Terri Windling's Blog, page 183

Breathing in the world

Today's quotes come from Jane Yolen, in honor of her visit to Chagford this week. They are taken primarily from Touch Magic: Fantasy, Faerie & Folklore in the Literature of Childhood and Take Joy: A Writer's Guide to Loving the Craft, both of which I highly recommend.

he great archetypal stories," writes Jane, "provide a framework or model for an
individual's belief system. They are, in Isak Dinesen's marvelous
expression, 'a serious statement of our existence.' The stories and
tales handed down to us from the cultures that proceded us were the most
serious, succinct expressions of the accumulated wisdom of those
cultures. They were created in a symbolic, metaphoric story language and
then hones by centuries of tongue-polishing to a crystalline
perfection....

"And if we deny our children their cultural,
historic heritage, their birthright to these stories, what then? Instead
of creating men and women who have a grasp of literary allusion and
symbolic language, and a metaphorical tool for dealing with the problems
of life, we will be forming stunted boys and girls who speak only a
barren language, a language that accurately reflects their equally
barren minds. Language helps develop life as surely as it reflects life.
It is the most important part of the human condition."

"In fantasy stories we learn to understand the differences of others, we
learn compassion for those things we cannot fathom, we learn the
importance of keeping our sense of wonder. The strange worlds that exist
in the pages of fantastic literature teach us a tolerance of other
people and places and engender an openness toward new experience.
Fantasy puts the world into perspective in a way that 'realistic'
literature rarely does. It is not so much an escape from the
here-and-now as an expansion of each reader's horizons."
"In fantasy stories we learn to understand the differences of others, we
learn compassion for those things we cannot fathom, we learn the
importance of keeping our sense of wonder. The strange worlds that exist
in the pages of fantastic literature teach us a tolerance of other
people and places and engender an openness toward new experience.
Fantasy puts the world into perspective in a way that 'realistic'
literature rarely does. It is not so much an escape from the
here-and-now as an expansion of each reader's horizons."

"Just as a child is born with a literal hole in his head, where the
bones slowly close underneath the fragile shield of skin, so the child
is born with a figurative hole in his heart. What slips in before it
anneals shapes the man or woman into which that child will grow. Story
is one of the most serious intruders into the heart."

“Children’s books change lives. Stories pour into the hearts of children and help make them what they become.”

"We have spent a good portion of our last decades erasing the past. The episode of the gas ovens is closed, wrapped in the mist of history. It is as if it never happened. At the very least, which always suprises me, it is considered a kind of historical novel, abstract and not particularly terrifying.

"It is important for children to have books that confront the evils and do not back away from them. Such books can provide a sense of good and evil, a moral reference point. If our fantasy books are not strong enough -- and many modern fantasies shy away from asking for sacrifice, preferring to profer rewards first as if testing the faerie waters -- then real stories, like those of Adolf Hitler's evil deeds, will seem so much slanted news, not to be believed.

"Why do so many fantasies shy away from Tough Magic? Why do they offer sweet fairy dances in the moonlight without the fear of the cold dawn that comes after? Because writing about Tough Magic takes courage on the author's part as well. To bring up all the dark, unknown, frightening images that live within each of us and try to make some sense of them on the page is a task that takes courage indeed. It is not an impersonal courage. Only by taking great risks can the tale succeed. Ursula Le Guin has written: 'The artist who goes into himself most deeply -- and it is a painful journey -- is the artist who touches us most closely, speaks to us most clearly.' "

" 'Stories,' he'd said, his voice low and almost husky, 'we are made up of
stories. And even the one's that seem the most like lies can be our
deepest hidden truths.' "  (from Briar Rose)

The  illustrations above are by Honor Charlotte Appleton (1879-1951), Eleanor Vere Boyle (1825-1916),  Charles Robinson (1870-1937), John Dickson Batten (1860-1932) and

A woodland meditation

“For far too long we have been seduced into walking a path that
did not lead us to ourselves. For far too long we have said yes when we
wanted to say no. And for far too long we have said no when we
desperately wanted to say yes....When we don't listen to
our intuition, we abandon our souls. And we abandon our souls because
we are afraid if we don't, others will abandon us.”   - Terry Tempest Williams (When Women Were Birds)

"There are always moments when one feels empty and estranged.

Such moments are most desirable, 
for it means the soul has cast its
moorings and is sailing for distant places. 
This is detachment -- 
when
the old is over and the new has not yet come. 
If you are afraid, the
state may be distressing, 
but there is really nothing to be afraid of.

Remember the instruction: 
Whatever you come across -- go beyond."
  - Nisargadatta Maharaj (via Jonathan Caroll)

“Some periods of our growth are so confusing that we don’t even
recognize that growth is happening. We may feel hostile or angry or
weepy and hysterical, or we may feel depressed. It would never occur to
us, unless we stumbled on a book or a person who explained to us, that
we were in fact in the process of change, of actually becoming larger,
spiritually, than we were before. Whenever we grow, we tend to feel it,
as a young seed must feel the weight and inertia of the earth as it
seeks to break out of its shell on its way to becoming a plant. Often
the feeling is anything but pleasant. But what is most unpleasant is the
not knowing what is happening. Those long periods when something inside
ourselves seems to be waiting, holding its breath, unsure about what
the next step should be, eventually become the periods we wait for, for
it is in those periods that we realize that we are being prepared for
the next phase of our life and that, in all probability, a new level of
the personality is about to be revealed.” 
- Alice Walker (Living by the Word)

"That's the way things come clear. All of a sudden.  And then you
realize how obvious they've been all along."  - Madeleine L'Engle (The Arm of the Starfish)

On balance

"In each of us lie good and bad, light and dark, art and pain, choice
and regret, cruelty and sacrifice. We’re each of us our own chiaroscuro,
our own bit of illusion fighting to emerge into something solid,
something real. We’ve got to forgive ourselves that. I must remember to
forgive myself. Because there is a lot of grey to work with. No one can
live in the light all the time."  - Libba Bray (A Great and Terrible Beauty)

''Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great
terror, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it
always balances them.'' - Anais Nin (The Diaries)

“Your hand opens and closes, opens and closes. If it were always a fist
or always stretched open, you would be paralysed. Your deepest presence
is in every small contracting and expanding, the two as beautifully
balanced and coordinated as birds' wings.” - Rumi

"How one walks through the world, the endless small adjustments of
balance, is affected by the shifting weights of beautiful things.” 
- Elaine Scarry (On Beauty and Just Being)

Tunes for a Monday Morning

Starting off in Ireland today...

Above: "Hugo's Jig" and "Banish Misfortune" performed by Spraoi -- a young band from Sligo -- streamed live from Haragan's Bar, Sligo, in 2010. (For an English translation of the lyrics, go here.)

Below: "Hazeltunes," a sweet video and lovely music from JP Trio, a "Celtic roots funk" group created by three Spraoi veterans: Ted Kelly (banjo and tenor guitar), Jos Kelly (button accordion &
keyboards), and Paddy Hazleton (percussion) --  occasionally joined by a fourth, Niamh Farrell (vocals).

Next:

Crossing over the Atlantic:

"Lazy John," a recent video by the Sligo Creek Stompers, based the Maryland/DC area. They play a terrific mix of Appalachian Irish, Bluegrass, Old Time, and other American roots music.

And now crossing back over the Atlantic, and back to Sligo, Ireland. (Musical influences, after all, travel both ways.)

Below, the young musicians of Grizzly Dippers cover "James River Blues" by the great American roots bands Old Crow Medicine Show. This is the best way to hear music, in my opinion: out doors, by water or a campfire. Or else in the intimate setting of  pub, like the video at the top of this post.

Reading as reincarnation

I highly recommend Mark Edmundson's recent essay "The Ideal English Major," published in The Chronicle of Higher Education. It's an exhortation for college-bound young people to consider the value of studying literature over pursuing a more "marketable" degree...but substitute "serious reader" for "English major" and much of this lovely essay applies to us all. Here's a taste:

"The English major [and the serious reader] reads because, as rich as the one life he has may
be, one life is not enough. He reads not to see the world through the
eyes of other people but effectively to become other people.
What is it like to be John Milton, Jane Austen, Chinua Achebe? What is
it like to be them at their best, at the top of their games?

"English majors want the joy of seeing the world through the eyes of
people who -- let us admit it -- are more sensitive, more articulate,
shrewder, sharper, more alive than they themselves are. The experience
of merging minds and hearts with Proust or James or Austen makes you see
that there is more to the world than you had ever imagined. You see
that life is bigger, sweeter, more tragic and intense -- more alive with
meaning than you had thought.

"Real reading is reincarnation. There is no other way to put
it. It is being born again into a higher form of consciousness than we
ourselves possess. When we walk the streets of Manhattan with Walt
Whitman or contemplate our hopes for eternity with Emily Dickinson, we
are reborn into more ample and generous minds.

" 'Life piled on life /
Were all too little,' says Tennyson's 'Ulysses,' and he is right. Given
the ragged magnificence of the world, who would wish to live only once?
The English major lives many times through the astounding transportive
magic of words and the welcoming power of his receptive imagination. The
economics major? In all probability he lives but once. If the English
major has enough energy and openness of heart, he lives not once but
hundreds of times. Not all books are worth being reincarnated into, to
be sure—but those that are win Keats's sweet phrase: 'a joy forever.' "

You can read the rest of this lovely essay here.

The art above: "Lady Reading in an Interior" by Marguerite Gérard (French, 1761-1837); "Young Man Reading by Candlelight" by Matthias Stom (Dutch, mid 17th century); "Reading" by Eastman Johnson (American, 1824-1906); "Interior with Young Man Reading" by Vilhelm Hammershøi (Danish, 1864-1916); "Interior with Girl Reading" by Henrique Bernardelli (Brazilian, 1858-1936); "Young Woman Reading" by Giovanni Fattori (Italy, 1825-1908); "Reading"  and "Le horla" by Anna & Elena Balbusso (Italy, contemporary); Girl in Grey by Louis le Brocquy (Irish, 1916 – 2012); "Lytton Stratchey Reading" by Vanessa Bell; and "Girl Studying" by Susan MacDowell Eakins (American, 1851-1938).

Life as art, and art as life

“Art can model the more difficult dynamic of transfiguring one’s life,
but at some point the dynamic reverses itself: life models, or forces,
the existential crisis by which art -- great art -- is fully
experienced. There is a fluidity between art and life, then, in the same
way that there is, in the best lives, a fluidity between mind and
matter, self and soul, life and death. Experience seems to stream
clearly through some lives, rather than getting slowed and clogged up in
the drift-waste of ego, or stagnating in little inlets of despair,
envy, rage. It has to do with seizing and releasing as a single gesture.
It has to do with standing in relation to life and death -- owning an
emptiness that, because you have claimed it, has become a source of
light, wearing your wound that, like a ramshackle house on some high
exposed hill, sings with the hard wind that is steadily destroying it.”     - Christian Wiman (The Bright Abyss)

“Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.”    - Cormac McCarthy (All the Pretty Horses)

"We all need to look into the dark side of our nature -- that’s where the energy is, the passion. People are afraid of that because it holds pieces of us we’re busy denying."   - Sue Grafton

“And so we polish our own lives, creating landscapes and canyons and peaks with the very silt we try to avoid, the dirt we disavow or hide or deny. It is the dirt of our lives -- the depressions, the losses, the inequities, the failing grades in trigonometry, the e-mails sent in fear or hate or haste, the ways in which we encounter people different from us -- that shape us, polish us to a heady sheen, make us in fact more beautiful, more elemental, more artful and lasting.”    - Terry Tempest Williams (When Women Were Birds)

(Click on pictures for larger versions)

The stories that demand to be told

This post is for my fellow writers this morning, but I think these sentiments apply to all of the arts...

"The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing him, always.”  - Arthur Miller

''You can’t put much on paper before you betray your secret self, try as you will to keep things civil.''
- Patricia Hampl

“Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly
perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.”  - Virginia
Woolf

"All the stories I would like to write persecute me. When I am in my
chamber, it seems as if they are all around me, like little devils, and
while one tugs at my ear, another tweaks my nose, and each says to me,
'Sir, write me, I am beautiful.”   - Umberto Eco

"I would write ads for deodorants or labels for catsup bottles, if I had
to. The miracle of turning inklings into thoughts and thoughts into
words and words into metal and print and ink never palls for me."  - John Updike

“A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream
while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the
right to dream.” ― Gaston Bachelard

Art above: "Reverie" by János László Áldor (Hungarian, 1895-1944); "Woman Writing at a Secretaire" by James McBey (Scottish, 1883-1959); "Woman Writing" by Rupert Shephard (English, 1909-1992); "Girl Writing" by Henriette Brown (a.k.a. Mme Jules de Saulx, French, 1829-1901); "All Are But Stories, from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayam," by Edmund Dulac (French, 1882-1953); "Young Man Writing" by Jean-Louis-Ernest Messonier (French, 1815-1891); and a detail from "Girl Writing a Letter" by Johannes Vermeer (Dutch, 1632-1674).

Deer prayers

This morning when I looked out the roof window

before dawn and

a few stars were still caught
in the fragile weft of ebony night
I
was overwhelmed. I sang the song Louis taught me:
a song to call
the deer in Creek, when hunting,
and I am certainly hunting
something as magic as deer
in this city far from the hammock of my
mother’s belly.

It works, of course, and deer came into this room

and wondered at finding themselves

in a house near downtown Denver...

- Joy
Harjo (from my favorite Harjo poem, "Song
for the Deer and Myself to Return On")

...And so we close our eyes when we pray to seek the blindness

that offers a window into the world,

                                                     & the world within this one,

sudden rain so fine it could be just a trick of the wind & the light,

                                                                                            there & gone,

as the deer move off, through the silky wilds

                                                                of Queen Anne's lace,

through clover scatter-brushed in the grasses,

the long grasses that hold the traces of their passing

for a moment only, & beneath the old pear trees

already heavy with their suns,

with the cities of clouds the caterpillars

have spun for their tombs

                                     as they move from this life & into the next one.

And we, with our rain-limned bodies, listening

for the echoes of our prayers to return,

to the aethereal bodies drifting so close

                                                       & out of sight,

listening hard for the sound of our own disappearance.

- Mark Wagonaar (from "Deer Hour Gospel")

I'd seen

their hoofprints in the deep

needles and knew

they ended the long night

under the pines...

I was thinking:

so this is how you swim inward,

so this is how you flow outward,

so this is how you pray.

- Mary Oliver (from my favorite Oliver poem, "Five A.M. in the Pinewoods")

I somehow overlooked these deer pictures (from the American South-west) during our Deer Week back in early July. The drawing at the top is "Three Does and a Kid" by "cowgirl" artist Donna Howell-Sickles, from Texas. The paintings are by Toby Abeyta, a young Navajo/Anglo artist from New Mexico: "Deer Amongst the Trees," "Forest Deer Trio,"   "Deer Dancer," and the two-part "Hunting Processional."  Please visit the artists' websites to see more of their beautiful work. The deer photo is of a stray fawn
found at the City Hall in downtown Santa Fe, New Mexio, this summer. It's now at the Wildlife Center in Espanola and will be released
into the wild after rehabiliation.   

I should mention that it's going to be a particularly busy month here at Bumblehill, due to deadlines, guests, and a family member's impending move. I'll keep posting, but the posts may be shorter & quicker over the weeks ahead. I''ll continue on with the  "Into the Woods" series when time permits, and will return to it fully in September.

Tunes for a Monday Morning

Above, "I Just Might Pray" -- a video that never fails to make me smile. It's from Good Man Down, the lovely new album by American singer/songwriter David Mayfield. (And yes, that's the Avett Brothers you hear singing in the background.)

Below, "Agape" by the London-based trio Bear's Den: Andrew Davie, Kev Jones and Joey Hayne. It's a sad song about love lost, simply performed, and simply beautiful.

I suppose that if there's a theme this morning, it must be Love Songs Sung by Men With Beards...

...so let's include the Avett Brothers themselves (from North Carolina), with both Scott and Seth Avett sporting beards these days, as well as cello player Joe Kwan. I've made no secret of my Avett love on this blog, which shows no sign of waning. I'm slayed by their musicanship; their poetic (and unabashedly heart-on-the-sleeve) lyrics; and the sheer beauty of Joe's cello. Below is "February Seven," the charming new video for a song about love's return.

(This one's for Jane Yolen, who loves antique shops.)

And last: Deep Dark Woods from Canada, with their version of "Pretty Peggy-o." The bearded fellow with the gorgeous voice is Bryan Boldt.

"Pretty Peggy-o" is an American Civil War variant of a Scottish folksong, "The Boonie Lass o'Fyvie," about the unrequited love of a captain of Irish dragoons for a beautiful Scottish lass in Fyvie. The song traveled to America's Appalachian mountains with Scots immigrants, where it was collected and brought back to England by Cecil Sharpe.

Into the Woods, 22: Beneath the trees

Let the trees be consulted before you take any action
every time you breathe in thank a tree
let tree roots crack parking lots at the world bank headquarters
let loggers be druids specially trained and rewarded
to sacrifice trees at auspicious times
let carpenters be master artisans
let lumber be treasured like gold
let chain saws be played like saxophones
let soldiers on maneuvers plant trees give police and criminals a shovel
and a thousand seedlings
let businessmen carry pocketfuls of acorns
let newlyweds honeymoon in the woods
walk don't drive
stop reading newspapers
stop writing poetry
squat under a tree and tell stories.

- John Wright

Or better still, keep writing poems, painting pictures, making music and telling tales beneath the trees. For it's all part of the world's great story, and the seasons turning. And we need it all.

Photographs above: Tilly beneath a beech tree, a rowan tree (spring and autumn), an oak tree (summer and winter), and nestled among the oak tree's roots. The drawings are by two Chagford friends and neighbors: "Chestnut Nuptials," an absolutely charming pen-and-ink sketch by Virginia Lee, and David Wyatt's initial pencil sketch for In the Word Wood, his beautiful painting of Tlly and me in our beloved woods.

John Wright's  untitled poem comes from Earth Prayers: 365 Prayers, Poems, and Invocations from Around the World, edited by Elizabeth Roberts & Elisa Amidon. Austin Hackney gave me my copy of the book years ago, and I recommend it highly.