cold the front of her smock, right down to the tool belt.
So there I was. Like a limpet sucking sustenance from a tide-bound rock pool.
Mother raged at Father when he got back to the dun. Fuckwit! Call yourself a king? For goodness sake, you’re supposed to be a fucking man! It’ll be the laughing stock! Don’t you dare ever say it came out of me, I’ll have your balls on my breakfast toast quicker’n you can squeal, you muthafucking, wetnosed, nostalgic wimp of a man! And she’d not humped him all winter after that.
Well I just kept on being a white-as-winter four-legged, left to myself most of the time, or else hanging out with the dogs. I got no evil eye from the villagers: not goodwife nor hunter, blacksmith or tanner. Nor any of the animals neither. Especially not Spud. As pale as me, he is, but nobody ever gives him a hard time for the color he was born to. He’s big as a fucking pony and destined to head the sled team when he’s fully trained in the traces. Life’s been me and him from as far back as I can remember.
Mother… what’s her name again? You know those words that are so cruel on the tongue you forget them on purpose somehow? Like widow-makers. You know what they are? Sometimes hunters pitch a tent for the night, sheltering till brother blizzard passes, then crack, in their sleep, that massive lower branch snaps under the weight of too much ice, killing every one of ‘em.
A bit too smartfor your own good, is what Manna says, time and again, when I say stuff like that about the woman who bore me, who I sometimes see at a distance—at the market or down by the pier, at the ships, bringing treasure from the East. Manna suggests I keep thoughts like that to myself, but who am I supposed to tell anyway? Other kids? The other kids? I’m as white as the fucking snow and not even a freckle to break up the ghost of me. No. Other kids learned early not to look in my direction. Playing is what sled dogs are for. Spud and the others.
Mother looks my way from a distance. I know who you are, Mother. By your crown. Narrow heavy metal line around hair the color of a dangerous autumn forest, eyes hooded, as though you’d rather not see me. I’m supposed to be dead, I know. A thin line to your lips suggesting what? Hatred? Your gaggle of my honey-skinned siblings, their hair as black as Father’s, dressed in finely-woven, woad-dyed wool, fine ermine and bear fur for their shoulders, walking behind you with the grace that the privileged are taught at your knee. At your command. None of them know about me, do they?
Father keeps the miniwikin in ample stock. For payment, I guess. Not that Manna cares. I was her pride right from the getgo, and only her own mother and Robert The Axe—the man who loves her and shares her bed—knows. And even though Robert is the best woodsman for mile after vast mile, keeping the houses in the dun, and outer walls of the longhouse loaded high with deep-seasoned redwood and spruce logs, peeled and quartered perfectly, he could never be paid the kind of meat that Father could provide, so he cedes my upbringing by Manna with humble grace.
That was that, and all very fine, for ten or more years. I ran with Spud and the other dogs, learned the way of the sled like a navvie, if not like a musher. I could chew rawhide to soft leather with the best of ‘em. And I gained an education in miniwikin, to the point I can identify and name every healing wort, and gathering-green, in all the valleys and on all the mountainsides, for miles and miles. I know everything from how to lance the pus from an infection, to what it takes to pull a calf from her mother, legs first.
And then I hit about twelve, I guess. I get hair under my arms and in my groin. Small round mounds where my nipples, until now, have been of little consequence. I keep this to myself of course, as I figure this to be trouble, there not being anything I haven’t seen that people with such get up to, me traveling with Manna and the sled dogs, to near a cabin for a birth or a death. Me watching from the tree line. Taboo. Getting an education from a distance. I understand rutting – sex they call it—same for a person as for a dog and a bitch, or caribou and reindeer in season. Same as foxes and wolves.
People, and me too if I’m honest, are so used to me hiding out and being this kid who disappears into the color of winter, that I’m just part of the landscape, because there is no hunting more pointless than sometimes happens anyway, there is no drying up the milk of cattle and, from what Manna jokes about, no shriveling of the penises of men or babies spat out of women’s wombs only a month or two from when they get planted.
But then my hair takes on the light of butter, and within a year that turns to amber, a little lighter than Mother’s, and I have to think of what to do next. Now, at night, I am able to be seen when I hunt with Spud. And the blood has begun. Ho. What a curse is womanhood, eh?
Worried out of her brain about all this, Manna sends for the six other miniwikins of the region, and she banishes Robbie to the forest when they come, saying go cut a brother down or something for a week, love. Shape something beautiful with your axe and knives, okay? because he is trained in forest lore, not woman magic, and therefore, for now, this is not about him The miniwikins come together one dark December night, well after midwinter and, after they’ve had copious cups of mushroom tea, I’m called inside from where I’m grooming the puppies in the byre. I sit on a stool in the firelight from the hearth, surrounded by these women, from smooth-skinned to leather-barked, all hung about with copper and bone talismans. All belted with stoppered, sap-collecting jars and, despite the warmth of the cottage, are swathed from head to foot in fur and woven linen, their skin covered voluminously in scars of sooty ink. Manna is the eldest, though not as skin-wrinkled as the others close to her age, because she’s big and round from the cuts of kill Father delivers. The best fat, the liver, the intestines. Whatever he can snaffle from the dispersion.
How much miniwikin she got? was the main question asked over the tobacco smoke from their pipes. Fire and dog, said Manna. Best dog magic EVER. That gets nods and pouts, lips scrunching like bums. It means there is a use for me. A really good thing under the circumstances, and it is all round agreed that if I ever get to looking any more like Mother she’s going to get pissed and deadly. Like winter not wanting to give way to spring. So what’s a miniwikin to do?
They stay for six more nights, and every night I am made to sit with my head in my hands and listen to the how of tracking my way to each demesne where they abide, that each of them describes. Every landscape, every river. This twisted tree, that standing stone between two hills, the cove between two headlands that looks like horns holding the moon, the lake with stones that lead to the island in the middle – but only in autumn and before the leaves fell. The road made by mules, to-ing and fro-ing from the salt mines, bowed low enough to make tarmac. Lore. Maps. I learn those places by shutting my mouth and just listening.
. . .
Then, one night not long after, Father comes, a bundle in his arms: a cloak of tanned mammoth so soft it’s like a dream remnant, despite its size. Sharp knives and scissors, needles of whalebone, the makings necessary to craft shafts, the bow already cured from last year’s ash. A cooking pot. A warning. A nod to Manna. A whispered message to Robbie. Then a look. He gives me a look. Something that, should I become snaggle-toothed, I will always remember. Is that love?
And so it has come to this. The dogs are hugged one-by-one, except for Spud, untethered and by my side, my only companion for the long haul. Manna smelling deep into my lungs, her body enfolding mine like I was fingers in her mittens, in that night of the midnight sun, just before the season turns towards the light again. Me and Rob, side by side, huffing white air into white air.
Robbie picks up a trail of the spoor of a parcel of deer. A day and a night hunting the straggler. My shot. Him gutting. Us sharing the eating of the heart. Him stowing the liver and the lungs in his satchel.
You, he explains.
Her? I respond, knowing the answer.
I love you, Snow White, is the last thing he says as I run towards the escarpment,
knowing I will never see him, or Manna, or Father, ever again. And deep, deep in the guts of me, feeling an ache that will last forever.
. . .
Now I live in a small house on the shore of Loch Sgadabhagh, on the island of North Uist, amidst the Innse Gall—the islands of the strangers—amidst the dottings of the Outer Hebrides of the coast of what is rudely called Scotland. My mothers and fathers and I have been here since long before the Vikings came, surviving it all. Enough to set the story straight, told mother to child, mother to child, miniwickin to miniwickin until nobody knows the word anymore. Except us.
I am generations down the boon-line from being Snow White, or snow of any tint for that matter, but I’m still her. Although I have a very freckled face, I am the same woman. And no matter what gets thrown at her she, too, survives. Of course: no prince, no dwarves, no glass coffin, no ebony, because what peasant knows about these things, way off on the continent, and a thousand years beyond the truth of it all? Winter thought of as a wicked, jealous queen, a bane to other women. A bad name.
You want to know my regret? Those honey-colored, crow-haired brothers and sisters are still in the world somewhere. And we have never met. We probably have such different stories and such different histories. If I could sit with them—my relatives—we could watch each other’s faces as we tell the way of legend… well, I can only dream.
The apple? The food that the shape-shifting wild weather, written of as a step-mother, really is? The poison words, that were just another way of killing me when Robbie’s deceit was uncovered? Each successive trick failing until the wicked last—that I am the pretty possession of some wealthy man…?
That apple, I think, is still lodged in the throat of the miniwickin, cut by the pen of the gatherers of what are, spuriously, called fairy stories for children. By such pompous, grim, Grimm men, and published into popularity, for the reading by girl-children, and so to fool them into believing that someone will rescue them… from what exactly? And that when the desolation of happy-ever-after becomes known for the propaganda it is?
But money talks, bullshit walks, isn’t that how the saying goes? There’s a price to be paid for hiding. There are reasons for fearing winter. And liberation mixed with threat when the thaw begins again. Because we have known all these already or we would not be alive as anyone.
The codes to crack are written in the shallows by a river and inked into ready skin. They are between polite lines and in books called fiction just in case.
We may be ready if we have rooted deeply enough into ancestral soil. We are unafraid when we know we are not alone in knowing what we do and are.
Oh, you do come across as a little weird. Someone with that many tattoos can’t be trusted. Can’t be introduced as someone serious or quite sane. A bit peculiar. A bit of a fruit loop, you must understand. Too old for those piercings. Too…
I am not like you.
The adopted people he [Dr Paul Sunderland] sees often appear very well put together.
They rarely talk about being adopted – it’s just by the way. When he does a bank of psychometric tests, he finds these people score very extremely high on the measure of depression, but you can’t actually see it. Sunderland[1] began to question what this was about and found there is an awful lot these people have in common…
When I was young I wanted to be like other children. To get princess compliments. No, not from my ‘family’. That was never an option. From those other children. It didn’t happen, of course. It couldn’t happen. They instinctively knew I was not one of them. By the smell of me, perhaps. That I was wrong, in some way they wouldn’t have been able to articulate, even if asked. So I just achieved more than was fitting for a girl. For a while. Endorphins are interesting like that.
Over the years it became easier to be different. There was a precedent. The era was ripe. They were promiscuous, skinny-jeans-wearing, black-lipstick days of anarchy and political disobedience, of nights sneaking out of windows to have sex in darkened laneways up against a wall. Times of poetry and ritual, war and rage and loud music… and of rejection for being different. Because I was not like them, and even though the era gave the hope of freedom to other girls, I was trapped. I would never be them.
I was born a mammal. Squeezed from an unwilling vagina, cut and washed and wrapped in something to prevent my fists from pounding air. Popped into a small hospital box and put up for sale. Nothing smelled like me. No flesh, no nipple, no sigh, no grunt at the force of my suck, no eyes locked to eyes. Did you know that of abandoned children? That immediate and irreversible fear of death is our first breath? Our first milk fed to us through rubber? The hands that powder us and pin us to a diaper, a stranger’s hands? Brisk and efficient. Paid for by a hospital?
…
An abandoned child’s neurons are, at birth, irrevocably confused because there is supposed to be oxytocin. And a name. A future. A designation.
We I am not like you because I was not in the company of the person belonging to that vagina.
For the adoptee there is real fear in relationships. There is a great desire or hunger to attach, causing you to sometimes behave against your best interests, but with the conflicting feelings that this is not safe. The feelings are held in the limbic system which will always override the frontal cortex…
And no one speaks of it again. Or if they do, in later years, it is impossible to fix those broken neural pathways. Besides, it is with the voice of shame. Or with a thinking mind of I know-ness. When that is impossible because the person doing that thinking is not the relinquished person. Will never know them, because in their brain is another brain. A limbic thing of several billion electrical
impulses. Ancient and primordial. Reptilian, in fact.
That brain is not wired like yours.
When an unborn mammal is floating in the sea of an amniotic fluid for that full and airless inner lifetime, from conception to eruption, we heard the thunder of a thousand heartbeats, from organ to pulse to excitement to rage. I turned in languid sensual seal-movements, to the rumble and gurgle of bodily secretions passing along and through that glorious universe of unrealized digestive tract. The rush and whir of lung-life. The contraction of some mythic, external winter-on-skin, the grunt and rush of a masturbated orgasm. The magnesium hit of ocean-in-summer. Roller coasters of standing and lying and bending and shitting and rolling over in the night. I was prepared. An eternity of DNA and cells and neurons all promising suckle. And safety.
That never comes. So this is death. At the first breath, and the breath after and the breath after that. Left on the grass of a savannah with eagles and buzzards circling. Caul not licked off. Legs unable to stand, let alone find an udder or a pap. Lying there. Ready to be eaten. Carrion for any scenting hunter.
To never look into eyes and see yourself. Yourself in the turn of a smile. The behavior that says like mother like daughter. To never, until ejecting young from a woman-body, smell someone whose scent is like you. You think we are like you? You really think that?
…
THIS brain is not wired like yours. You might think so, but you are wrong.
The normal biology of pregnancy has the baby set up for bonding with its mother, and the mother who relinquishes her baby goes against her biology. The child experiences life-threatening abandonment. The ‘chosen child’ is the story of a child entering a family that does not genetically fit them, with an impossible job description to be someone they can never be.
We are achievers, or we are dead. By our own hands. Quite often both. One step ahead of the bullet, the blade, the syringe or the top of a tall building, the bottle. The sentence that says, in truth, you have no right to be alive. You are a sin. You are a bastard. You have brought shame upon someone you never met. Their parents. The church. You are the get of a slut. Fallen from grace. Of no name until bought. Claimed. Your new, ‘real’ identity recorded within the appropriate department of an establishment for such people as what came from so much badness. Who could not be a citizen without the legitimate banding of some man who had the money to afford their price. Who could keep his wife’s infertility a secret. If indeed that was the case. Yes, we were recorded in some register, somewhere, as an actual entity, a human being, now acceptable within the culture of both the sellers and the buyers. Paid for by a legal document. Signed into a life with strangers by a court of law.
A child now owned, and everyone pretending I belong. People playing with belief. Playing love. Causing harm. In uncountable paper cuts or other ways, unmentionable ways, humiliating and confusing to a child. Them saying, but you like it, don’t you?
But we are not like them and they do not know that, except by the look of us, so utterly unfamiliar to any of them. They thought we would comply with the pretense of family. They thought we would be a proper kid. How? We don’t know how. This is not in the handbook of the neuroscience that I we are wired for, in that ceaselessly noisy prepartum ocean. The umbilicus feeds this person something else. An ancestry that dates deep to within the sea of stars from which we all come, and something else. Before that. The atomic roar and electron kaleidoscopic particle accelerator that exploded one cell into two, with the ramming of that unrelenting sperm into that other woman’s vast and eager egg. Therein is written another story. An old, old one. That handbook said you belong! You will belong! But it unwittingly lied. That doesn’t happen. It never happens.
I am now an elder, and my relationship with rejection and shame, my intimacy with achievement and excellence, depression and isolation, is as private and unknown as the secret, hidden insubstantial fluff of a newborn empress penguin, called an emperor, raised and brought up amongst sea lions, too wet and too huge to do more than to show her that she cannot be satisfied by them, but neither is she able to know she is not one of them.
This relationship is that of the twenty one stairs in our house that I threw myself down, in an attempt to die at seven, to Valium and the acceptance of violating sex, to the wonder of understanding raven conversations, prophesy and wildness, and the dreams of the smells of a forest of fir and aspen, in a landscape I have never trod. It is an unquiet fear of nothing, that is sometimes, also, the dark, deep bottomless ocean that yes, fuck it, is occasionally a terrifying suffocation because I can never really swim to the surface.
…
AM ERASED person is not like you. You might think so, but you are wrong. I am not wired like you.
I’m adopted, I say, to someone who’s not knowing, even as I speak, that the words will only sound like the same language. Note I did not say stolen.
I wish I’d been, they sigh, giving me an opening to ask why that I refuse. As every time before.
Really? I reply, hiding this unquenchable rage with the look of guilelessness that has kept me from an asylum most of my life. The look on my face is benign. Benign with practice. On the inside I am unavailable to anything except as a deep-dark-water-drowning-person who is wishing, right now, to be aboard a saddled and gaily-tasseled camel wandering a desert in another part of the galaxy. Rather than have begun this conversation.
You think that would have made your life better? I smile.
Poker was a game, mastered in the company of a bloke-full of butchers, preferred to the threat of idleness (or even books). I only win if I play with matches, however, because addiction is such an easy hole to fall into. I’d have bet my life and lost.
Sure do, they shrug, you can’t choose your family, you know. That look on their faces. Of resignation. And the need for my compassion. No, I don’t know, I say, and so they change the subject back to them.
Do I curse the something that has kept me alive this long? That pulls at me with ribbons of inspiration? That has me thinking perhaps I’m schizophrenic but in such an unpsychiatric way that I scoff at the very notion? A something that/who cares, but cruelly? That rides me, then deserts me? That is classified as clinical depression but that doesn’t kill inspiration, only the desire to follow it.
…
The Goblin Queen’s Lost Daughter.
The human brain starts working before it is fully built. Experience is the architect of the brain. Experience is the cue for connections and hook-ups of the billions of neurons formed before birth. In other words, neurons that fire together, wire together. If life begins with a trauma of separation and abandonment, that feels life-threatening, that is how the neurons will fire and wire. The human brain is a reflective organ, reflecting on past experiences, so it would be normal for abandonment issues to always be there in relationships.
Oh, he knew about me. But there was nothing he could do, the gypsy king, this father of mine. My real mother sang him. Who would not be seduced by her? That Titania. That copper-haired, wild young faerie queen with eyes like the green-gold fruit on a hazel tree. Skin dappled with freckles from making love in the meadows and glens, under an early autumn sun. She’s known for it, you know. Stealing a handsome man’s seed for the sheer wickedness of exchanging a child of her own with a human one. Sneaking into a mortal’s hospital like a silken film of shadow, and making the swap. All to keep herself viable in the lands of the short-lived. To keep the fear and awe of her whispered about, still and then later, when I am grown. And who knew what happened to that cast-off, unwanted bastard that she took instead? Of course she informed my father of what she had done. That big, handsome, barrel-chested Rom barro. By way of one last, fleeting visit. That he had a daughter as fair as she, but that he could not know her, would not find her. She was given away to strangers. To cause havoc. As changelings are meant to do. To make him sad, as women do, to men and children not their own, in stories.
Then she was gone forever. Melted away, uncaring of his desperate why. Melted as frost does with the start of a new day.
I sat in a café in the village, sipping on long black, and reading to idle the time away, just waiting for him to arrive. Thinking perhaps he’d send my three brothers. Them knowing. For them to tell me that he has searched for me his whole life. To explain why I could never belong. They would take me to him. He would whisper of his love for the mother I would never know: that wild copper-haired sídhe from beyond the Western Isle. He would welcome me home and teach me to communicate in the language of ancestors.
But they never came. He never came.
Then there is Dickens and his orphans. Those poor children of unnamed mothers. The whelps of noblemen taking what they wanted from beautiful servant girls, who had actually been the chieftains of these lochs, glens and burns before the slaughter of their ancestors. Before the Clearances and the Pale. Yes, Copperfield could be my name.
…
Not all brains are wired alike.
The break in the mother infant bonding has an enormous impact on brain chemicals and neurotransmitters. Cortisol and adrenaline are raised in trauma, and there are reduced levels of serotonin. These things happen from very early on, and may be repeated with multiple relinquishments, which result in new and unrecognised environments. ‘Where am I’ is the constant question.
When I was a child I asked my faux mother—my owner—in secret whispers of confidentiality, Am I a foundling? Was I abandoned and you took me in? It’s alright to tell me the truth, you know, I promise to never tell.
Don’t be stupid, she replied, returning to the dishes, her back to my face.
And with that, eventually, they are all dead, so orphan can I now claim to be?
But then…
The discovery of a woman’s name on a piece of paper, eventually giving me the birthright to Celtic tribal lands as old as the enemy of the mad Emperor Claudius, and that of a woman who tamed hawks for a French royal court, and that of a Viking warlord of whom a television series is written, does not take away from the fact that my brain is not wired like yours.
I have been lied to for so long that even the truth is suspect. Even the truth can be the history of the child taken beneath the hollow hills to the garden of earthly delights, leaving me, a goblin queen’s rightful heir, to grow old amongst humans.
There is so much evidence for a trauma of relinquishment. They exhibit enormous amounts of hyper vigilance, anxiety and catastrophic thinking – because the wound was a life-threatening one. They develop shame and anxiety, afraid to show who they really are. And they develop self-reliance – ‘if you want to get something done, do it yourself’.
No. I am not like you. Is that why you look askance? Is that why you spurn my work and my inked hands? Is that why you only seek me out, shaking as you always do, in my ancient places of secrecy, to get your fortune told? Refusing to acknowledge me by your side in the daylight? Is that why you are so shocked that I am clever? Because if I look like this I’m supposed to believe some misappropriated dream-catcher shit? You court me, but you keep me from your door.
You know, but oh… you think you are not a bigot because… because…? You know something I never will. No matter how you explain with what savage force your brother raped you. No matter how utterly hypocritical and alien you feel at the family christmas dinner, or your nephew’s bar mitzvah. Yes, I hear what you say. That you would disown them, divorce them, never speak to them again if you could. How you ridicule and deride them. But you do. You know.
When you were born you were looked upon. By eyes that looked like you. Your brain, small limbic, primitive thing that it is, remembers that moment.
Mine does not.
…
I am not wired like you. Do you dare to scoff at my claim?
The developmental PTSD is stored in the limbic system, where the fight, flight or freeze response is initiated. And the limbic system deals with trauma and kicks in straight away before there is a chance to experience the feeling of rejection. These people often feel schizophrenic – living with a duality, and have an ambivalence in decision making because making decisions feels life-threatening.
Never give advice to a person with developmental trauma.[2]
And finally, now, I sit before a spit tube. A new one. The earlier company I spat at did not evaluate the Y chromosome in my DNA and, despite the gypsy king, there was no man’s name registered as responsible for inseminating the woman, or the goblin queen, within whom I, or my human counterpart, gestated for 40 weeks. And her? The human woman, that post adoption resources advised, gave birth to me…? I met her. I sat with her for one day. That could have been, considering how that unfolded, a mistake. But we’d both agreed, and I was so fucking hopeful.
I look nothing like her. The boy she confessed to having fucked, she claimed was from France. Who knows? As it stands there is only her word, and the post-adoption case worker couldn’t hunt that name down no matter how many bad nights the problem gave her.
So I sit with this second spit tube, ready to find out.
Because we, children of no one, if not dead by sixteen… we are mad by your standards. We are explained away by the pretend families. Some I know are nuts, preferring total denial, claiming that if it’s legal—if our ownership is legal—then we belong.
The White Australia Policy was legal. So was the slave trade. So was burning women to death for suspected witchcraft. So, still, is stoning for blasphemy. For loving someone of the same gender. Just because it’s on paper doesn’t make it right. Doesn’t ever make it sane.
The new baby, way before the birth day, during it and right after, is an extremely sensitive being, in fact, more sensitive than he or she will ever be during the adult life. And not only able to have all those sensations and feelings, but also to not-cognitively remember them! Our early impressions stay with us for the rest of our lives, for better or for worse. Twenty five years of thorough research and studies in the field of prenatal psychology show undoubtedly a direct correlation between the way we were born and the subconscious behavioral and emotional patterns in our adult lives. This is due to the mechanism called “limbic imprint”.
We are very familiar with establishing the basic settings in our TVs, cameras, computers… Imagine that your TV is set on “maximum blue”, then, no matter what movie is being shown on the screen, everything will be very blue; or if brightness is set on ‘dim’ – same thing, no matter how bright is the image in the video, your screen will show a very dark picture.
That exact mechanism is at work with us, mammals. It is the same limbic imprint that is being deliberately used for thousands of years to train animals to serve people: elephants, camels, horses, circus bears. For example, a baby elephant is routinely tied in the yard on a chain to a small stick in the ground.
The baby elephant rages all his might for a few days and then stops. When he grows up and has enough strength to pull this stick right out, – it doesn’t happen. He never even tries…[3]
On 21 March 2013, Julia Gillard, then Prime Minister of Australia, apologized, on behalf of the Australian Government, to people affected by “forced adoption”. Or that was what was on the agenda. I listened. I waited. She did not say sorry to me. She did not apologize to the stolen children, sold as objects in a trade as old as slavery, and she did not demand we be acknowledged victims of a corrupt morality. No one has.
My own offspring cannot comprehend this wiring problem. They have my eyes and they had my breast for their suck. They have my nose and each other. But they have no uncles, No aunts or cousins or grandparents’ stories. No truth or mystery beyond or around me. I am it. When I was able to write to them of their genealogy I did so with great pride. That I had finally found us.
It wasn’t important to them.
Am I the gypsy king’s daughter? Or the wild, copper-haired faerie queen’s changeling child? Young Mr. Copperfield’s long-lost sister, and yet another orphan? Or am I the child of ancient heroes about whom most people do not care? Or is this all just make-believe and none of it matters because we’re all just meat on the journey to be stardust?
I will not say, here, or aloud, why I wear my defenses like armor, my ink with such heraldry and grandeur… why I do not get old like a nanna, content with the kiddies of my kiddies.
How is that even plausible for someone resigned to death at the moment of birth? That unrealized… normalcy. Unclaimed and unacknowledged? A trauma impossible to heal? Events creating a person unable and unwilling to forgo the hunt for honest answers to anything? To everything?
The fire is way too fierce, the dark still way, way too dark…
And I am not wired to. I am not like you. You might think so, but you are wrong.
…
POST SCRIPT
Since writing the above I have been through the NSW Supreme Court and, despite the governor general’s department attempting to deny my paternity, their historian Michael Cornelius Flynn, has rendered them moot. He is now on my birth certificate. I was released. I am now a free person.
My posthumous father was French nobility, not the gypsy king. He is of my mother’s lineage: Romanichal—English gypsy. Therefore, my mother’s pregnancy was moxado (prohibited), her coupling with a gadje likely an outrage. And she became lost, after. I met her for one day. Me? Serendipitous that most of my life is as drabarni.
The funny/tragic/enraging/proud/defiant thing, however, is: I am my ancestors’ daughter. Or am I?
Dishonesty and pretence. They’re a disease. I almost said they are like a disease but that would be to deny what’s systemic and virulent. It’s the most violating pandemic, historically, since the invention of the jesus myth. To be liked. To fit in. For accolades. To be important. Individually, not communally. To seek relevance. To think we will be worth remembering.
What’s the point?
When the face of this delusion presents itself it wears a garment. Always. To fit the Greek mythology of gods and goddesses, Jung’s archetypes; the idea of kings and queens. See the order in which I gendered these? Murderers get headlines while the murdered get forgotten when the survivors seek what they consider justice. There isn’t such a thing. It is possibly a memory of what is buried in our genome. Once it potentially existed. A bit like the theory of socialism or communism. A bit like some curiosity like the perfect mother or an almighty old man. Perhaps it is germinating through the antithesis of itself. Justice.
Honesty is empty. It has nothing and no one. It is silent, not silenced. Simply outglitzed by desperation. For meaning. When it’s here. Meaning is right in front of us. It is steamrollered, however, by pretence and dishonesty.
I am awed by beauty. The human who shines. The very animal of us. The garments, inks, piercings that communicate a narrative without voices. That tell stories. Are depth and courage. These individuals also stand out. But they risk. Oh the risk. Abuse. Jeers. Zoos. Cellars in chains or lunatic asylums. Antidepressants if they speak out. Or prison. Or execution. Malleus Maleficarum.
If you are not poor, you are eccentric or artistic or lauded for uniqueness. If you are poor you will fight, your entire life, to be.
Why are we not taught to be forgotten? That we will be trees? Or vast tundra or gaseous vaporous stratosphere? Lightning? Hurricanes. Ah. There it is brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, ancestors not yet born for a thousand thousand years. You who killed your bodies to escape.
There is everything and forever. The individual dies in the soul of themselves if accepting of the poison. If infected by this vast invented loneliness.
Scars that are not seen are not included in acceptability. You don’t have to remember that.
If you don’t watch videos that reveal a future dark and dangerous, controlled and grey, with black-masked cops wielding lasers and stun guns, that doesn’t mean that millions of others avoid that film. Are entertained. Play World of Warcraft like it’s a switch-off after a day’s work in retail. Some worry. A few realise how close we are to that virtual future. One could almost become paralysed. Paranoid. Convinced, because virtual means almost, and I am old enough to remember that eventualities occur because of somebody’s capacity to speculate. You see I was born into a world with hardly any plastic, no TV, no computers, no mobile phones and no satellites. Can you imagine?
So walk a little further into the future and ask yourself if you’ve done enough.
Imagine, if you can, the seventh generation. Does it matter that your name is not remembered? No. But I’m aware that one person (just one person) can affect an incalculable number of people with an appropriate and truthful narrative. The very thing that affects species the most, outside of the basic necessities of food, sex, shelter, sleep and health, is excitation. And what excites? Interaction. Doesn’t matter with what. And what is the key here? Communication. Whether through words, gesture, expression, sensation or manipulation, cellular division, communication is [our] species’ most exciting (and devastating) tool.
Part 1
There’s too much talking. And talking, much of the time, has taken on a seriously flawed agenda. Either personal or social propaganda in an era of sensory assault. I would be naïve to believe that people had not used lying or distortions of the truth for gain or profit (in whatever form) for a very long time. One merely needs to know sufficiently of history to get the big picture. But… At no other known time has there been an atmosphere so degraded, so filled with energetic chatter, so burdened with radio-waves, microwaves, electrical interference as now. Not that I know of, that is.
The Big Picture
Time and space and matter are all made up of energy in some great dance and song. Light joins the festival telling us, as a species of life, just how fine is starlight. Everything that is emits. Everything in the continuum of living and dying (which is all progression from something to something else) is entwined with everything else in an endless season of energetic symbiosis, constantly changing in patterns that the naked eye cannot see but that our bodies know. Our DNA hold the knowledge of forever (Big Bang being merely a theory of possible beginnings because what comes from nothing).
Let’s throw away the idea that anything is inanimate. Physical forms might not all breathe the way that we do but in a universe so complex, who would have the audacity as to assume we were special anyway? Suns and stars and tables and worms, mould and plastic and cold, cold iron – all emit. All express energy in whatever their state of growth or entropy. One photon a trillion light years away from Alpha Centauri dances a pattern. Another photon another trillion light years away knows about this because all expressions of energy nestle in a sea of infinite space that is very good at not losing anything.
Localise
Earth provides her progeny with everything. If it isn’t here we don’t know about it. We are getting to the point that we think we understands an awful lot about energy, from particle physics and quantum mechanics to chaos theory. And more often the new sciences recognise that energy and our understanding of consciousness are not separate. That nothing is separate, but inter-relative, therefore our symbiosis with Earth is, of course, mutual. So what are we doing stuffing it up?
Our relationship with Earth is as seriously damaged as a pair of friends where one person does all the talking and the other ends up very bored because they are being treated like a wall. Lovers playing power-over games. Doing the Drama Triangle (to the eventual demise of the relationship). Politicians pretending to listen to the people they are meant to represent but who go ahead and make war anyway. Scientists devoutly inventing another noxious toxin and telling us how beneficial it will all be. And hardly anyone is listening to other voices because, should they, the ramifications to greed and avarice would be staggering.
Personalise
Check Your Current Reality: Questions to ask yourself
Note: your answers are best kept private unless you have already resolved the experiment.
1
Who do you live with and what is your relationship to these people?
Is your relationship to those with whom you live different to the relationship you have with your friends? If so, how and why?
Do you hold a job? If so who are you around your workmates and bosses?
If you are studying what is your relationship to a. the tutors and b. the subject matter of your study? Is the subject matter of your study aligned with a vocation[1]?
2
What is the quality of communication like with those in question one? Is the quality based on a pecking order of imposed household authority? What are your responses when faced with dispute? Is it debate, argument, someone walking out and slamming the door, one of you waiting to see who says sorry first, resentment, guilt, anxiety, violence, boredom? Is your household comfortable with silences or do others think there’s a problem if one of you is not speaking for their own reasons? Do any of you seek to interfere with another’s choices without discussion?
What is the colour of your conversations with your friends? Do you ever branch into dangerous topics that could offend another’s’ viewpoint? Do you regularly discover things to talk about? Are you comfortable with these people when there’s nothing to say?
Does your job cause you satisfaction? Why? Do you question the motives of the business with which you are currently employed? How do you relate to authority; your own or that of others?
Do you ever really listen to your seemingly-random thoughts? If so, can you discern the different layers of thought?
Do you think about what you say when you say it or do you find yourself repeating material in a repertoire?
Do you ever communicate, internally, with someone or something that you know is not you?
What, to you, constitutes authority?
Do you have unique thoughts and/or ‘original’ conversations or are they based on pre-learned parameters?
Do you question everything that you are told or taught?
Do you question yourself on issues, ideals, ideologies, beliefs, ethics, moralities and information upon which you base your judgments or opinions? Do you change when the above are undermined (or do you fight like a demon to be seen as consistent)?
When listening to another person speaking, do you actually listen without bias?
Answering these questions can change you. Especially if you allow yourself to answer freely and to enter into debate regarding the questions, your answers and what you really feel in the depths of yourself. Do you even care? Does it matter? Does anyone you know care? Are you living in a vacuum?
What happens next is the experiment.
The experiment has nothing to do with talking and everything to do with listening – listening very deeply.
Listening deeply requires that you use more than your ears. Listening requires that you use your hearing in conjunction with your eyes, your sense of atmosphere, your gut.
The experiment requests that…
Section 1
you initiate no conversations
you only respond to what is said to you
you do not automatically think of what you will say next
you recognise your pre-conditioned biases and emotional responses
you respond to any and all conversations without pre-conceived parameters of relationship
Section 2
you observe the body language of the person with whom you are engaged in conversation
you remain aware of the spaces between your bodies as this is a strong indicator of the emotional state of the person towards you
you remain aware of your bodily responses to the conversation and learn to trust them – they are a truer receptivity barometer than your intellect when any emotional content enters into the conversation
you never pre-judge a person by the glamour they present, rather you remain alert to the equality of all people, no matter how educated in the so-called western modality.
I never found it necessary to keep a record of my participation and observations in these experiments, rather I discovered the ability to be free within all interactions and to respond honestly, whether it gets me into hot water or not. The people closest to me are aware of what I am doing and in most cases they are engaged in the same experiment.
FIRST DO NO HARM—examples (self and others) OF PERSONA GARMENTS
The Arguer: debate, keeping the object of debate at the constant foreground of conversation, does not lead to argument unless the participants become emotionally attached to being seen as right. It is no longer, then, a debate but a debacle that will leave both or all parties debilitated and distressed
The Manipulator: emotional manipulation utilises many criteria: guilt, flattery, conspiracy, destructive criticism, arrogance, vulnerability, constant agreement, denial, comparison – you can tell which is which by the inflation/deflation ratio
The Quoter: this person will use ‘the big guns’ of authority by quoting the works of others as a reference upon which to base their opinions
The White-Lighter: well, mostly they don’t engage, they just tell you what’s good for you and talk at you about stuff that makes them feel good about themselves
The Perennial Parent: is constantly thinking they know what’s best for others, based on their own experience, socially, spiritually, morally and emotionally. This behaviour seeks to impose uniformity onto individuality without recourse to differences. Many politicians and religious leaders do this. So do people with something to gain. So do those who need a mirror to their own psyches
The Victim: there are two kinds of victim in the world. Those with choices and those without. Those people who have choices can choose to change their current realities but the Victim will not, rather using that consciousness to attract sympathy in order to control another
Real victims (of any species or life-form) have no choices. They are legion, and altering the ways we communicate and listen are one of their chances of escape. They do not have a voice. They are not heard.
What you will be doing, as a result of actively engaging in this experiment, is to break down, or through, conditioning. You will be altering your emission – your harmonic – and that will have an effect upon the collective field. Enough alteration: overall change to the human harmonic affecting life.
The Rescuer: a mix of perennial parent, white lighter, the manipulator. This individual could actually be a rescuer. Problems only start when they identify as having done that for you. Do you ow them? Was the resce necessary? Are your boundaries breached because you had that experience of helplessness and they ‘saved’ you? Admiration for First Responders everywhere, and those humans who see what needs doing and does it. But let us take into account Hippocrates: FIRST DO NO HARM. A rescuer can get their dopamine hits from how good they feel helping you up when you’re on your arse, literally or figuratively. Be aware, however, that in social and familiar relationships the ‘rescuer’ can often want payback.
The above can read as cynical. You know as well as I that it isn’t. We have a sort of duty to defend the whole of ourselves, and to listen to the microbiome; be aware when all those trillions of people that make you, you, when they project that sensation in the gut or the heart. They pick their organs as ecological language/weather forms of communication. With an estimated 2.6 billion years of genomic experience they are not controlled by religion, media, populism or ideology. They simply want the ecstasy of living.
Science and Mysticism
Each human being is born with a talent[2] that can grow, deeper and more expansive—a recognised attending genius—and once realised and expressed, life takes on meaning. No one talent is more important than another, they are simply different and those differences are what makes life exciting. Volcanic, tidal, architectural.
Sometimes a talent can seem like a gift and other times a curse. It’s curse-like when one is unable or incapable of following through on realisations. For example, I can predict the future for others but I cannot prevent what seems like misfortune from happening. I can hear the desolation emitting from the gorillas in a zoo but I cannot release them. I can pick up the despair of the refugees in enforced detention centres but my only recourse is protest.
I hear them in the other voices of nature. I listen to other animals and we talk the same language of feeling and sensation, necessity and humour. It’s human beings who are in a serious state of communication-crisis. So often, what is said is not what is meant, or is said for the sake of talking, or is what I call the broken record conversation, or what is said has a hidden agenda of want. Conversations with people who have been damaged, emotionally, and who have never released their attachment to the experience that caused the dysfunction can be deeply akin to psychic vampires. What all of them have in common – what everyone has in common – is that they emit. These emissions are what are currently distorting life’s patterns and this will affect the future; this is affecting the future.
What sound is
In 1787, the jurist, musician and physicist Ernst Chladni published Entdeckungen über die Theorie des Klangesor (Discoveries Concerning the Theory of Music).In this and other pioneering works, Chladni laid the foundations for that discipline within physics known now as acoustics, the science of sound. Among Chladni’s successes was the discovery of a way to make sound visible. With the help of a violin bow, which he drew perpendicularly across the edge of flat plates covered with sand, he produced those patterns and shapes which today are called Chladni Figures. What was the significance of this discovery? Chladni demonstrated once and for all that sound actually does affect physical matter and that it has the quality of creating geometric patterns.
This is calledcymatics (<Gk Kyma or ta kymatika: matters pertaining to waves). The study of wave phenomena is a science that was pioneered by Hans Jenny (1904-1972), a Swiss medical doctor and natural scientist. He conducted experiments animating inert powders, pastes, and liquids into life-like, flowing forms, which mirrored patterns found throughout nature, art and architecture. What’s more, all of these patterns were created using simple sine wave vibrations within the audible range. So what you see is a physical representation of vibration, or how sound manifests into form through the medium of various materials.
Dr. Jenny’s methodology was meticulous, well documented, and totally repeatable. His fascinating body of work offers profound insights into both the physical sciences and esoteric philosophies. It illustrates the very principles which inspired the ancient Greek philosophers Heraclites, Pythagoras and Plato, on down to Giordano Bruno and Johannes Kepler, the fathers of modern astronomy.
Sound in Relativity to Emission
The easiest and most familiar way to study vibration is through sound. Just as the many and varied alphabets of the world encompass all possible words in verbal language, the octave structure encompasses all possible vibrations of sound, and reveals the simple way that they fit together. Chaos theory might call the octave an attractor, meaning that all vibrations of sound, however chaotic or random they might be from one to the next, must be attracted into the octave structure.
An identical level of this octave of vibration occurs in the visible light spectrum[3], where we recognise seven colours before encountering other, more subtle, levels (or octave of vibrations) such as infrared, ultra-violet, X-rays, gamma waves. Science tells us that packets or units of energy known as photons form the basis for light, and we now know that the frequency of the photons that create visible light are simply a finer octave of vibration than the sound frequencies of the musical octave. In other words, you could take the numerical ratios between each note in the musical Diatonic scale and double them many times over, and eventually you would find the same, identical ratios between the vibrational speeds of the light spectrum. The only difference is the magnitude- sound is vibrating much more slowly, whereas light is vibrating much more quickly.
The Sound of Magic – Time
Clairaudience, clairvoyance, clairsentience: the same but different.
Philosophy is written in this grand book – I mean universe – which stands continuously open to our gaze, but which cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles and other geometric figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one is wandering about in a dark labyrinth. Galileo (1623)[4]
If, sitting here, I was to prophesy about the next 50 years only, I could do so with a probability ratio, oh randomly, of about a 99.9% certainty, we’re in for big trouble. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that right now, in the early years of the 21st Century, we’re at a point of environmental and social critical mass. I could throw up my arms and get really upset about all the issues facing life (all life) but—
a.) that would only add to the problem (based on the aforementioned conversation) and
b.) it wouldn’t make sense. I have read tarot for other people for decades. They come from everywhere, all walks of life, hold a myriad of differing viewpoints on life, the universe and everything, and year after year that which is foretold comes to pass. How? What is it that allows a seemingly random shuffle of seventy-eight cards to predict events that seemingly have not yet happened?
The events have already happened.
Matter and energy
I remember a couple of scientists talking on ABC Radio National back in the 80’s. They were visiting Australia on a discussion tour. They had done studies of differing forms of divination for a year and had come to the conclusion that “tarot defies the law of probability” more than any other form of foretelling. Up until then I’d always wondered but had never had the keys to look for answers to the mystery of what I do. I undertook some basic study of quantum physics and read Gleick’s book on Chaos Theory, pondered, in awe, such things as the Mandelbrot Set and Fractal Geometry.
If we take into account the theory of the Big Bang then light (remembering that it’s a vast thing and the naked eye sees only a very small section), which is both particle and wave, occurred instantaneously throughout the universe. Matter, on the other hand, seems to be taking its time catching up, which is why our universe is said to be in a continuous state of expansion.
As nothing comes from nothing we were the Big Bang, albeit in a different state of vibration: both light and matter on an arrow-flight through conceptual evolution, however virtual. Now whether we consider our current selves as human or otherwise is really irrelevant; whatever we even contemplate our ancestors as having been is really irrelevant. What is most profound is our having been there, because if we hadn’t been there we wouldn’t be here now. The mere fact that our haemoglobin contains iron; that our insides slosh around in vast quantities of a fusion of hydrogen² and oxygen (and that hydrogen is what fuels stars) is fact. That our bodies follow a seemingly adequate set of parameters and reproduction indicates that they remember having been around forever … and that surely after several billion we’ve experienced most everything in one manner or another.
When a person shuffles my tarot cards they are actually sorting them into order. Because everything has been experienced that person doesn’t need to look at the images, like a very proficient pianist does not have to look at where their fingers are going (and in some cases to look would be to stop the music) because the music is in them. I interpret what the person is telling me because quite often when you’re involved in your life you lack objectivity. This is where the strange part comes in. And I’ve wondered about this all my life: is it a case of the chicken or the egg?
Collapsing the Wave: Thought to Speech
Have you ever heard it said that to name the thing is to empower the thing? That to speak it will either
a.) prevent a thing from happening, or else
b.) if you speak a thing you will cause it to happen (hence touch wood)?
Well I have.
Not only is it the basis for spell casting it is also founded on an interesting theory put forward by Dr Darryl Reanney in his book The Music of the Mind: that thought is like light and travels at the same speed and that speaking collapses the wave giving it a semblance of matter. Once spoken, never unspoken. Once spoken, the thought becomes interwoven with the fabric of our atmosphere as a frequency (please see Part One as a reference to babble) and can interfere with material reality.
Consequently, once I say aloud what I see or experience in tarot it enters into time. Still as an energy (like light) that the individual will walk into sooner or later, it will be recognised as it happens. Therefore, retrospectively, as the present moment is already the past it has already happened once spoken.
It’s the same with causing events to occur by way of the use of verbal magic. One can enter a spell into an average conversation and probably no one else will ever know. It all depends on what is said and how it is said but the reality is that I know I’m creating a loop: NOW®THEN®NOW. It all depends on how we understand progression. When we really throw away the illusion of linear time all things are valid, it’s merely a matter of when.
To achieve a conscious transition from the fate of linear time one simply needs to look at life, the seasons, the natural configuration of existence: it either spirals, cycles or unfolds. When and why did the line become such a god?
Thought into Matter
Propaganda is one of the more potent influencers of contemporary western culture. Media and the advertising industries are the current dispensers of doctrines of acceptability. Throughout the centuries people have been told what they should or should not do and are threatened with the inventions of damnation, starvation or torture for bucking the rules. These inventions are projections of consciousness. I know this could sound trite but it is people who make tables, and tables began in the minds of their inventors. Therefore, to think a thing is to trigger an act of creation when the thought is manifest into a material reality.
The future is the product of all that precedes it – it is a concept. It is therefore really important that we participate in the art of creating events yet to come into existence through our current actions and awareness. This requires conscious choices in every situation, no matter what our lot in life. It requires conscious responses to sensory input, specifically in relation to words, realising that Logos is as easily manipulated as a puppet.
Part 2
DESPAIR
Practical ideas towards healing
When, either personally or collectively, the illusion of either abandonment or disconnection (sometimes both) mental illness manifests and expresses itself in a tapestry of dysfunction. This disease is despair and a necessary step in the eradication of despair, is to first recognise that it is present, either in yourself, your family, your peers, your community, the current zeitgeist or the demands of a society. To do this you monitor your attitude and outlook on everything for a set number of weeks/months. You will, of course, be affected by news and advertising which, more often than not depict the world (in the former) in a disadvantaged state and (in the latter) what you will need to own or to look like to be on the winning side. There is no point blinkering oneself throughout this training. It is also important to keep eyes wide, wide open; to learn as much as one can about the soul-illness afflicting our mutual species. It seems to present itself in several ways:
Apathy. Constant assault from myriad media sources can trigger a form of apathy whereby people can watch absolutely horrific scenes of barbarity and brutality that eventually, seemingly bounce off the psyche … but do they? How can they? What actually happens is more insidious: acceptance that these behaviours are validated by their continuum. The training you undertake in ridding yourself of despair is all about seeing clearly what is happening but realising that you are not a participant in the process.
Accumulation (or, when is enough, enough?) The propaganda of advertising is not about you benefiting from a product, remember that, rather it is about a chain of profit that has its own best interest at heart. That chain of profit includes people who produce nothing but who benefit enormously from those who do. And by creating fear. Finding a level of contentment with your possessions and consciously realising that you need no more is a powerful thing. It allows you the security of simplicity and it means you no longer feed the beast. To purchase your goods directly from the grower or the manufacturer means that you are honouring their work, feeding their families and denying improper investment used for such things as war, environmental rape, the lining of the pockets of the greedy and any of an incalculably vast arsenal of destructive research and development (including the still-prevalent use of vivisection).
Debt. Have you heard of the term usury? I realise that it is considered as the ‘illegal’ charging of excessive interest on loans but who is it that decides what is excessive? Is ‘a profit of $2.192 billion…’ in one year excessive? Is: “The Reserve Bank found the big four banks enjoy an implicit government subsidy worth up to $4 billion dollars a year,” said Mr Oquist.[5] This amount of money is SPARE MONEY. It will be used for investment. Do you know where this money will be invested? Do you know how this profit was accrued?
Every time you take out a loan, or purchase using credit, you are indebting, even enslaving, yourself to others. In the current climate of company CEO’s claiming bonuses in the millions of dollars you might want to ask yourself: How do I fare? When will be your next holiday? What is your quality of life like? I realise that I’m not necessarily talking about issues of which you are unaware but, so far, have I managed to get you thinking?
(Please note that some of the following topics will overlap each other.)
Relationships. Communicate without fear. Communicate without the need to manipulate. Respect silence when there is nothing to say. Whether we are talking about an intimate relationship, the relationship between family, between friends, between associates – the way to understand relationships, and not ‘lose’ yourself somewhere in these relationships, is to realise three things:
There is always going to be a pecking order within any relationship. This is not a power, or a power-over, phenomenon but a biological one. It cannot be controlled, and neither can the conflict that can, and invariably will, arise because of it. Therefore, understanding it is your first line of least resistance. No relationship is permanent and no relationship will remain fixed to any idea any of us may consider. False relationships are those based on power over others.
The Pecking Order
Every species of animal has one. The problem for us, as an animal species, generally, is that we don’t remember that we are one and we have been brainwashed through both the entertainment industry and religions of the idealisation of love. Many in intimate relationships find themselves in the dominant/submissive role. This always leads to conflict. When sexually active people mark each other with their scents (in effect: marking their territory) and someone else enters into the picture there willbe conflict unless the couple band together, like a wolf-pair, to attain a specific outcome (scenario irrelevant). In the case of a couple without children there is likely to be little conflict unless outsiders attempt to lay a scent. In the case of a couple with children? Well, here’s the reason for a couple of millennia of discord or oppression. In most other animal species the breeding female is always the dominant member of the pack, herd, barnyard and the males will always fight for her favours, therefore establishing their own pecking order. This is not our history. The male of our species has been placed in an unnatural state of dominance (and look at the mess we’re in). Currently the western world is undergoing a crisis of sexuality (specifically in heterosexual society) because, again taking animal behaviour into account, the majority of species do not take their sex lying on their backs. The flipping of an animal onto its back is a threat. In another powerful turn, same sex relationships and gender variations alter the perspective of what, even fifty years ago, would have been predictable in sexual relationships.
Suggested solutions to dysfunctional relationships
Share your living-space with several people, setting clear boundaries of mutual responsibility and gain. If assisting good friends or family to move into a new dwelling be certain to lay your scent on the dwelling by either cleaning, helping to place objects and furniture, cooking a meal for them using their appliances. This will ascertain you both feel, and are, welcome whenever you return. Respect each others’ needs for independence and spontaneity, do not lean or rely on each other, rather be together for the sake of simply that.
Recognise the pecking order that is natural between you, and your near associates, but do not allow it to manipulate or over-ride the uniqueness of each individual involved. Communicate freely (and that does not imply talking a lot) but do not invade another’s need for solitude or silence when that need is obvious
Impermanence
This is a very important ideal to keep in mind. I am not implying that all relationships will cease to be, rather they will definitely change over time as either/any of you explore and learn new things. You will find yourself at a disadvantage in any relationship should you place too much emphasis on that relationship to the detriment of your own journey. Many relationships do have a life-span and attempting to hold onto them when they cease to be relevant to either/any party involved is kind of like not burying or performing an appropriate death-rite with a corpse: sooner or later the thing will become repugnant. Quite often the severance process at the completion of a relationship is painful. So be it. Mourning is a natural way of dealing with letting go. Respect of both the self, and the process of change, is how one transforms through change.
False Relationships
Our culture is full of these. To avoid them, simply don’t do them. We encounter these at all levels of society – governments, business, family, institutional religion, within many education systems, socially. These superficial hierarchies are established for the purposes of control or greed (perhaps both). In an ideal world there is a need for leadership but that leadership ought to be based on the transparency, wisdom and proven adroitness of an individual. On their consistency. In an ideal society those leaders are not better than anyone else but are clear on the responsibilities based on honour and integrity. Leaders are good leaders when they don’t need to lead, and they recognise that they are merely good at what they do and are reliable within the expertise of that leadership.
Parents quite often demand that their children conform to authority that is not gained through example but through force (sometimes physical, usually psychological), as do many institutionalised educators, as do politicians and bosses.
Observation, on your part, of the behaviour and body-language of others will allow you to understand any situation and to either extricate yourself from it or mould your behaviour (not necessarily your true self) to fit the circumstances.
Death
Despair often walks with the person who has been taught to fear death. Through consciously realising the organic nature of death (and that everything does it, therefore it is natural), and deciding to live your life gloriously, death can be recognised for what it is – a breaking down of organic matter into that which it is forever becoming: something else.
Religions and New Age movements place an inordinate focus on retaining one’s individuality (as it is understood) after body-death and there are, therefore, a plethora of ideologies and theories concerning an after-life. I ask you to contemplate: when is there no life? What constitutes no life? When is there not life? Is it necessary to believe in an after-life as distinct from life? Do we know all there is to know? There is nothing ‘after’ life because life is perpetual; eternal. And, besides, it’s not like body-death is something anyone really ought to worry about because it’s going to happen sooner or later. In the meantime, what about the quality of living?
A Lack of Knowledge Concerning Our Own Bodies
When our health or well-being is taken out of our hands; when we do not know sufficiently about our own bodies to ascertain their functions; when we accept, blindly, the authority of others over our own, we allow the demon of despair to have itself a party.
Change the situation.
I was once told by a doctor whom I was teaching about fitness, that throughout the entirety of his medicinal training he only spent somewhere around forty hours learning about nutrition. Due to my own studies and research I was able to advise my own son, who had been diagnosed with “killer cholesterol” and given a prescription for medication, on a fitness programme and a nutritional regime that both he and his girlfriend could enjoy. It took him three weeks to reduce his cholesterol to healthy levels. He has since continued his exploration of such things as triglycerides, good/bad fats, protein/carbohydrate affects upon the body and has also rid himself of a ten year high blood-pressure problem (bearing in mind he was a young man).
Death is an integral facet of good health. Without sufficient decaying matter—compost—the earth’s ability to sustain and grow food is diminished, as are the food’s nutritional elements when they are consumed. Growing one’s own food is an unsurpassed act of creativity and as Frank Herbert said in his unpublished notes “A requirement of creativity is that it contributes to change. Creativity keeps the creator alive.’”
Mulengro
The spelling mulengro is a shortening of the form mulengero. This shortened form is used quite commonly in some varieties of Romani < mulhengero mulo (fog ghost) < Mulengero Di (All Souls Day) < mulo (dead) [these terminology are from the Burganland Romani dialect]
Mulengro is like a disease passed from one person to another through the use of seven dysfunctional manipulations: envy, greed, guilt, deceit, denial, expectation and assumption. Each time an individual seeks to entice, control, coerce or otherwise warp seeming facts to suit an agenda they will perpetuate one or more of these. The only way to prevent despair from overwhelming our well-being is to cease allowing Mulengro into our lives. I’ve done it; several of my students have done it; most of my friends have stopped it.
The outcome of being infected by Mulengro is always resentment, rejection and blame and, needless to say, despair. The carrier of this disease will always attempt to pass it on. I could write an entire book on the games that people play on both themselves and others in this fashion but I’m sure with contemplation and practice you can recognise Mulengro when it is present in your dealings with others.
Authority?
What a strange word. What connotations. The word has come to represent a pinnacle – the epitome of a powerful person. I rather detest the word and I would, perhaps, ask you to develop a healthy objectivity regarding this concept. The word authority is very different, in truth, to a master (such as a master carpenter, a master of the sword, a master chef) because a person who has mastered a skill is a practitioner whereas, in many instances, an authority is someone with an opinion who confers with other people with opinions and who, therefore, could be considered to be educated in opinions. Of course I’m generalising, but it’s worth your consideration as quite often those who consider themselves authorities do not condone having that authority questioned and that is, and has been, despotism or tyranny. Whether the presumed authority is a parent, the president of a company or country, an educator, a five-star general, or a pope, it is the responsibility of a truthful person or society to consider the individual, or the institution, open to fallibility.
I once sat on the loo of a friend’s house in Victoria pondering the poster he had on the back of the door. The image on the poster was of a skeleton in a bathtub in the bathroom of a hotel that is discovered in the far distant future by a team of archaeologists. They document the sarcophagus (the bathtub), the roll of paper used to send messages to the gods via an aqueduct (toilet paper and flush-toilet), mirror used for divination, various holy objects (like razor, toothbrush etc) kept on the altar, the obvious sacredness of water (realised, of course, from the profusion of taps), the quirky plastic crown worn by the king or priest of this temple (the shower-cap). On and on went the description. I realised that no one could truly understand the past from the stand-point of the present and that all such sciences employ educated guesswork.
When I see a documentary on ancient people depicting them bent-over, ugly, hairy primates I tend to cringe as nothing in life is ungainly in its natural habitat so why depict humanity, alone, as having been so? And primitive is merely deemed as derogatory in comparison to us now. To take upon oneself the responsibility of informed questioning ensures that authority does not take upon itself the liberty of ‘better-than’ – it allows for possibilities, it allows for alternatives, it allows for error and it ensures that the authority remains accountable.
Religion
The Jesus Myth
Pope Leo X, who reigned 1513-21, once said: “It has served us well, this myth of Christ.” By this he meant that over the centuries, the Vatican had managed to acquire enormous wealth and power in the name of a figure called Jesus Christ. In the twentieth century, the man most responsible for making the Vatican a financial powerhouse was its investment manager, Bernardino Nogara. Speaking of him, Cardinal Spellman of New York once said “Next to Jesus Christ, the best thing that ever happened to the Catholic Church is Bernardino Nogara.” Anticipating that Europe was heading for war, Nogara invested heavily in armaments factories, buying several of them outright. This allowed the Vatican to reap huge profits when Mussolini invaded Abyssinia in 1935 and in World War II later.
Religious Fundamentalism, Dogma and Bigotry
It is drummed into children in war-torn countries, brainwashing them into hating one another without knowing why. It is the arrogant racist who believes in an imperialist, white supremacy that presumes anything can be bought. It is in the neo-Nazi and the Ku Klux Klan. Fundamentalism is in the office worker next to you who feels her faith is superior to yours and that you will be damned for your viewpoint and your sexual activity and she, to a place thought of as paradise. Fundamentalism is the reason people mail anthrax to abortion clinics because they don’t believe a woman should have a right to choose. Fundamentalism is the man who bullies, beats or represses his wife because he believes women are inferior – the source of all wickedness because of some Middle Eastern myth from life only knows how long ago – and passes on seeds of tyranny to his children. Fundamentalism is the people who mock same-sex love; people who shun unwed mothers, the poor, and those infected with HIV-AIDS calling such a terrible illness “the wrath of God”. It is people who smile politely to those of another race in public, but condemn them in private purely because of the colour of their skin or their religion. Religious fundamentalism; religious laws, rules, arrogance, moral condemnations.
A very good way of controlling people, don’t you think? Divide and rule? A future where wonder is revered and the wildness and the beauty of life is honoured, where such terms as man conquers…, in the battle to control… and in the war against… are no longer used to discuss natural phenomenon like mountains, space, death – actually, to not use these terminologies for anything.
Religions? What is valid about them? Whom do they serve? Why do a vast percentage of humans insist on bowing to seemingly omnipotent and, to be honest, terrifying deities that have no connection with the rest of nature unless he uses it to wreak havoc on his enemies, or prayed to, to stop hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, oil spills, the leaking of Fukushima nuclear plant, the uselessness of future antibiotics. So much for omnipotence.
Religions demand worship. They demand divisions and employ dualisms like good and evil, us and them, sacred or profane. Us and them. Why? Religion and the words worship, faith, belief all to go together. Inherent within these words is possibility of doubt.
Part 3
The Power of One
Please don’t think that because you are one person you cannot have a potent and intense affect on the future. My grandmother started me thinking about things mystical and magical when I was just 11 years old. She’d never taught her stuff to anyone before me and she never taught anyone else after me. I’ve ended up teaching thousands of people throughout my lifetime and even more thousands whom I’ve never met have read the books I’ve written. I didn’t start out thinking that was what was going to happen and ultimately it doesn’t matter to me because I’m merely doing what I’m doing.
There is nothing without consequences and everything that you do will have them. If none of us change how we communicate between ourselves and our world, then we’re in an avalanche of trouble. I remember thinking, one time, on the eve of a rally on human rights, So what? It doesn’t matter if I don’t attend, what’sone person less? Of course it was just a fleeting thought. I knew I’d go because if I didn’t and nobody else did there would be no hope.
One becomes two, two become ten, ten become ten thousand … and apartheid falls. Ten thousand become one million, and one million becomes humanity’s next step to change.
Conclusion
Silence.
Silence is, without doubt, the most important form of communication. In silence we can think. With silence we can dare to explore the thoughts deeply buried within the caves beneath the tundra that may hold answers like the truth in a situation of falsehood. Through silence we can also hear other things so vitally important like wind and rain and birdsong. Within silence is heard the voices of the spirits of place, the warnings of our ancestors and the stories as yet unsung.
I am forgotten until you remember me. I am the living root; the forever Tree – I await beneath the senses for the soul who truly listens with an ear to hear my mystery … and in the song of such a one I am remembered; and remembering will set the sacred free to walk through dreams that can rebuild the ancient trackways, to awaken memories of fires on the hills, to call the faidh and the ceoltoiri to attend me As I plant the living legends in the places of the deep, where the forgotten ones still sleep of the forest of profusion of the ever-living Tree. I am the guardian of the Gate – I am not found in any book already written, already printed, already bound but in the spaces yet to be heard; in the mystery of the yet-to-be-written word. Ancient Now. Alive. Wilderness. Free.
Prepare a place for me – a face for me. Deny me not – I am the legend of the vine And I am yours, beloved, you who hear me, And in an act that holds to nothing – we entwine.
The Feast of Flesh and Spirit (excerpt) Ly de Angeles, 2003
Endnotes
[1] Vocation: a calling [<L vocatio, -onis <vocatus, pp. of vocare to call]. I mention this so that it is understood that we are talking about sound again/harmonics again and not simply employment or career.
[2]Talent is one’s natural ability to shine in an area of expertise particularly rather than generally. It is something one is born with that can be enhanced with experience.
[3] Though electromagnetic waves exist in a vast range of wavelengths, our eyes are sensitive to only a very narrow band. Since this narrow band of wavelengths is the means by which humans see, we refer to it as the visible light spectrum. Normally when we use the term light, we are referring to a type of electromagnetic wave which stimulates the retina of our eyes. In this sense, we are referring to visible light, a small spectrum of the enormous range of frequencies of electromagnetic radiation.
[4] P. Machamer (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Galileo, Cambridge Uni Press, UK, 1998, pp. 64-65
[1] Vocation: a calling [<L vocatio, -onis <vocatus, pp. of vocare to call]. I mention this so that it is understood that we are talking about sound again/harmonics again and not simply employment or career.
[1] Talent is one’s natural ability to shine in an area of expertise particularly rather than generally. It is something one is born with that can be enhanced with experience.
[1] Though electromagnetic waves exist in a vast range of wavelengths, our eyes are sensitive to only a very narrow band. Since this narrow band of wavelengths is the means by which humans see, we refer to it as the visible light spectrum. Normally when we use the term light, we are referring to a type of electromagnetic wave which stimulates the retina of our eyes. In this sense, we are referring to visible light, a small spectrum of the enormous range of frequencies of electromagnetic radiation.
[1] P. Machamer (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Galileo, Cambridge Uni Press, UK, 1998, pp. 64-65
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.
He sits at the bar. His cap is dirty, visor pointing back, as though caught in a conversation he can’t let go of. His ragged, russet hair is tucked behind his ears, pierced with blackthorn and briar. He seems drunk but isn’t. Drugged, but is he? He knows I’m here and tips his head without turning. I’m Tommy, he says, catching the condensation dripping down the glass of an untouched beer, It’s not my real name, and I could be crazy, so best leave it.
He’s what? Maybe twenty? Looks are deceptive, though, unless we look with better eyes than just the ones we think see. So the curse kicks in and I see him. Really see him.
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.
His breath smells of the smoke of peat hearths, like a squalid, dangerous perfume. And kelp. And loam. Oh, and 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, pushing the glass well away from him. As though it is an ugliness.
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’m uncomfortable. It’s a cross between being in the presence of god or a brown snake. Aware that either could kill without hesitation. 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.
Tommy, he calls himself. But he is, I know, the Fisher King of that legendary Wasteland. 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 only a ghost-pale kestrel, above him, near 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 say, 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.
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 gossips her destiny 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.
Of course, 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.
