Bi-Weekly Topic for Dec. 15, 2003
Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20051112124712/www.magpienest.org/scgi-bin/wiki.pl?MythicPlace
Mythic Place
Mythic Place: the topic for this biweekly Ecotone writing. The idea brings to mind stories-- grand, old stories-- that become associated with people and places and things that may or may not have existed in fact. Paul Bunyan and John Henry are mythic. BigFoot and maybe the mysterious but real Brown Mountain Lights in Burke County where we used to live-- are myths, or mythic realities-- associated with particular places.
While it not mythic, the story of Mary Draper Ingles is epic-- a larger-than-life heroic drama that pervades this region. This woman's experience in these very hills enters my thoughts often and comes to me as I contemplate "mythic place". In our comings and goings through Montgomery County each week, we unknowingly cross Mary Ingles footsteps with our humming wheels. It is a story that deserves a wider audience, and so I will simply offer her tale to you here. And another account here.
Mythic Place
By P.I'm an idiot. On [Saturday] I thought out a contribution to Mythic Places that says I'm looking for great deeds and noble purposes of long ago and not finding them in shopworn Ohio, but on Sunday, I repent my shallowness -- even though I liked what I wrote.
For I have walked the Cleveland streets where Eliot Ness walked, on his long, sorry slide after busting gangs in Chicago; I have climbed the steps, now demolished, that Dr. Sam Sheppard climbed on his tragic quest to keep his innocence; I have walked the halls where America's first big-city black mayor walked (though ignobly on my part, in the mere pursuit of a birth certificate). Lincoln came to Cleveland, and Dr. King; and all manner of scoundrels; and hopeful, ordinary folk whose purposes were no less high because their powers were small.
I have seen the modest social hall where immigrants and visitors conceived and shaped one of the Balkans' few successes, Czechoslovakia. Often I have crossed Public Square, where thousands of women once rallied for the right to vote and thousands of men rallied again and again for the right to negotiate over the shape and value of their work. I have counted the coins on John D. Rockefeller's grave and pondered something that proletarian and plutocrat proved together, before greed took over and rust devoured us: That in sharing wealth and space and ideas, and in tolerating, if not embracing, those we share with, we all prosper.
I think that maybe I mythed the point of the exercise, for that's a truth, not a legend. But it's a truth people are apt to forget in the morning, anyhow, so with your permission, I'll let both entries ride.
I must have mythed out when they were explaining "mythic places," because I can't make up my mind whether they're places of legend or legendary places.
The real world I live in is more abused than ancient, like an old porch railing that has been scraped and painted a dozen times but never stripped, so that a thick, irregular surface obscures the detail of the wood. Ohio has been cut-over, dug under, drained, plowed and paved for 200 years, and at this point, the rich lands that pioneers found when they went "beyond the Allegheny" are themselves the stuff of legend. For heroes, we have Ulysses Grant and James Garfield, and stolid regiments who went to fight at Chickamauga or Chattanooga.
Hardly "mythic," at least not yet. For mythic, I want great deeds, long enough gone to have lost their gory details and gained that extra dimension storytellers add, of moral significance and the sense that we are not alone on the surface of the Earth, that there is more to what I see than what I understand.
After 200 years, we're still strangers in this land. The Erie, the Wyandot, the folks whose ancestors lived and told stories here are gone, and the stories that scholars have collected aren't meaningful to me, child of a far different culture. I have stood and wondered at some of the earthworks a lost people built in the southern part of the state -- but myth? I wish I knew enough.
I climbed once to the top of the Cahokia Mound on the plains of Illinois opposite St. Louis. The earthwork stood at the center of a great city of 30,000 people until 1300 AD. What I saw was haze and the odd ranch house, but the archaeologists have reported lost dwellings everywhere, signs of a complex society, and courtyards possibly used for games. Surely over four or five centuries, that green place could boast of great deeds and higher meanings -- but when you come down to it, I know more about the Babylonians. Could it be one of the cities of Mormon teaching? More homework to do.
Maybe somewhere out there, there's a legend worth traveling to. You know, a myth is as good as a mile
Source: http://my.core.com/~pzicari/text/Myth.htm
Myth and Place
By Lorianne
I don't (yet!) publish a weblog, but I do enjoy yours. (Editorial note: several weeks after posting this, I did start a weblog, [Hoarded Ordinaries].) This is from my offline journal for Wed, Dec 17, 2003: in it's own roundabout way, it explores Mythic Place...
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Just past 8:30 am as I sit here writing at the kitchen table. The refrigerator hums loudly; beside it, the dog slurps his breakfast. In the office Chris masters a CD of a local choir's Christmas concert: the usual mishmash of sounds that means home.
I just sent an email to Chris's dad. He'd responded to my latest [Pedestrian Thoughts], suggesting that the scant references to symbolic birds at the end were more effective than the isolated paragraphs on birding in the middle. And thus with one insightful comment, his keen lawyer's mind honed in on the cusp of the debate in nature writing today: to what extent should we focus on actual places peopled with real birds, and to what extent should we focus on spaces of the spirit, locales populated by symbolic creatures like Dickinson's [feathered hope]?
In my mind ,we should do both: Nature is, as Emerson argued, the symbol of spirit; at the same time, though, Beauty is its own excuse for being (as he argued [elsewhere]). And so this table at which I sit writing is at once a Platonic table, a representative of any table at which someone might sit and write; this dog, a symbol of any dog; and Chris, an emblem of any man, or husbands in general.
At the same time, though, it should certainly matter that this particular table was purchased in Nashua, NH, bought from a company that has no qualms, I'm sure, about selling mass-produced tables made from lumber harvested from rain forests or other shady sites; it should matter that this dog named Reggie is a chow-shepherd mix, 7 years old, rescued from a pound just outside Boston some 5 years ago. It should also matter that as I wrote that last sentence, Reggie was pacing about, haunted by squirrels either real or imagined, and at the end of that same sentence he plopped down noisily on the bedroom floor, sighing.
And the Chris who sits clicking at the computer, repeating the same recorded phrase over and over in an attempt to get a song ending just right, is not Everyman much less Every Husband: instead, he's Chris from Michigan; Chris who quit a corporate computer job (Chris the ex-VP) to play Renaissance lute for pure joy; Chris the son of a retired lawyer who reads stacks of books in a living-room in Michigan and who enjoys discussing them with his lit scholar daughter-in-law here in New Hampshire.
And so this Keene where we three--Chris, the dog, and I--as well as this America where Chris's dad also joins into the intellectual fray, connected via electronic impulses sped via modem and cable lines...this Keene and this America are simultaneously spiritual places as well as actual. It matters that Keene is home to some 20,000 actual souls, some of whom write, some of whom sing, and some of whom take their dogs on actual walks, treading trails that once were railroad beds, lines that took actual goods from actual factories (now abandoned) to deliver to actual people who wanted to buy things (including mass-produced tables) in the commercial heyday after the Civil War.
So is Keene an actual place or a mythic one? Is it merely my humble home, a place that still surprises me, a newcomer who moved here less than 6 months ago? Or is it a mythic place, a place representative of something larger and greater, a place where my struggle to get out of bed and write each morning is a universal battle of wills, Beowulf against Grendel?
When we first moved to New Hampshire, I was shocked to learn that 20 minutes up the road from our subdivision house in Hillsborough was the town of Nelson, NH: the place where May Sarton wrote her Journal of a Solitude. And not a half hour in the other direction from Hillsborough lies Warner, NH, the home of Maxine Kumin, whose In Deep essays I'd eagerly read in the suburbs of Randolph, MA the same spring that we adopted Reggie. Reading of Sarton's self-imposed solitudes in a quaint New England town and reading Kumin's musings on a neighbor's pregnant mare in rural New Hampshire, I'd imagined these places to be wild--distant and removed from my actual life of shopping lists and indifferent students.
The thought that art could be written in my backyard--the thought that a mythic house on a hill where people were actually creative, and wrote, did really exist within a comfortable drive from my home--was alarming. If Maxine Kumn is the type of person I could encounter at any moment shopping for groceries at the local store (and she is), then what was I doing with my life? Instead of longing for a mythic table at which an idealized writer could pen universal truths, the stuff of tomorrow's myths, why wasn't I starting with the actual: this table, this pen, this writer in this place, this moment?
And so now the dog lies resting here in the kitchen, having moved from his spot in the bedroom. The kitchen faucet drops as it did yesterday and the day before that as Chris continues to click at the computer, having moved on to master the next song. Hark the Herald Angels Sing--another myth from another time and place--while here in Keene at 9:14 am on Wednesday, December 17, the rain falls from grey skies onto increasingly sodden, slowly melting snows. Is this place mythic, or is it real? Only the snows know.
Shri Marundeeswarar Temple
By under the fire star
I wrote this a year ago. It's meant to describe to an outsider like myself what it's like to visit a South Indian temple (I'm not a great photographer -- and I didn't take any pictures inside the walls of the temple. There's a much better picture of a typical South Indian temple gopuram than the one I took here):
Thiruvanmiyur used to be a small village on Chennai's southern outskirts. Now it is a suburb. Its only distinguishing features are Kalakshetra (where I was a student for two years, long ago) and a temple of Shiva in the form of Marundeeswarar, the Lord of Medicine.
The temple was built in the 11th c. AD. According to the temple history, the sage Agastya came to Shiva with a terrible stomach ache. Shiva cured him, and taught him medicine. He also cured the ailing sun and moon, as a result of which they both worship Shiva here every day. The doorway of the god's inner sanctum faces west, because the sun worships him at sunset. Most Shiva temples include shrines to the nine planets, including sun and moon. This temple does not, because the sun and moon themselves are worshippers. Valmiki, author of the epic Ramayana, prayed here for Shiva to appear before him. Shiva did so, and there is a shrine which marks the spot.
Outside the temple is a tank, a square artificial pond with stone steps leading down on all four sides. In the center is a square 'island', also reached by steps, just large enough for a stone pavilion. When I came here years ago, I watched women doing their laundry, boys playing, men bathing. Red lotuses floated on the surface of the water.
Now the tank was dry. Five or six goats ate scrubby grass at the bottom. People had thrown garbage there, amid which white plastic shopping bags gleamed. I parked in an open expanse of soft dust in front of the temple. A brown chicken ran in front of my car. There were more goats, and people resting in the shade of a few trees.
When you face the temple, the first thing you see is a tall gopuram, a roughly triangular tower five or six storeys high, covered with figures: gods, goddesses, terrifying protective deities, arranged in tiers like a wedding cake, all painted in vivid colours. Pigeons flutter in its nooks and crannies.
The gopuram rises over a tall green double door, studded with heavy bolts. This gateway is in the middle of a red-and-white striped wall around the temple compound. White-painted bulls sit on top of the wall. The bull, Nandi, is Shiva's vehicle and also his greatest devotee.
looking toward the gopuram over the east gate from the south.
Nandis sit on top of the wall
There is another dry tank in front of the temple, smaller, with broken, uneven steps. [Note: The two tanks have been renovated since I wrote this, partly in an attempt to recharge the water table, which has sunk dramatically because of overuse due to population increase.] At one end of the tank another Nandi faces a small shrine.
A man sold strings of marigolds and jasmine beside the main door. Worshippers kept their shoes under a rickety lean-to.
As I walked toward the temple I followed an elderly lady heading in the same direction. Her grey hair was pulled back in a tight bun. She wore a rose-coloured cotton sari with a yellow border, and a gold and diamond jewel on one nostril. She left her sandals in the lean-to and walked to the shrine beside the neglected tank. She faced the deity, joined her hands, prayed, circled the shrine clockwise. The deity was a lingam, the abstract phallic symbol which is the most common representation of Shiva. It was draped in white cloth. Tiny lamps -- mud cups filled with oil and cotton wicks -- burned in front of it.
the small tank to the left of the east gate,
with Nandi, under a stone canopy, facing a shrine
I also circled the shrine, and followed the lady to the main temple door. People were entering in a steady trickle, some of them touching the high stone threshold with their right hands, and raising their hands to their heads.
From outside, the gopurams (there were two, over the east and west gates) gave an impression of massiveness and height. But across the threshold was open space and human dimensions. A number of one-story stone buildings were set in a large dirt courtyard, covering about an acre. The principal buildings were: Shiva's shrine, divided in two parts for two different forms of the same god; two small shrines in front of the main one, for Shiva's two sons; and, on the right, a shrine for Shiva's consort. A number of minor shrines were scattered around the compound.
Of the two sons, Ganesh, the elephant-headed Remover of Obstacles and God of Beginnings, was the more popular. All the worshippers stopped to pray to him on their way to the main building. Many performed a gesture which is reserved for Ganesh: cross your arms over your chest; from there, reach your hands up to grasp your earlobes, so that your crossed arms represent elephant ears; bend your knees and bob up and down three times. A priest was stationed with a round brass tray which held an oil lamp, cow dung ash, and flowers. As the worshippers came up he waved the tray in front of the god, then held it out. Each person cupped both hands palm down over the flame, then moved their hands in the air over their faces and the tops of their heads. The priest gave each one some ash to put on their foreheads, and a flower petal.
The first chamber of the main temple was an open hall supported by thirty six pillars carved with deities. Wooden carriages for temple processions were stored there: fantastic birds, lions, lotus blossoms, all brightly painted; and a special swinging palanquin for Shiva's annual marriage ceremony. There was also an intriguing noise-making machine: two small kettle-drums with metal drumsticks poised, two bells, two cymbals, and a motor to set everything in motion.
At the end of this pillared hall was a shrine to Shiva as Tyagaraja Swami, in human form. This was the god which was taken outside the temple during festivals. The shrine was a building within the building, made so the devotees could circle it.
From Tyagaraja's hall I turned right and entered the shrine to the main deity, Shri Marundeeswarar. This was the largest room in the temple. It also contained a separate building inside for the god's sanctum. It was dim, lit by sunlight from the pillared hall, and by dozens of oil lamps. Shri Marundeeswarar was in the form of a black stone lingam, almost completely covered with jasmine garlands and surrounded by oil lamps. The worshippers stand behind railings and peer into the sanctum, lit only by the flickering lamps, so the god seems withdrawn and mysterious. This lingam is supposed to have risen from the earth. The Divine Cow Kamadhenu used to shower the lingam with milk, and there's a nick where a hoof grazed it. The priest goes inside, waves his brass tray in front of the god, brings it out along the railing to the worshippers.
I circled the sanctum, which was surrounded by a stone gutter. The priests bathed the gods every day, before dressing and decorating them, and the gutter was still wet from the morning bath. On special days there were elaborate baths. During Shiva's annual festival the lingam was bathed with water and shikakai (a pre-soap herbal cleanser), then with honey, milk, yoghurt and navamrta (nine fruits mixed together). Women could bring their gold jewellry to the temple, and the priests would put it on the lingam and bathe it along with the lingam. The bathed jewellry was 'good for health.' People sponsored special baths, and offered clothing to the gods.
I walked outside to continue my clockwise trip around the compound. Cows were tethered near the wall, to provide milk, ghee and cow dung for the rituals. An old priest and a young one sat side by side on the ground with a book. Both were bare-chested except for the Brahmin's sacred thread, and wore white dhotis. The old man chanted a Sanskrit verse, the young one repeated it.
I passed the west gate, surmounted by its gopuram. I could see the barred opening into the main shrine -- oil lamps and darkness -- for the setting sun to worship Shiva.
Further on, a platform surrounded the temple tree. It was ancient, its trunk partly hollowed but alive, fragrant, surrounded with naga stones, fertility deities. These were tombstone-shaped, carved with twining snakes. They were decorated with flowers, and smeared heavily with yellow turmeric and red sindoor. More oil lamps burned in front of them. A man stood praying to them, singing a hymn under his breath.
Finally I visited Shiva's consort, Tripurasundari, which means "Beautiful Woman of the Triple City (of the gods)." Her shrine followed the same pattern as the others: the goddess in her small chamber within a larger pavilion, almost hidden under a silk sari and flowers, the priest with his tray of oil lamp, ash, flowers. I sat cross-legged on the goddess's stone front porch for awhile, along with several other women, writing my notes.
In the years when I studied here the gods seemed so close, even though they weren't mine. People kept smaller versions at home, worshipped them, bathed and dressed them. The Southern classical music tradition consists entirely of hymns. Everyone knew the stories of gods' activities on earth. God appeared (in his complete form: the temple forms contain the divine, but the divine is larger than they are) on this very spot, right here, see? The Divine Cow's hoof grazed Shiva and left this mark, here! I still know intellectually that to some people the gods are immanent, available; sitting on the porch of Tripurasundari's shrine, I could feel for a moment how it must be.
Source: http://underthefirestar.blogspot.com/2003_09_01_archive.html
Mythic Place
By older and growing
Fred and Beth recently pointed me in the direction of the Ecotone wiki; writing about place. There's a bi-weekly topic, currently Mythic Place, so I thought I'd give it a go. Here's what resulted...
A child’s-eye-view of the world tends to build by a process of accretion. New knowledge materialises in isolated chunks and is added into the picture where it seems to fit best, or sits on its own, uncertain of a place in the whole. Islands of knowledge form and grow as new pieces of the jigsaw puzzle are added; sometimes the islands join to create a new panorama of knowledge; sometimes also the ever-creative mind of a child fills in the gaps as best it can to create a self-consistent world-view.
I grew up in the outer suburbs of London; my view of the world centred on our own little corner of England. I knew our street, I knew the neighbouring streets where my friends lived and the park reached by a short-cut over our back fence. As I grew older I got to know the neighbouring suburbs as well. But knowledge of any real places much further afield had to be pieced together from fragments of largely second- or third-hand information – pictures in books, glimpses on black-and-white TV, descriptions in stories. I read a lot as a child and developed a particular fondness for two series of books whose stories took place against a backdrop of rural England. Thankfully they had few pictures, only a small number of line drawings, so visualising the landscape in which they were set was almost entirely down to my imagination.
So it was that, without only the sketchiest first-hand knowledge, I built myself a child’s-eye-view of the English countryside. A mythical landscape; an archetype; an ideal; a mosaic assembled from all of those idealised portraits reflecting the countryside as those authors wished it to be. My mythical countryside was an adventurous schoolboy’s dream – freely accessible woods to explore, trees to climb (with perfectly-spaced branches), fields to laze in; streams to wade through (just shallow enough not to come over the top of Wellington boots), traffic-free county lanes to stroll down, grassy hills to race up and roll down, all linked together by winding sandy tracks and pathways (no heavy, cloying mud here) with delights around every corner. Hedgerows with perfectly red berries; haystacks of soft, dry hay; a grass snake slithering into the undergrowth; a heron silhouetted motionless before a pond at evening.
Seasons in this land of make-believe were, of course, perfect. Snow came early in winter – before Christmas, naturally, and just the right consistency for perfectly-rounded snowballs - and stayed clinging to rooftops and trees until the spring, magically disappearing overnight without ever turning to dirty wet slush. Summer days were long, hot, carefree.
Occasionally now I’ll come across a scene that’s like a tile fallen out of my mythic mosaic and materialised in a hidden corner of the real world. A combination of light and colour, feature and form, creates a vista that triggers a recognition of that imagined land.
More often though, reality disappoints. Farmyards, for example, are paved in concrete, permanently awash with mud, littered with old chemical fertiliser bags. Farming is rarely a profitable business, and it shows – everything looks old, used, a little shabby, often with makeshift repairs. Farm outbuildings constructed in the cheapest, most functional materials – concrete blocks, corrugated sheeting. The peace of the countryside disturbed by the incessant drone of a diesel generator. Access blocked by rusting barbed wire.
My mythical countryside remains a dream, and always will. But perhaps the only thing really separating dream and reality are the cumulative and ever-present effects of our apparent need to dominate the landscape. It’s still just possible to see past the artificiality and decay that modern living imposes on the land, and to appreciate the natural beauty that inspired the myth.
// posted by andy @ 11:19 AM permalink
Comments
Nice treat to go to Ecotone today and see your contribution. I think I have struggled a bit between "mythic" places and "ideal" places or personal archetypes as you describe. I don't know what the person who proposed "mythic place" would say about this distinction, and it is not important. Still, it was a hard topic to get my teeth around, so I didn't struggle with it too long.
Admittedly I may have interpreted the title in a slightly tangential way - but it was the first time I've tried "writing to order" so I was happy to grab hold of any idea that floated past!
Andy, I was delighted to find your contribution at Ecotone! And an excellent one it is. (A friend in England just sent me one of those "perfect" English-countryside calendars.) I hope you'll keep responding to the topics. Which reminds me - I still haven't written mine...like Fred, I've found this one a little hard to pin down.
Source: http://olderandgrowing.blogspot.com/2003_12_01_olderandgrowing_archive.html#107174635207030107
Mythic Place
By CassandraPages
Stonehenge. Photo by J.
ECOTONE TOPIC: MYTHIC PLACE
Driving out of London, the detached brick houses and backyard garden plots gradually give way to countryside. Sitting on the wrong side of the little rented car, I watched out the window while my husband, happy in the left-handed world of British motoring, drove west. Lulled by the rhythm of the rolling grassy land - undulating, calm, with hardly a tree -I suddenly sat up, astounded. There it was, in the distance, rising all alone from the Salisbury Plain. My skin contracted into gooseflesh.
This was more than twenty years ago. When we finally arrived at the site, we parked in a lot that had been cleverly designed to the left and below the highway, so that buses and cars would be largely out of sight when you were viewing the stones themselves. We also arrived in the days when you could walk right into the circle of stones. To our surprise and relief, there was no American-style souvenir shop, full of plastic monuments sealed in snow-globes, or reproduced as inflatable life-size replicas. You just walked up some steps, onto a gravel walkway set into the grass, and there you were.
It was a grey, misty English day: perfect for seeing this place that I had wanted to visit my entire life. I hadn't known what to expect; what the scale would feel like, or how the site was situated in real life, not just in pictures; whether it would have power once I actually stood there. And to this day, I can't really describe what I felt. I remember that the stones weren't as big as I had thought they might be, but feeling dwarfed by their massiveness as much as their height. I remember the quiet, and the strangeness that emanated from the juxtaposition of the vast horizontal plain, and these sudden, standing stones, arranged in a way that felt both supremely human, and supernatural. I felt like a visitor in a place I didn't understand, but ought to, on some long-forgotten level. I remember wonder, awe, and mystery, and the sense of a tenuous line stretching from myself back into ancientness, beyond the power of any tools I could summon, beyond language, experience, or reason.
As we stood there and moved around the stones, we heard a low thumping in the earth, far away, and then the unmistakable rumbling of airplane engines. Low on the horizon and then quite near, flew a large military transport plane. We watched as this plane, and then another, and another, moved ponderously in the grey sky through the voids between the stones, while the deep thumps of test-bombing continued in the distance.
It was 1982, during the Falklands conflict, and Maggie Thatcher had the RAF at the ready. Strange. When my father had heard we were going to Salisbury, he told me about being stationed nearby on maneuvers before crossing the channel during the Normany invasion, and how he had once driven his tank through the cobblestone streets of the medieval city. I watched the planes, and thought about him.
We left the site and continued on to the city of Salisbury, where the spire of the cathedral also rises above the landscape. We walked up the same cobblestone streets my father remembered, crossed the cathedral grounds, and entered. The interior was cold, stony, damp…and lovely in the early afternoon light. We walked around quietly, reading about the site's Norman origins, and the cathedral’s founding in 1220. There were ancient woolen banners above our heads - tattered and faded - and the sign beneath told us, incredibly, that they had been brought back from the Crusades. Nearby, the effigy of a Crusader knight lay above his tomb, and close to him, the body of a Saracen who had been brought back from the Middle East. So not much had changed. My husband and I looked at the tombs, and then at each other.
"My relative," I said.
"And mine," he replied.
Read other responses to "Mythic Place" at the Ecotone Wiki.
5:46 PM
Source: http://cassandrapages.blogspot.com/2003_12_14_cassandrapages_archive.html
And, Wendy, There are Mermaids
By The Geek Icon
If you know me, you know that when I was two my parents sold their house and bought a 38' cutter which they named Katherine (after my mom's middle name). We lived on the boat, which tied up to a slip in Oxnard Harbor. On weekends we would often untie the lines from the dock and sail out to the Channel Islands which skirt the Santa Barbara channel just offshore from Southern California.
I was very young at that stage, but we lived aboard Katherine for five years, so a lot of my later memories from ages five, six and seven are pretty vivid. I indelibly love sailing and the water as a result.
When I knew my dad was coming to visit, I immediately booked a reservation with a sailing club for he and Adam and I to go sailing in Pittwater, just north of Sydney. I took a sailing class in college, but I was still surprised at how well I handled myself. I got a feeling for the wind ingrained into my mutable child's brain that couldn't be erased in the intervening years. We paid for the day's sail, but it wasn't just a boat charter -- we got to be part of the crew, pulling lines to tack and jibe, and we got a turn at the helm if we wanted. It was wonderful, it called up a part of my life I'll always deeply love and regret neglecting.
When I was little, we'd often sail to Santa Cruz Island, one of the nearest and largest in the Channel Islands. The north side of the island was inevitably either foggy or windy or both. We sometimes stayed a night or two in Little Scorpion, but often sailed around to the south side where the island shielded the weather and offered mellow, calm, warm anchorages. But before we scuttled off to sun ourselves at Coches Prietos we'd often make a visit to the Dragon Cave.
The Dragon Cave was a sea cave that wound back into the igneous rock of the island through a dark opening large enough only for a dinghy. If the tides weren't right you couldn't squeeze past the twists in the passage. Emanating from the cave was a deep, rhythmic rumbling, because somewhere hidden in the back a dragon was sleeping, snoring loudly. I would insist that choruses of "Puff the Magic Dragon" be sung while I gazed at the cave with a thrill running right through the middle of me.
We only went all the way into the cave a couple of times. As you pushed the dinghy through the darkness, bumping against the bubbled pumice of the cave walls, cool air would rush around you. Finally you alit on a small pebble beach at the back of the cave. A wave would surge in and pull back, rolling and tumbling over the pebbles which would clatter against each other. The clatter would multiply a thousand times over and echo against the rugged cave walls.
Last night we went to watch Peter Pan at the cinema. Mr Wiggins and I needed a veg out night, but I didn't really feel like sitting around at home, so this was our solution. The movie wasn't great but it was easily enjoyable. It captured the brightness, excitement and color that comes from imaginative and happy children. The screenplay diverged noticeably from the original story, but still captured the spirit of it well, and did include a lot of the good quotes (such as Mrs Darling's hidden kiss, in the right hand corner of her mouth). It was a good film, and it brought about a feeling that grabs a hold of my throat every time I see films of that sort. It squeezes my throat and burns my eyes and makes me think of the Dragon Cave.
I went to the back of the Dragon Cave and though I never saw the dragon, I always kept very quiet so as not to wake it up. I wandered to the very back of the pebble beach and saw the cave continued on back into the darkness, just a slim crack in the rock that you couldn't squeeze through. I saw the pebbles rolling over and over as the waves pushed in and fell back, making that rumbling noise so like a snore. I could understand that rocks were making the sound. But I also knew, with a belief that was fierce and firm in my head, that the dragon still slept there, snoring, back in the darkness.
Source: http://www.geekicon.net/index.shtml/article/582
New Zealand as Middle Earth
By Feathers of Hope (Pica)
This is a very belated entry to the Ecotone Wiki's joint post on Mythic Place.
I doubt whether J.R.R. Tolkien ever visited New Zealand but Peter Jackson has ensured that it is now on the global mythic map of the 21st century. It is said that Tolkien was disappointed that England had no native myths, so he set about writing one--about an England that had long disappeared first into Enclosures and then into the Industrial Revolution. (The Arthurian legends are all of French origin.) The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion read like the Icelandic sagas that were the professor's day job.
Claude Lévi-Strauss insists that myths are a language because they only exist in language; that they must be retold. Jackson's retelling must count, in part because of the introduction of this landscape into the contemporary consciousness.
A quick rereading of parts of Tolkien has struck me in its almost obsessive avoidance of the latinate. Use an Anglo-Saxon word where there is one, he seems to say. Perhaps the latinate in English is less able to evoke myth than the language of Beowulf.
I wonder whether Maori New Zealand is as excited about the success of the films as everyone else seems to be. Ideas, anyone?
Posted by Pica at December 26, 2003 01:23 PM
Comments
I noticed every character in the Rings trilogy basically has a white skin ...
Posted by: P. at January 6, 2004 09:47 PM
Source: http://www.magpienest.org/feathersofhope/archives/2003/12/26/new_zealand_as_m.html
mythic place ... in fragments
By alembic
This post is my response to ecotone's (Deceber 15, 2003) biweekly topic: Mythic Place
For days now I have been trying to compose a post in response to one of ecotones old biweekly topics, myth and place. I started with a few quotes, mixing the essence of different ideas until I ended up with a fairly volatile notion of myth ... something to do with a place becoming mythical only in words.
I got this recipe from books, where else? And, since I went to the trouble of copying these quotes, let me post them here anyway:
Learned (and mostly white male) Europeans like to trot out the strongest in their arsenal of words when they go hunting for that elusive beast of myth that still haunts the landscapes of our consciousness, that realm from which the bright sun of science has all but banished the deep, dark shadows that used to inspire both awe and fear in us and drove us to make art or war out of our responses.
Elias Canetti wrote in The Agony of Flies that a myth is a tale that becomes fresher with every retelling. Robert Calasso, in his book The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony goes on for some 400 pages trying to capture the secret power of myth, that spell the soul casts on itself.
The more I tried to makes sense of my understanding of the spells we cast when we weave words into myths, the more I realized that the one place on this earth that made me feel the power of myth is the one place I can least describe. Not because I lack for words; its because the place is indescribable. Its so large that it doesnt fit into language, if you will.
...
The Sliammon people who once used to live on both sides of the northern part of the Strait of Georgia in British Columbia had settlements in what is now called Theodosia and which is a strip of land on the coast, north of Lund, in the shelter of one of the many inlets of Desolation Sound that break up the land and buffered by the range of massive mountains that rise straight up, seemingly from the water.
Back in the early 1980s I spent some time on that beach in Theodosia. I was involved with a man who had built a cabin on the land. He was a university professor, a man who made his living digging through the mud of words and the layers of syntax to bring up from the depths of confusion clean, tidy propositions capable of bearing truth -- the kind thats indisputable in logical terms.
When the descendants of what remains of the Sliammon people came digging for calms on this reasonable mans beach, he became irate and had gone to the trouble of having the land rezoned just so that he could keep the Sliammon away from his piece of paradise. With his new commercial license, he took the clams, to which he was deathly allergic, as he was to all shellfish, and became a boutique supplier to restaurants along the way of the long commute (miles of driving, two ferry rides and a boat ride) between Theodosia and Vancouver. But thats another story....
The more this man of ideas wrested order and structure out of the land around him, the more I saw the wild and improbable beauty in it. At one point, long after I knew we had no future, I still accompanied him to Theodosia because, by that time, I was deeply in love with the landscape. There was something in its cold, silent inhumanity that warmed me, comforted me beyond words.
Understand when I say all this that I am not being romantic or crafty with words about this beauty. In this context, when I say beauty, I might be closer to saying truth. I am not talking aesthetics here.
One winters night we boarded the small boat my -- oh what should I call him? Boyfriend? He was hardly that -- anyway we boarded the boat he kept in one of the marinas at Okeover Inlet. Half way across the inlet, in the black silence of the night we discovered that the boat had sprung a leak. We kept bailing out the water from the boat, our fingers were almost frozen, and my icy breath that much colder from fear. I talked of dying, be he was not paying any attention to me. Then I fell silent, too. I saw, for a moment, a death incomprehensible in human terms, for had our boat capsized, we would have perished, slipped under the black water with no witness, human or animal, to mark it.
We made it to the shore, of course.... In the morning, I felt the urge for some ritual, a penance or offering to waters of the inlet and the sentinel of trees along the shore. I wanted to thank some ancient spirit. But there was nothing but silence all around me ... a beautiful, awe-inspiring silence in a landscape in which the skies have descended on the beach to cover everything, except a sliver of water, with snow:
On the beach in Theodosia, the mythical for me was an experience beyond words....
Posted by maria at January 05, 2004 12:10 AM
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Oh yes, silence is the Myth that Places itself in heart not on lips. Those chilling waters felt rather close to my fingers too, thank you for sharing.
Posted by: Daisy-Winifred on January 5, 2004 02:59 PMWhat a beautiful, evocative story, Maria... I can't help but think that it was a combination of the place *with* the two opposing human elements in it (the Sliammon and the Boyfriend) and their opposing views on how the land belongs to people that brought it into such a clear focus for you. Perhaps the land temporarily tossed you into space, into another dimension, from which you could see with a mythic perspective the claims put on land and sea by people as various and essentially at odds as the Boyfriend on the one hand and the First Nations people on the other.
Well, I have to put this on my list for spring/summer: find a way to visit/ travel a bit more around here. In 5 years of teenagehood in Victoria and 5 years of mid-20s-hood in Vancouver, I have never managed to get to any of the Gulf Islands, much less Desolation Sound or -- heaven forbid -- the gargantuan journey to the Queen Charlotte's. At least I've seen Tofino and Botanical Beach, but I haven't even been to the Walbran Forest yet. Should visit before our corporatist neo-liberal government makes sure that every tree is striplogged off the land....
PS: glad you made it back alive!
Posted by: Yule Heibel on January 6, 2004 09:48 PMYule, had it not been for the Boyfriend, I probably would have never seen that part of B.C. in the first place ... and I can just imagine how different it might look today (20 years later!)
Already, when I was there for the last time, there was talk of buidling a facility for processing the clams on the Boyfriend's lot, and across from him, over at Portage Cove, the eccentric American artist and his wife, who had lived off the land for years (including canning their own bear stew) had sold their land to some wealthy guy who had dreams of making something out of that place....
It would be interesting to see it again, though, now that you got me heading down memory lane again!
I have never been the Queen Charlotte islands ... but sure would like to go!
Posted by: maria on January 7, 2004 04:05 PM
Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20040719203417/http://www.ashladle.org/archives/000272.html