Terri Windling's Blog, page 106

Myth & Moor update

My apologies for missing the Monday Tunes post today. It's been a hard week or so around here -- not for me personally, I hasten to add, but for several people (and animals*) around me, all going through tough times large and small. When many different things require attention (work, family life, supporting my loved ones), I'm afraid it's this blog that must draw the short straw. I hope to be back again on Wednesday, when I'll post the music I'd planned for today.

Here is a thing I've been thinking about: The world is troubled place right now, full of anger and divisiveness on the political Left and Right alike. This can trickle down from the cultural/political level to our personal relationships, if we're not careful. Both online and off, so many exchanges seem to be unusually and reflexively sharp right now. The world is hot, metaphorically speaking, and it seems to me like it needs cooling down. As artists, as wordsmiths, as people who walk the good earth, let's be part of that cooling. Let's talk, not shout; unite, not divide. Let's be still and silent sometimes, not just quick and reactive.

My mantra these days is: be gentle, be gentle, be gentle. Stand your ground, know your truth, but be kind.

* Tilly has another vet appointment for a persistent health problem tomorrow. It's not life-threatening, but has been troublesome and going on for a while. Please send her good thoughts for a positive outcome and full recovery.

It's time to take flight

On a windy day in autumn

I'm feeling low in spirit today, while the wind rattles my cabin studio and moans through the oak and ash trees of the woodland right behind it. Here is what I'm thinking about as I walk the hills and trails with Tilly, or nest among the trees with notebook and pen:

"Fiction is a kind of compassion-generating machine that saves us from sloth," says George Saunders. "Is life kind or cruel? Yes, Literature answers. Are people good or bad? You bet, says Literature. But unlike other systems of knowing, Literature declines to eradicate one truth in favor of another; rather, it teaches us to abide with the fact that, in their own way, all things are true, and helps us, in the face of this terrifying knowledge, continually push ourselves in the direction of Open the Hell Up."

The English Magic Tarot

I'd like to wish Rex Van Ryn, Andy Letcher & Steve Dooley a very happy Publication Day for The English Magic Tarot. As the publisher, Weiser Books, describes it:

"This captivating new tarot deck draws us into the vibrant but often hidden world of English magic, evoking a golden age of mysticism when John Dee was Queen Elizabeth���s Court Astrologer, antiquarian John Aubrey rediscovered ancient sacred sites, and the great physicist Isaac Newton studied alchemy. The English Magic Tarot places the cards in the colorful yet turbulent period of English history that stretches from the time of Henry VIII to the Restoration. During this time of upheaval archetypal forces were very much at play, making this a perfect setting for the cards."

The deck comes with a 160-page book, providing an in-depth guide to its use. It's beautifully illustrated, fascinating to peruse (and to use!), and I highly recommend it. 

This is a project that I have been following closely not only because it's magical and unique -- blending an erudite approach to the history of Western magic with comics-inflected art and a sly, smart humor -- but also because it's a thoroughly Chagfordian enterprise, involving many of my village friends and neighbors:

The deck's roots go back to John Barleycorn Must Die, a graphic novel by Rex and my husband Howard, in which the main character, an immortal magican, uses a deck of this very sort. Rex was then inspired to turn their book's fictional deck into reality, creating striking black-and-white tarot images which were subsequently colored by illustrator Steve Dooley. Andy Letcher came on board as the writer of the accompanying book, drawing on his long history as a folklorist and scholar of Western magical traditions.

More Chagford folk can be found in the deck itself, including the mischievous characters below: Steve as the Ace of Coins, Andy as the Fool, jewelry designer Jason of England as the Devil, baker extraordinaire Ruth Olley as Strength, and Rima Staines of Hedgespoken as the gypsy of the Fortune card. (I've spotted other familiar faces in the Major Arcana, but I haven't yet found them all....)

The English Magic Tarot uses symbols derived from the heyday of the English magical tradition, a period that lies between the end of the Renaissance and the beginning of the Early Modern. As Andy explains in the book's introduction:

"English magic is a distinctive, local branch of natural magic. It has evolved through many iterations, from prehistoric times to the present day, and freely bends high and low magic. One constant is that it regards the cosmos as animate, and our place in the world as significant. It calls us to rediscover a magical connection with the land upon which we happen to live, whether that be England or elsewhere. It supposes that through practice or study (not least, of the tarot!) we can attain a greater understanding of the disparate parts of the self, and the magical connections that permeate the universe. Through English magic we can attain a state of gnosis  and true knowledge of the world....

"A trip to a good anthropological museum (like the Pitt Rivers in Oxford, which is absolutely stuffed full of magical objects, charms, and spells) shows that magic is universal. English magic is simply the English dialect of a language that's shared by all human cultures. It is our particular, regional way of doing it. It stands to reason that if magic is natural, then it will be shaped by the land it belongs to and the language and culture of the people living there.

"No one really knows why, but this small country named England has produced a great many magicans. The foundations of English magic go right back to the earliest days, to the architects who aligned Stonehenge to the midwinter sun, to the Druids with their ogham tree-lore, and to the early Anglo-Saxons with their runes. The traces of our ancestors' magical practices lie etched across and buried within the English landscape, and if you look carefully you'll see those traces in The English Magic Tarot cards too."

For more information, visit Rex's English Magician website, his Facebook page (where many of the lovely photographs above come from), and the English Magic Tarot blog. You can also follow the project on Twitter.  The deck is published by Weiser Books, and can be ordered through most bookshops and book services.

I also recommend Rex & Howard's Barleycorn blog, where it all began; and Andy Letcher's deeply folkloric blog; and these two related web pages: Rex & Howard discussing magic with Andy Letcher, and tarot with Amal El-Mohtar.

Remembering who we are

From Beauty by the late Irish poet and philosopher John O'Donohue, whose books I return to again and again:

"The earth is our origin and destination. The ancient rhythms of the earth have insinuated themselves into the rhythms of the human heart. The earth is not outside us; it is within: the clay from where the tree of the body grows. When we emerge from our offices, rooms and houses, we enter our natural element. We are children of the earth: people to whom the outdoors is home. Nothing can separate us from the vigour and vibrancy of this inheritance. In contrast to our frenetic, saturated lives, the earth offers a calming stillness. Movement and growth in nature takes time. The patience of nature enjoys the ease of trust and hope. There is something in our clay nature that needs to continually experience this ancient, outer ease of the world. It helps us remember who we are and why we are here."

"Our times are driven by the inestimable energies of the mechanical mind; its achievements derive from its singular focus, linear direction and force. When it dominates, the habit of gentleness dies out. We become blind: nature is rifled, politics eschews vision and becomes the obsessive servant of economics, and religion opts for the mathematics of system and forgets its mystical flame."

"Yet constant struggle leaves us tired and empty. Our struggle for reform needs to be tempered and balanced with a capacity for celebration. When we lose sight of beauty our struggle becomes tired and functional. When we expect and engage the Beautiful, a new fluency is set free within us and between us. The heart becomes rekindled and our lives brighten with unexpected courage."

The passages above are from Beauty: The Invisible Embrace by John O'Donohue (HarperCollins, 2004). The quotes in the picture captions are from "The Practice of Beauty" by James Hillman (The Sphinx, 4, 1992); The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard (Penguin, 1990); On Beauty & Being Just by Elaine Scarry (Princeton University Press, 1999); and Rumi: The Book of Love: Poems of Ecstasy & Longing, translated by Coleman Barks (arperCollins, 2003). All rights reserved by the authors.

Tunes for a Monday Morning

This week, while there's so much talk of walls, borders, and other means of dividing us from each other, physically and metaphorically, I've chosen five songs from the border-crossing Gaelic music tradition here in the British Isles.

Above:  "Arrane Sooree," a Manx Gaelic song performed by Ruth Keggin, whose aim is to bring Manx music, language, and culture to a wider audience. The song is from her second album Turrys (2016). The video was shot on the Isle of Man.

Below: "Buachaill��n Deas ��g M��," an Irish Gaelic song performed Skipper's Alley. This seven-piece band, based in Dublin, released their self-titled debut album in 2014.

Above: "A Ghaoil, Leig Dhachaigh Gum Mhathair Mi," a Scots Gaelic song performed by Julie Fowlis, who grew up in a Gaelic-speaking community on a small island in the Outer Hebrides. She's released numerous solo and collaborative albums; her most recent of the former is Gach Sgeul (2014).

Below: "Gura Mise Tha Fo Mhulad," a Scots Gaelic song performed Rachel Newton, from Glasgow. Newton plays with The Furrow Collective, The Emily Portman Trio, The Shee and Boreas as well as with her own band, the Rachel Newton Trio. The song is from her new solo album, Here's My Heart Come Take It.

And last, below: "Samhradh Samhradh," an Irish Gaelic song beautifully performed by The Gloaming. The band consists of folk music stalwarts Iarla �� Lion��ird (vocals), Martin Hayes, Dennis Cahill, Caoimh��n �� Raghallaigh, and Thomas Bartlett. Their second album, 2, came out earlier this year.

Sheep drawings by Henry Moore (1898 - 1986)

Not silence but many voices

I've posted the following passages before, but they seem well worth a re-visit this week....

From "Art Objects" by Jeanette Winterson:

"I had better come clean now and say that I do not believe that art (all art) and beauty are ever separate, nor do I believe that either art or beauty are optional in a sane society. That puts me on the side of what Harold Bloom calls 'the ecstasy of the privileged moment. Art, all art, as insight, as transformation, as joy. Unlike Harold Bloom, I really believe that human beings can be taught to love what they do not love already and that the privileged moment exists for all of us, if we let it."

"We know that the universe is infinite, expanding and strangely complete, that it lacks nothing we need, but in spite of that knowledge, the tragic paradigm of human life is lack, loss, finality, a primitive doomsaying that has not been repealed by technology or medical science. The arts stand in the way of this doomsaying. Art objects. The nouns become an active force not a collector's item. Art objects.

"The cave wall paintings at Lascaux, the Sistine Chapel ceiling, the huge truth of a Picasso, the quieter truth of Vanessa Bell, are part of the art that objects to the lie against life, against the spirit, that is pointless and mean. The message colored through time is not lack, but abundance. Not silence but many voices. Art, all art, is the communication cord that cannot be snapped by indifference or disaster. Against the daily death it does not die."

"Naked I came into the world, but brush strokes cover me, language raises me, music rhythms me. Art is my rod and my staff, my resting place and shield, and not mine only, for art leaves nobody out. Even those from whom art has been stolen away by tyranny, by poverty, begin to make it again. If the arts did not exist, at every moment, someone would begin to create them, in song, out of dust and mud, and although the artifacts might be destroyed, the energy that creates them is not destroyed. If, in the comfortable West, we have chosen to treat such energies with scepticism and contempt, then so much the worse for us."

"Art is not a little bit of evolution that late-twentieth-century city dwellers can safely do without. Strictly, art does not belong to our evolutionary pattern at all. It has no biological necessity. Time taken up with it was time lost to hunting, gathering, mating, exploring, building, surviving, thriving. Odd then, that when routine physical threats to ourselves and our kind are no longer a reality, we say we have no time for art.

"If we say that art, all art is no longer relevant to our lives, then we might at least risk the question 'What has happened to our lives?' "

A good question indeed.

The art today is mythic imagery in marble by Sicilian scuptor Girolamo Ciulla. Born and raised in Caltanisetta, western Sicily, he's now based in Pietrasanta, northern Tuscany, which has been an important center for sculptors working in marble for many centuries.

Sicily, a sun-baked island off Italy's southern coast, has its own language, culture, and ancient tradition of myth, folklore, and fairy tales. This heritage informs every aspect of Ciulla's work, says art historian Beatrice Buscaroli, representing "a continuity with a world that reaches us from the cradle of Mediterranean civilization...to which he adds the magic of the Etruscan land of Pietrasanta."

Ciulla's sculptures, as Buscaroli describes them, are "made of thousand-year-old certainties, of fruit, of sunlight, of wheat and stone, rain and wind. Of generous and vindictive gods, of women and warriors, billy goats and tortoises, of donkeys and fish.... Ciulla's sculpture is a sculpture that lasts, still anchored today to a thousand-year-old wilfullness dedicated to simplicity and beauty, a sculpture that sparks feelings of lightness and familiarity, faith in faces, in animals, in fruits and objects, because they belong to  everyday life, and at the same time, to a parallel world, evocative and reassuring, and worthy of being remembered."

The four passages of text by Jeanette Winterson above are from "Art Objects," published in her essay collection of the same name (Jonathan Cape, 1995). The quote by Beatrice Buscaroli is from "Girolamo Cuilla: Being, Lasting" in Girolamo Ciculla (Albermarle Gallery, London, 2007); the photograph of the artist in his studio is from the same publication. All rights to the text and imagery above reserved by the authors and artist.

The magic within

Ben Okri has this to say about poetry; and I think it applies to those of us working in Mythic Arts too, in various mediums and forms -- particularly now, during troubled times, when the world seems so fractured, the future uncertain, and art seems so small a voice raised against the chorus of anger that is everywhere:

"The world in which the poet lives," Okri writes, "does not necessarily yield up the poetic. In the hands of the poet, the world is resistant. It is only with the searching and the moulding that the unyielding world becomes transformed in a new medium of song and metaphor.

"It is not surprising therefore that poets seem to be set against the world. The poet needs to be up at night when the world sleeps; needs to be up at dawn, before the world wakes; needs to dwell in odd corners, where Tao is said to reside; needs to exist in dark places, where spiders forge their webs in silence; near the gutters, where the undersides of our dreams fester. Poets need to live where others don't care to look, and they need to do this because if they don't they can't sing to us of all the secret and public domains of our lives."

"The acknowledged legislators of the world take the world as given. They dislike mysteries, because mysteries cannot be coded, or legislated, and wonder cannot be made into law. And so these legislators police the accepted frontiers of things. Politicians, heads of state, kings, religious leaders, the rich and powerful -- they all fancy themselves the masters of this earthly kingdom. They speak to us of facts, policies, statistics, programs, abstract and severe moralities. But the dreams of the people are beyond them, and would trouble them. The harder realities of the people would alarm them. It is they who have curbed the poets' vision of reality. It is they who invoke the infamous 'poetic license' whenever they do not want to face the inescapable tragedy contained in, for example, Okibo's words, ' I have lived the oracle dry on the cradle of a new generation.' It is they who demand that poetry be partisan, that it take sides, usually their side; that it rises on the backs of causes and issues, their causes, their issues, whoever they may be.

"Our lives have become narrow enough. Our dreams strain to widen them, to bring our waking consciousness the awareness of greater discoveries that lie just beyond the limits of our sight. We must not force our poets to limit the world any further. That is a crime against life itself. If a poet begins to speak only of narrow things, of things we can effortlessly digest and recognize, of things that do not disturb, frighten, stir, or annoy us, or make us restless for more, make us cry for greater justice, make us want to set sail and explore inklings murdered in our youths, if the poet sings only of our restricted angels and in restricted terms and in restricted language, then what hope is there for any of us in this world?"

Okri also offers this note of hope:

"The antagonists of poetry cannot win," he insists. "The world seems resistant but carries within it for ever the desire to be transformed into something higher. The world may seem unyielding but, like invisible forces in the air, it merely waits imagination and will to unloosen the magic within itself."

The magical art today, which plays with allusions to Renaissance painting and classical myth, is by Chie Yoshii, who was born and raised in Kochi, Japan. She moved to the US in 2000 to earn a BFA at Massachusetts College of Art, then studied with portraitist Adrian Gottlieb for six years. Now she lives and works in Los Angeles, and her paintings are exhibited worldwide.

Her work, Yoshii says, "is inspired by the relationship between human psychology and mythical archetypes. The enduring themes are woven into surrealities filled with symbols and visual narratives. The enigmatic images embody contradicting elements such as novelty and nostalgia, innocence and sensuality, and strength and fragility, mirroring the complexity of our psyche."

The passages above by Ben Okri are from his essay collection A Way of Being Free (Phoenix, 1998). All rights to the text and imagery above reserved by the author and artist.

In the dark of the woods

"It is Story that heals us, that shapeshifts us, that saves us.''  -  Sylvia V. Linsteadt

And, sometimes, a good dog.

Into the woods once more....

In  The Horn Book (a long-running magazine about children's literature), author & folklorist Jane Yolen was asked if she, personally, believed in magic. This is her answer:

"I believe there are prestidigitators who can do card tricks and saw-the-woman-in half tricks. I believe there are politicians who can make us believe up is down and wrong is right. I believe there are preachers who try to sell us a mess of pottage.

"And then I believe that an owl in flight, a hawk in stoop, an otter rising out of the duckweed, a triple rainbow over the Isle of May, the New Jersey skyline as seen from the Highline in Manhattan on a night of the full moon, the small greenings of spring, honeybees on a blossom, and a newborn���s finger curled around mine are small everyday miracles, another word for ordinary magic. And that I believe in."

Do you believe in magic?

The Jane Yolen quote above comes from The Horn Book (January, 2012). The poem in the picture captions is from This Great Unknowing by Denise Levertov (New Directions, 1999). All right reserved by the authors.