Nimue Brown's Blog, page 332

Mountains, music and myths

Both of the books I’m reviewing this week I bought because they have relevance for my Pagan Pilgrimage project. I’m in an ongoing process of studying writing about landscape and the many different forms that takes. The CD in the set has turned out to be an excellent soundtrack for colouring Camelot…

Gloucestershire Folk Tales – Anthony Nanson.

Many of the stories in this book are connected with landscapes I know intimately. Some of the tales were familiar, others not, including one about a hill that has left me with a significant mystery to ponder. For me, what made the book so valuable was the intertwining of known history, physical place, and story. At times there are reasons to think that the stories have grown out of those other features, perhaps to explain something. I particularly liked the way in which the Devil stories for the county were woven into one tale. I hadn’t realised just how much of the landscape was of the Devil’s making! Parallels with tales from elsewhere were also fascinating. It’s a lively read, and a must if you’re in the county.

You can buy direct from the publisher – thehistorypress.co.uk or find it anywhere you’d normally buy books.

Dirty Toes – Mad Magdalene

Both the band and the album names are reference to Tom O’ Bedlam, which is a favourite song of mine. This album is an exuberant mix of folk and Pagan music, and very danceable to. It sounds like live performance – there’s something raw and immediate about the production, which I prefer anyway. I’ve seen Mad Magdalene perform live a couple of times, and this is very much their gigging sound. The arrangements are innovative and freshen up some classic folk songs. You can always hear the words. The final track is a version of Lord Randall, unlike any other I’ve heard – (plot spoilers!) the replacing of a sweetheart with a stepmother suggests a far more complicated and unpleasant sort of back story. You can listen to them on bandcamp – https://madmagdalen.bandcamp.com/album/dirty-toes if you like them, do consider supporting them by buying a copy.

 

Mountains of the Mind, Robert Macfarlane,

This book explores the differences between mountains as people imagine them, and mountains as they turn out to be when you’re on one. It’s a difference that has a habit of killing people. Through talking about historic understandings of mountains, Macfarlane is able to open up the broader territory of landscape writing, ideas of masculinity, adventure and conquest. It’s a beautiful, fascinating read, weaving history with personal experience. You don’t have to be obsessed with mountains to enjoy it, either. Being the sort of person who likes to admire them from afar, reading about other people’s deaths, accidents and near-deaths on slippery, near-vertical surfaces has confirmed me in my prejudices! Easily sourced from all places that sell books.

Sword and Planet

Author Anthony Nanson explores the green themes in Dune….

Anthony Nanson's Deep Time

Something else celebrated its fiftieth year in 2015 besides me and my age-mates. Frank Herbert’s epic novel Dune was published in that same fateful year of 1965. Some say it’s the best science fiction novel there’s ever been. It’s also one of the most ecological.

It was a student giving a presentation on space opera who introduced me to the notion of ‘sword and planet’ – derived from ‘sword and sandal’ movies like Cleopatra and The Ten Commandments – to refer to epic SF whose action takes place mainly on a planetary surface and involves picturesque low-tech impedimenta (e.g. swords) future-primitively mixed with more advanced tech. It covers things as varied as Flash Gordon, Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Barsoom and Venus books, Jack Vance’s Planet of Adventure, and Dune.

This kind of fiction isn’t always going to concern itself with profound explorations of science, but the choice of a…

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Colouring for Camelot

New Year, new slightly crazy project. My other half – illustrator Tom Brown has signed up to do a four volume graphic novel interpretation of Mallory’s Le Morte D’Arthur, adapted by Arthurian buff John Matthews. This will be happening over the next four years.

Tom and I got together around jointly working on www.hopelessmaine.com – our creative lives and our marriage are deeply intertwined. I have to admit that last year, when he was involved with The Raven’s Child, I found that tough. I did some odd bits of shading, but we spent much of our spare time talking about a project that I had no other involvement in, and I felt rather peripheral a lot of the time. So, a cunning plan was clearly in order.

Those of you who have followed Hopeless Maine will know that Tom favours muted pallets. Medieval art is really gaudy by contrast and it would be fair to say that those bright colours do not come easily for him. I, on the other hand have fairly medieval sensibilities anyway – you should see our living room! I like working with colour. I have no real skill at line drawing or getting things to look like things, but a deep fascination with how colour works. Normally this is manifest in textiles and upcycling projects, but we’ve done a few things where Tom has drawn for me to put in tapestry, and we’ve known for a while this works well.

Last year, I asked if I could colour on the Arthur project. This is normal for comics and graphic novels. Typically, one artist does the initial drawing, then separate people deal with the colour, the ink work and the lettering. Comics art is either collaborative, or factory production line, depending on the setup. We’ve been testing this, and it seems to be working. The logo for the project represents a team effort.

Thus far, the method is as follows. Tom puts down all the lines, and any contour shading that he wants, and then scans this. I colour on the paper, using oil pastels. We scan it again, and in photoshop he drops his line work back in over the top – so there’s no separate inking. We’re going to look at him reasserting the lines on originals as well. He also does lighting effects, and there we are. We’re learning how to do this together in ways that avoid duplicating work and that play to our different strengths. So far so good, I think.

The oil pastels I’m using, I inherited from my grandmother. She spent her retirement years creating land, sea and sky scapes, tall ships, flowers, and such like. I’m not just using her pastels, but trying to remember all the many tricks she taught me in my teens. If nothing else, I have learned from her that a bit of kit that looks like a child’s wax crayon (but isn’t) can be deployed for significant detail, and subtlety. Like Tom, she used to go in afterwards with pencils to firm up the details.

As an aside to this project I’ve had a crash course in the 1400s, I’m looking at chivalry and the troubadours, and there’s all kinds of interesting bits and pieces around the making of this, so I will no doubt be back to this as a subject on and off over the next four years! Hopeless Maine will be happening alongside Arthur, I’m still writing, and in theory it will all fit together.

The awkward business of shrinking

Warning: contains body size issues and possibly irrational thinking.

I’ve been losing weight for a while now. Intermittently, people compliment me on my shrinkage. It’s not been deliberate – which is odd all by itself, having spent most of life trying, and failing to reduce the amount of fat I’ve carried. At times in my life when I’ve dieted, I’ve gained weight, and in the recent years of just not bothering about it at all, the weight has gently fallen off. If there’s a sensible, mechanical process, it’s that I’m sleeping more and this helps me regulate my weight. There’s science around for this one.

Weight loss is held up in our wider culture as something to celebrate. It’s normal to praise people for it, and dieting is invariably presented in the media as a good thing: Feel great, look great, have more energy. This is not my experience of weight loss at all. I invariably feel worse and have less energy when it’s happening. The reasonable explanation for this is that unpleasant substances stored in my fat cells are releasing into my blood stream. Certainly, increasing water intake helps me get through, which could be a placebo, or could be the washing out process.

I notice, when I’m shrinking and feeling awful, it brings up memories. Usually intense and painful memories of times when I’ve been shamed, humiliated, or hurt. This is especially noticeable last thing at night when keeping my thoughts on a good and peaceful track is hard. During my most recent shrink period, I went through hours of painful recall. It felt (and this is the bit I can make no rational sense of) as if those memories were releasing from my fat cells. During the worst of it, I started wondering if what I had in my body wasn’t fat at all, but shame. Memory is distributed to some degree – muscle memory exists. Does fat memory exist?

I’ve been fat shamed for as long as I can remember, and I know weight is not a new issue or source of discomfort in my family line. There’s ancestry here and  am repeating it. My stomach has been a focal point for shame for as long as I can remember. The more able I am to accept myself as I am and let go of other people’s judgements, the less weight I seem to be carrying. The more I can say ‘this body is ok and it will do’ the less shame-fat there is. The less I see the measure of my girth as a measure of myself, the less girth there is to measure. Is that a coincidence? If there is cause and effect, which way round is it going? I don’t know, but the effects are becoming obvious.

Body-mind duality is a core part of western thinking, but it’s a flawed logic. Our brains and central nervous systems run on chemical and electrical processes. These are not separate from the rest of our body chemistry. The mind affects the body – that’s what it’s for. The body, inevitably, affects the mind. Emotions are chemical experiences. Stress is a very toxic chemical experience. Is it irrational to think that the physical processes of shame and distress might have a lasting impact on my body?

Further along this line of thought is all the New Agey ‘we make our own reality’ stuff, and the idea that by getting rid of negative thoughts we can fix everything. I’ve never bought that, I still don’t – it’s too simplistic. Avoiding negative thoughts means we can’t recognise vast swathes of truth. There are times when we need to acknowledge error, lack of care, poor judgement and so forth. We can’t grow if we can’t see where we are going wrong. Shame has important social functions. But how much shame, and how we process it is worth thinking about. How entitled our culture feels to shame us for things we have little control over is well worth considering. How much we pile the shame on ourselves for not meeting expectations is also a factor.

Once again, magic words like ‘enough’ seem relevant here. Good enough, tolerable – that’s all we need to be, any of us. And what if it isn’t that we feel as we do because we look a certain way, but that within the physical issues and limitations of our specific bodies, we’ve come to look a certain way in some part because it reflects elements of how we feel?

Walking Calendar – Boxing Day

Boxing Day lends itself to a walk – the post-Christmas over-eating guilt encourages people to get out. Amongst the set of people I was at school with, there’s a long standing tradition of walking over the hills from Dursley to Waterly Bottoms (we have fantastic place names round here) to a pub, and then coming back. It’s a steep walk, and not the easiest in the dark. I’ve done it a couple of times, and while I like the theory, I struggle with the practice. It also doesn’t help that not living in Dursley I need to get home after the return from the pub, sans car.

This year I thought it would be fun to start my own Boxing Day walk, for which I managed to lure out a few intrepid souls. While I like the idea of committing to a walk on this day, I have no sense of a fixed route I want to adopt – that may settle in time, or it may not.

The inspiration for the walk came from Gloucestershire Ghost Tales (History press, Anthony Nanson and Kirsty Hartsiosis) – the mention of a place called ‘Woeful Dane’s Bottom’ and reference to a standing stone that I didn’t previously know about. I spent a while cross-referencing the story with the local ordinance survey map, but then failed to take the map with me on the day, which had consequences.

We walked from Stroud to Nailsworth, and thence to Avening, where there was a detour to the graveyard. My great uncle – Wilfred Hunking – and his wife Anne are buried there. They are just on the graveyard side of the wall, and on the other side is a stile, and it was at that stile that they kissed for the first time on the night that they met at a local dance. They were a case of love at first sight. Romantic to the end. But also cantankerous – it was a romance that looked a lot like fighting and point scoring from the outside.

From Avening, we walked up the edge of Gattcombe Park, an exercise in trying to keep my inner proletariat from rioting. A vast tract of beautiful landscape and woodland largely inaccessible because it’s owned by a royal. There is now a gate in the field that allows people to access the barrow there – a really unusual barrow with a stone on the top, called The Tingle Stone. I’ve heard stories about Pagans trespassing in that field and finding themselves in conversation with armed police. And so we trespassed, but an unlocked gate is an open invitation, and I think it immoral that anyone is allowed to prohibit access to such places as these. The history of land ownership in the UK has a lot to do with conquest, which can equally be described as violent theft.

We found the long stone, but, without the map, were on the wrong road and the wrong side of the field, so we missed the second barrow, and we did not get to Woeful Dane’s Bottom. That will be for another day.

As is so often the way of it, this walk suggested the scope for another, and one that might be especially suited to early spring.

Walking Calendar – Christmas

Seasonal walking is a practical issue as well as a way of connecting with the cycle of the seasons. It’s something I’ve been exploring for a while. One of my personal traditions is to walk to my mother’s house at Christmas, with my husband and son. The first few times we did this, we were walking up from the canal (low, flat ground) into the hills. It wasn’t a charming route – the necessity of crossing a motorway and the scarcity of places to do this meant mostly road walking, although on Christmas morning there’s never much traffic. One year we did this in heavy snow, and had the odd experience of someone passing over us in a hot air balloon!

The last three Christmases, we’ve walked over the hills from Stroud to Dursley, taking in several barrows as we go. On a few occasions, this year included, we’ve done it in less than ideal weather. Last year was exquisite, with light and colours that you don’t often see at any time of year, but especially not the middle of winter. The Severn River tends to be grey, or muddy browns when you look down on her from these hills, but for that one walk, with the fields shining in greens, the river was the kind of blue that children paint rivers. It was unreal in many ways, and wondrous.

This year we had to modify the route, because there’s a small pair of hills we can come in over – again the views on a good day are stunning, and there’s something exciting about finishing the walk with these final hills, separate from the Cotswold edge, taking in the views and coming down into the small town feeling triumphant. However, the hill is steep and in wet weather, too slippery to be faced. We took the lanes, an old holloway, weaving between hills and farms, past the hill that homed a small pox isolation hospital. The ruins of that were still visible when my great grandmother was a child. On maps, the hill bears the bland name of ‘Downham’ but to local people it is Smallpox Hill. In mist it is an eerie place.

We paused to talk to some friendly sheep, saw a retirement home for old horses, and were charmed by a sleeping goat. These are the kinds of experience that you can only have when moving through a landscape at a human pace. We also got cold and wet.

One of the highpoints of the walk for me, came as we were moving over the top of the Cotswold hills in driving wind and heavy rain. It wasn’t easy walking, we were all starting to feel tired by this point and the battering by the elements wasn’t easy to bear. My son expressed his enthusiasm for what we were doing, because it was real; an immediate encounter with the reality of the land and weather. He put it more bluntly but I can’t recall the exact phrasing. It was a moment of pride for me. I don’t want to be at the raw edge of existence all the time, I doubt my son does either, but to be willing to go there, to experience discomfort so as to meet the season and the land – that’s powerful.

Walking through a landscape with history, folklore and tradition is an opportunity to talk about it, and to pass down knowledge. Walking past Smallpox Hill created time to tell my son the stories of the hill – the history of the hospital, and the mystery of the bumps. There are two large, rectangular constructions on one side of the hill. Local myth has it that these are mass graves from the hospital. The more likely version is that these are mediaeval rabbit warrens. It’s an interesting example of how we make intelligible stories out of landscape features when we don’t know what’s going on.

New Year, New Books

I’ve had a week off, and in that time, I’ve been reading. I thought I’d set the tone for 2016 by kicking off with reviews of the books I’ve read over the last week.

The Old Magic of Christmas, Linda Raedisch. A book exploring myths, legends and folk practice from Germanic and Scandinavian countries, interspersed with ways to do some of the things described. Charming, accessible and very readable, it’s not an academic text but the author seems well read. While I’m no expert on Christmas traditions, where there were overlaps with things I know about, I saw nothing to take issue with. I very much enjoyed the author’s willingness to explore all the gruesome and creepy aspects of the season. If only regular Christmas had more trolls in it, I’d probably find the whole thing far more palatable!

https://www.llewellyn.com/product.php?ean=9780738733340

 

 

The Sandman: Overture – Neil Gaiman. A prequel to the Sandman series, I imagine it would make little sense to a reader who hadn’t already read the other titles. It’s beautifully put together, the art really shows what can be done with a graphic novel when the artist, letterer and colourist have time to lavish care and attention on every page rather than what the usual factory approach delivers. In terms of story, it is odd, clever, sometimes funny, poignant, uncomfortable – in short all I have come to expect from Neil Gaiman. If you like what he does, you will like this one too.

http://www.vertigocomics.com/graphic-novels/the-sandman-overture-deluxe-edition

 

 

The Voice that Thunders – Alan Garner. A collection of essays exploring the process of writing, the writing industry, landscape, history, family, the relationship between books and classrooms, mental health issues, language, dialect… all laced through with stories of people and places. A fascinating read and exactly what I needed at this point in time. If you’re fascinated with Alan Garner and his work, of if any of the above themes are obsessions of yours, then I heartily recommend it.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1602869.The_Voice_That_Thunders

New Year Plotting

It’s that point when its tempting to look back and look forward, think about things, plot things. So, here we go. This last year has been ok – not terrible, not ecstatic, but a fairly functional mix of highs and lows, more progress than setback, and enough seeds planted for the future to feel hopeful. Most of the highs involved events and people. Most of the lows involved people.

In terms of last year’s resolutions, I did a pretty good job of working with them. I successfully increased the amount of cake in my life. I have not noticeably gained weight, probably the opposite. I have walked more – especially leisure walking, and longer distance walks. I did not manage to have this be as social an activity as I’d hoped, but people are showing up who do want to play, so I think that’s only going to improve. I did spend more time doing nothing. There’s still lots of scope to improve on this. One of the ways I’m improving is by taking more time off. I haven’t quite taken down capitalism yet, but I’m seeing more moves in that direction all the time from other people!

This year’s resolutions then:

To read more books. Because books are good, reading for leisure is good, talking about books is good, lending people books is good and there’s going to be more of it.
Go to the pub more. Not just to talk about books, but also as part of number three…
Get more live music and other live performance into my life. This is in no small part about managing my energy such that I have the physical resources to go out in the evening more.
To sell a lot of books. Not necessarily my own, although that would be fine, but to get more good books into people’s hands. Probably not by jumping out of darkened alleys ways dressed as Batman and thrusting novels into the hands of alarmed passers by, and demanding payment, but you never know.
To stop angsting over unwinnable fights and focus my time on energy on doing good things that make a difference. Where ‘good things’ and ‘making a difference’ are going to be mine to define as I’m going along.
To dance more. Possibly in public, possibly as part of resolution numbers 2 and 3. I used to dance a lot, I want that back.

Whatever you’re planning to do with 2016, I hope it brings you gentle abundance, peace, and the opportunity to share that around a bit to good effect.

Are we here again? Bugger.

Are we here again? Bugger.

After the unexpected lane I reach

An oft visited crossroads –

Ideal for hanging the intolerable

And burying suicidal misfits.

A homely sort of space, familiar.

Road sign points to villages

With names like You Really Are Too Much.

It’s Far Too Difficult On The Wold.

And my favourite: You’re Unreasonable.

I’ve downed my share of pints

In the pub there. More than my share.

Gallows humour at the crossroads,

Leaving another of my guises to choke.

A whole new level of corpsing,

But if the joke has a punchline

I’m still waiting to hear it.

Fiction – Will and testament

No, I never met Julie. I heard about her, but that was before my time. He was always so friendly when I saw him in the street. A lovely man, you couldn’t possibly hope to have a nicer neighbour.

There was a girlfriend, yes. Katie? Kitty? Something like that. I didn’t know her.

No, he never said anything that made me think anything was wrong. He was always nice to everyone.

Kitty, Katie, whoever she was didn’t last for long. I don’t know what happened, I just stopped seeing her around. I don’t like to pry. I don’t think she’d been very good for him, to be honest. I think once she’d gone, he realised that.

Lisa moved in last summer. I would guess she was around for a while before that, months, certainly. It wasn’t too hasty. They seemed perfectly happy at first.

No, I didn’t see or hear anything untoward. It was fine. Perfectly normal. She wasn’t… how do I put it? She wasn’t really in his league. Nothing like as clever as him, not very successful, a little too loud of voice and dress style, if you take my meaning. I expect he got tired of her, realised she wasn’t quite for him.

 

No, I never asked him why his first marriage broke up. As I said we were just neighbours, we were hardly close. No, I never asked him about the others, either. I don’t know what happened. Why are you asking me all these questions? What do you imagine I could tell you?

I do not think those women are dead. I think it’s all nasty lies, cooked up by people with nothing better to do. You go ahead and dig up his garden. You won’t find anything there.

Of course I don’t know where they are!

Is that why you’re asking me all these horrible questions? You really think I know something, don’t you? I barely knew the man. I had very little to do with him.

I wasn’t jealous. Why would I be? It’s not like I have an unrequited attraction to Evan. He’s just a pleasant neighbour.

I moved here after Julie left.

Why? Because I liked the house. I wanted a change of scenery and this is a nice, quiet, upmarket road. No immigrants.  There’s nothing wrong with that, is there? I like to hear a language I speak when I walk down the road of a morning. That’s not a crime. Moving here was not a crime. I was perfectly entitled to do it for my own reasons, and they were exactly as I have already said. I didn’t know Evan before I moved here. I never met him before. I never met Julie. I swear it. Or any of the others, Katie, or Lisa. I didn’t know anyone here.

Yes, I worked at the mail depot for, what was it? Three years, give or take. I left a while back because I’d found something with better pay, and I wanted a new challenge. Still Human Resources, of course.

No, I had no idea Evan also worked for the depot at that time. It was a big place. Lots of people worked there, I don’t know who half of them were. I never saw him.

I wasn’t helping him. Well, there was one time when I helped him pick up litter after a fox had torn the bins open. Was that what you meant? No?

No, I wasn’t stalking him. It’s just coincidences, none of it means anything. This isn’t a big town. I’m sure I have all sorts of things in common with all sorts of people without my ever knowing at all.

I have never been inside his house.

That was a long time ago. That was years ago. I was a kid. You can’t bring that into this. It’s not the same at all. It was an accident. They said so at the time. Everybody said so. It was a terrible, awful accident that she died, and it wasn’t my fault. That’s got nothing to do with any of this.

That’s not fair. I wouldn’t say there have been more accidents in my life than anyone else gets. People die. They do it all the time. People have car accidents and they kill themselves, and they get food poisoning and I don’t know what. I expect if you pick over anybody’s life you can find lots of times they were close to someone who died. That’s what life is! People dying. None of it’s my fault.

I never did anything with Evan beyond talking to him in the street. If he’s told you something different, then I don’t know why, but it isn’t true. I never slept with him. I never asked him to sleep with me. I was not interested in having sex with him.

No, I’m not seeing anyone at the moment, for what that’s worth. I don’t see what that has to do with anything.

Alright, yes, a couple of years ago I found a suicide in my workplace. He’d hung himself from the rafters. It was a traumatic experience for me.

His name was Greg, I’m not sure exactly what he did. I’m sorry. It’s years ago and it isn’t something I like to dwell on.

No, I didn’t know him very well. I talked to him in passing, but that’s true of a lot of other people too.

Yes, that was the mail depot.

No, I had no idea Evan was working there at the same time.

No, I have no idea whether they knew each other. How could I possibly know something like that? Maybe they did know each other. It’s a small enough town, we aren’t all total strangers here.

No, I did not date Greg. Nor did I particularly want to.

No, he did not turn down any advances from me, because there were no advances.

I didn’t resent Greg! He was nothing to me, just another employee in a dead-end place I was working. I work because I need the money, but it’s not a big part of my life. Very little of it interests me.

Literature. That’s interests me. I like nineteenth century novels, and Russian literature especially. I like gardening.

Yes, I own gardening equipment.

Yes, I have several very good spades, thank you. And a saw, for small tree branches.

No power tools. I do not believe it is a crime to own gardening equipment, or to take interest in looking after the soil.

Yes, there is evidence of digging in my garden. I recently dug a trench to bury last year’s compost. I’d rather you didn’t dig it up, I have already redistributed my rhubarb there. You won’t find any bodies there.

Well, you clearly think all manner of things are possible, so why shouldn’t someone have buried a body in my garden without my knowing it? It’s no more ludicrous than suggesting that Greg and Evan were gay lovers and that I killed Greg in a fit of envy. That’s quite remarkably far-fetched.

I didn’t say they were gay lovers! I said you were suggesting they were gay lovers, that’s an entirely different thing.

You’re confusing me. You’re doing it on purpose and making me think I’ve said things I haven’t said.

Alright, yes, ten years ago I reported that someone was stalking me. I was very afraid, and I felt threatened. It’s not easy, being a woman alone. You’ve obviously read the file, you don’t need me to tell you. They never found anyone. Eventually the window banging and the strange things being pushed through my letterbox, stopped. I was very glad. What else is there to say? How is that relevant to any of this? I was a victim of an unsolved crime.

Yes, I’m sure lots of people went missing all over the place during those same weeks. That kind of thing makes me nervous. I’m allowed to be nervous.

And then you found the body. I still don’t see what that has to do with my stalker, other than that it all happened in the same time frame.

No, I did not know the young man, so far as I am aware. It is entirely possible that we once sat in the same cafe or had a hairdresser in common, but honestly, you could say that of anyone.

Oh, we had a bus route in common, did we? Well, I wonder how long it took you to make that tenuous connection.

No, I’m not being flippant, I’m unhappy and frustrated and I think this must be very close to harassment. You have no evidence of anything and you’re just making wild accusations. Aren’t you? I haven’t done anything wrong. I don’t know any of these people you’re talking about. They are nothing to do with me. It’s just coincidences and plain bad luck. I didn’t kill any of them.

And you can’t prove otherwise.