Poetry at the Coffee Mill Tobey Kaplan & Maureen Hurley

The Wonder Smith & his Son, Ella Young, summary

Klar, Celtic Romanticism 170
Summary

THE WONDER SMITH AND HIS SON
A Tale from the Golden Childhood of the World
Longman, Green & Co., NY, © 1927; Floris, Edinburgh, 1992
(In lieu of Celtic Wonder Tales, which I couldn’t find)
by Ella Young

Another book by Ella Young, in the same genre as Celtic Wonder Tales, is a collection of stories about the “Gubbaun Saor, whose other name was Mananaun, whose other name was Cullion the Smith...” Young writes in her foreword, “He was a maker of worlds and a shaper of universes.”

Young learned many stories as a child in Co. Antrim, Ireland. Born in 1867, Young was acquainted with Dr. Hyde and the Celtic Revival, and she collected her stories in Ireland. Later, in California, she wrote them down. “The stories were told to me in Gaelic at times, at times in English.” Patrick Gallagher was her main source. She wrote, “I have amplified the tales but I have not altered any incident.”

The first time I read the stories I thought them pointless. I had trouble recognizing Irish words as her transliteration is pre- Modern Irish. Dún is written as “dune,” which had me wondering why on earth anyone would be building a sand dune city! 

Upon second reading, I was better able to enjoy her extraordinary use of Hiberneo-English, rich imagery and metaphor: To the Gubbaun’s feast came king’s sons on white stallions with bells and apples of gold on their reins, their tails and manes “dyed a crimson-purple...” and the land of Ireland was so glad at his home-coming, the four directions played a music so wild that “...the white bulls of the forest moved to it, tossing their moon-curved horns...” 

 The backdrop of poetry is central to the story. One recognizes echoes of Amergin’s Mystery in it. As a cross-check, I also read Irish Fairy Tales (by Crocker, MacManus and Jacobs), they seemed dull and pedantic by comparison.

The loosely joined incidents, intended to “shorten a road,” do form a cohesive story about the Gubbaun. They are chock full of Celtic references as a dragon’s lair is filled with golden treasure: triads, blessings, spells, gessa, ogham, trees, white hounds, white bulls, pookas, piasts, ever-full cups, red capes, shape-shifters, a betraying giant: Balor of the One Eye, a Formorian King, and other gods (Angus, Midir), The Hag at the Ford, The Chief Poet, Tír na n-Óge...

The Gubbaun Saor, the cleverest wonder smith in the world, got his trade from a magic bag of tools dropped by three ravens who were once djinn craftsmen building a fairy city of stone, but a red-polled woman peeked and broke the spell.... 

The Gubbaun Saor became an inventor and builder of things. He had a crackerjack daughter Aunya, as wise as he, whom he traded (in fosterage) with an old woman for her son, Lugh, who was next to useless but played a mean fairy flute. 

Unable to teach Lugh anything, he regretted his bargain, and when Lugh was of marriageable age, The Gubbaun Saor interviewed many woman; only one was as clever as he, but she outwitted him over a sheepskin and mysteriously left. 

He sent Lugh in search of the cleverest woman in Ireland, with the sheepskin, saying: bring back both the skin and its price. Lugh was flummoxed but met a beautiful girl with hair of spun gold who took the sheepskin, plucked it of its wool and gave him back the skin with its price. Lugh sent the hound home and the Gubbaun made ready a feast for Aunya. But she drove a hard bargain for the Gubbaun’s forgiveness.... For the rest, you’ll just have to read the story yourself!

The Lay of the last Minstrel, Sir Walter Scott, summary

Klar, Celtic Romanticism 170
Summary

THE LAY of the LAST MINSTREL
by Sir Walter Scott

Scott’s long poem in 6 cantos is a story within a story written in heroic couplets, and it utilizes antique language so characteristic of the corpus of the Romantic poets.

The framing device is the last bard, or minstrel, who recounts the deeds of her illustrious ancestors to the lady of the manor born—the Duchess of Buccleugh at Newark Castle. 

Like the Táin, this tale is of and for the nobility, and the story is nearly lost but the minstrel holds the memory of her Clan’s deeds. However, time has left him behind. Noble families have no need of his services. 

I don’t know when the Lay was written (ca. 1800, during Mad King George’s reign?), however, the story takes place in the mid-1600s with the decay of the Bardic Order (the inter-regnal period?) with references to the Civil- and Border Wars. 

But the tale harkens back two generations to the end of the 1500s (Eliz I). Scottish society, both pastoral and warlike, was changing, becoming literate, if we can trust Dr. Johnson’s observations. “They said a great family had a Bard and a Senachie who were the poet and historian of the house... but that neither Bard nor Senachie had existed for some centuries.”

The action begins Michaelmas Eve, and ends three days and three nights later, culminating in a great feast—as told by the harper/historian who rustily resurrects the past. 

The story is filled with episodes of skirmishes, single-hand-combat, heroic boasting and honor code—many elements seemingly right out of the Táin—as are the extensive detail of battles and of dress. We have chivalry and pageantry bestudded with wronged knights, an illicit love tryst between the children of rival families (and nations: Scots Lady Margaret “the flower of Teviot” of Branksome Hall and English Lord Henry Cranstoun).

 We’ve got a wizard, Michael Scott, restless in his tomb at St Mary’s Abbey, a midnight raid to steal his treasure, his magic book that wouldn’t open for unChristian hands (remember: sitting on a grave gets you otherworld information!), a monk struck dead for fulfilling his Clan duties, a goblin page/changeling (and the kidnapping of young Buccleogh, hell hounds, a Robin Hood-ish hunter-rescuer yeoman), dead warriors brought back to life, shape shifters, druid shades, ghosts and fairies from the sidhe/barrows—even Arthur, as a constellation, is evoked. 

Did I mention spells gone awry? This is a wild wooded landscape (unlike Johnson’s 1773 landscape where he bemoaned the serious lack of trees throughout Scotland).

We’ve got jumbled historic references: St George, and the Crusades? (red cross) are thrown in for good measure. Lady Margaret of Branksome Hall (Scott’s relation?) of French origin (Picardie) ties this tale in with the French Romances—there’s something of the Provençale trouvere style hinted at as well. She’s a bit druidic herself as she has some influence with the weather. And she can heal mortal wounds—or is that her mother? 

Even with Scott’s prologue explaining the action, I was hopelessly unhorsed by Canto 3. I climbed back into the saddle. But by Canto 5, I was stirrup-less, and by Canto 6, I was beneath the belly of the beast—or maybe I was a head dangling from the Night-mare’s mane! HELP! Who are all those knights? 

I gleaned little other than bardic rivalry after the triumphant final feast—many ballads were pastiched into the text. Is Albert Grahaeme the Last Bard? But I do know that the Minstrel lived happily ever after in a little hut on the estate of Newark Castle. I’m afraid the Romantic poets try my patience.

NB: Weirdly enough, I sometimes have curious dreams of poetic lines and obscure words I’ve not heard of: Heriot (p 87,) baffled me for ages. I dreamt it appeared in bold Gothic letters superimposed on the woods of north Britain—I was dressed in a filmy white gown, my feet not quite touching the dewy grass, I was keeper of the woods, for what, or where, I knew not. I later racked my brain trying to figure out if, and where I previously saw the word, to no avail. Unfortunately Scott sheds no light on the subject either.

The Bard, by Thomas Grey, summary

Klar, Celtic Romanticism 170
Summary

THE BARD
by Thomas Grey

The Bard is a poem written in 3 parts set at the time of the 1282 Conquest of Edward the First, when he invaded the kingdom of Llewlyn ap Griffith, “the last Welsh prince.” Edward the First “Longshanks” (“Cambria’s curse”) ordered all the bards be put to death. “

Politically the Conquest brought to the bardic order a diminished status...” A. H. Dodd writes of a vanishing social order (A Short History of Wales); future bards “soft-peddled warlike and political themes.” He recounts a bard’s tale of a 15th c. bard executed under the crabbed “law of London” for pursuing a family feud. The Statute of Rhyddan didn’t help either, but I digress...

Romantic poet Thomas Gray, a contemporary of Johnson and Goldsmith, opens his poem evoking the majestic Snowden range. He sets in the midst of a tempest, his protagonist, the haggard-eyed Poet, who totters the banks of the raging river “Conway” [Conwy], where he “Struck the deep sorrows of his lyre.” Gray weaves a pageantry of kings: Hoel, Llewellyn, Cadwallo, Urien, Mordred?...who was Plinlimmon? “Ye died amidst your dying country’s cries—” 

Gray weaves a warp of ravens, eagles and revenge upon “Edward’s race. The characters of hell...” the succession of Edwards- I, II, and III; the sumptuous—nearly neoclassic—funeral scene in II, 2., must be Richard II?, a beloved (and maligned) hero, obviously well mourned. 

Gray’s tapestry reveals the Henrys- IV, V, VI; Edward IV; a reference to the War of the Roses in symbolic language, and the very, very short reign of Richard III, “The Boar.” After four Edwards, who is evoked in III, 1? 

A segue to the Once and Future King preparing us for the Tudor line? Gray is sympathetic to The Virgin Queene: “Her eye proclaims her of the Briton-Line.” We take a great leap from the 6th c., of the Great Poet Taliesin—who like Arthur, rises again—to the last bard, who speaks in a allegorical Spenserian style (the Red-Cross knight?) as he leaps to his death into the roaring tide.

The landscape is painted majestic—somewhat parallel to the paintings of Constable (too bucolic) or Turner (too industrial), or even Bierstadt who made the American landscape so famous. But David Lloyd showed us a fabulous painting of the last bard leaping to his death, so perhaps my vision is colored by art. “Hark how each giant oak, and desert cave/ Sighs to the torrent’s awful voice beneath!” 

The poem (low on plot) has a two king lists, and a plethora of warriors and damsels. And the endgame: a bard (or warrior) would rather commit suicide rather than face surrender, is an age-old Celtic motif. Thomas Gray's poem kicked of the Romantic Movement as well as becoming the impetus for the founding of the Celtic Twilight movement.

THE BARD: a Pindaric Ode —Thomas Gray 

“Ruin seize thee, ruthless King!
Confusion on thy banners wait!
Tho’ fanned by Conquest’s crimson wing,
They mock the air with idle state.
Helm, nor hauberk’s twisted mail,
Nor e’en thy virtues, Tyrant, shall avail
To save thy secret soul from nightly fears,
From Cambria’s curse, from Cambria’s tears!”
Such were the sounds that o’er the crested pride
Of the first Edward scattered wild dismay,
As down the steep of Snowdon’s shaggy side
He wound with toilsome march his long array.
Stout Glo’ster stood aghast in speechless trance:
“To arms!” cried Mortimer, and couched his quiv’ring lance

On a rock, whose haughty brow
Frowns o’er cold Conway’s foaming flood,
Robed in the sable garb of woe
With haggard eyes the Poet stood;
(Loose his beard and hoary hair
Streamed like a meteor to the troubled air)
And with a master’s hand, and prophet’s fire,
Struck the deep sorrows of his lyre.
“Hark, how each giant-oak and desert-cave
Sighs to the torrent’s awful voice beneath!
O’er thee, O King! their hundred arms they wave,
Revenge on thee in hoarser murmurs breathe;
Vocal no more, since Cambria’s fatal day,
To high-born Hoel’s harp, or soft Llewellyn’s lay.

Enough for me: with joy I see
The diff’rent doom our fates assign.
Be thine Despair and sceptred Care;
To triumph and to die are mine.”
He spoke, and headlong from the mountain’s height
Deep in the roaring tide he plunged to endless night.

                               —Thomas Gray, 1757

see also, for an interesting parallel:
Hungary celebrates legendary tale of Welsh bards' slaughter

NOTHING HAPPENED

         —after Karen Finley

So I dared myself to open the car door 
and just lean out as we hugged the cliff
and nothing happened.

So I gave up everything for coffee and beer 
and nothing happened

except I was skinny, wired and a lightweight drunk. 
Drugs lost their thrill.

I cooked lavish meals and watched him eat 
and nothing happened.

So I took up eating meat 
and nothing happened 
except my stomach ached

and I dreamed of falling off cliffs, 
or fell in love with strangers, 
while reading Naked Lunch.

My clothes grew into tents, 
I thought about joining the circus.

One day my skin turned blue 
and I couldn’t eat a thing

except soda crackers 
and nothing happened. 
Beer and coffee lost their thrill.

I was cold, so I opened a Corona 
and crawled in the tub

until I was lobster-red and I thought 
about how veins were like highways.
In a traveling mood, I went north 

and put Christmas ornaments 
on the tomato vines to keep the frost back

and took to staying out late (while he worked nights)
and nothing happened.

I thought about how my veins were like highways. 
Wishing I was Kerouac on the road, 

I tried out homelessness before it was fashionable.

I slept on people’s couches 
and in the back seat of my VW Bug 
in Safeway parking lots

and nothing happened 
except that I felt kinda funny 
whenever I was in a real bed.
I stepped out dressed to the nines
and no one was ever the wiser.

So, I flushed the fetus, damn near bled to death 
and still nothing happened.

and I took to poetry and cross-dressing 
like a retro 40s movie star

with stiletto heels and carmine claws 
while everyone else was discovering

the navel of their earth mother selves

and they all moved to the country 
but I’d already been there, done that,

and nothing happened 
except that I decided to 
rewrite life again.

A lotta good that did.

10/13/2000

Cuchulain of Muirthemne, by Lady Gregory, summary

Klar, Celtic Romanticism 170
Summary

CUCHULAIN OF MUIRTHEMNE
by Lady Gregory

In her dedication to the people of Kiltartan, Lady Gregory’s disclaimer of how she took the best of the ancient Irish stories and fitted them together again—clues the reader in that this too is an author’s redaction, not authentic translation.

I found the statement patronizing: “I left out a good deal I thought you would not care about for one reason or another, and I put in nothing of my own that could be helped, only a sentence or so now and again to link the different parts together. I have told the whole story in plain and simple words, in the same way my old nurse Mary Sheridan used to be telling stories from the Irish long ago, and I a child at Roxborough.” 

In her end Notes, L. Gregory further elaborates that she has condensed many passages, and has given a 19th c. context to obscure (medieval) formulae. She used some 24 translated sources of the stories including Scots-Gaelic versions—but no original Irish material. Which makes this book a Victorian paraphrase of secondary and tertiary translations from the German, French, English, and perhaps even Latin—each with their own linguistic flaws—for, to borrow an Italian aphorism: to translate is to assassinate. 

Like with MacPherson, we can no more hold L. Gregory’s text to be an authentic translation as we can the King James version of the Bible—though we continue to swear the whole truth by it. Which brings me back to an idle thought: nurse Mary Sheridan—is L. Gregory making a claim that she understands Irish—or not? It is a romantic notion to have been brought up by an Irish-speaking nurse. I am aware that Gregory and Yeats collaborated on many projects and that he based his plays on her interpretations of the Ulster Cycle.

We get a glimpse of the 1890s mindset from excerpts of Yeats’ review of L. Gregory’s CúChulain. He stated: “...no story has come down to us in the form it had when the storyteller told it in the winter evenings. Lady Gregory has done her work of compression and selection at once so firmly and so reverently that I cannot believe that anybody, except... for a scientific purpose, will need another text than this,.... When she has added her translations from other cycles, she will have given Ireland its Mabinogion, its Morte d’Arthur, its Nibelungenlied.” 

He added: “Lady Gregory has discovered a speech as beautiful as that of Morris, and a living speech into the bargain. ... Irish, and to understand that it is as true a dialect of English as the dialect that Burns wrote in. It is some hundreds of years old, and age gives a language authority. [it is] tender, compassionate, and complaisant, like the Irish language itself. “

With that said, we have a medieval text referring back to the epic/classical past, modernized to Victorian standards, which includes a newfound reverence for Irish exotica, the concept of Hiberneo-English as an art form, and the validation of genuine oral tradition. 

Hard romanticism based on the Classical tradition with many landscapes converging: mythic,/epic, medieval and neoclassic/ romantic. A pastoral landscape peopled with aristocratic heroes, kings and druids. Prophecy, gessa, pathos, hero-death lists, liminal boundaries. 

Synopsis: CúChulain bids his mother goodbye, vessels bleed (3 x); he and Cathbad the Druid see a washer at the ford (washing C’s. guts), eats dog with 3 hags (becomes crippled on left side). At the battle, he does his feats, throws his spears, which are lobbed back, killing kings as prophesied, Lugaid mortally wounds Cu, who is tied up to a stone pillar in order to die standing. Even in death he manages to maim. 

Battle head count with Cu’s wife Emer (who sounds like Hamlet at he gravesite), she falls into Cu’s grave and dies, where he was resurrected into the sky by a druid chariot. (Shades of Apollo!)

Celtic Twilight, by WB Yeats, summary

Klar, Celtic Romanticism 170
Summary

CELTIC TWILIGHT
by WB Yeats

Yeats, while in his late 20s, published collections of Irish peasant folklore in two volumes of Celtic Twilight (1893, 1902)—many pieces which previously appeared in journals, in Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888), and in Miscellanies (1902?).

 I found Yeats’ comments on collecting folklore intriguing as it had become a science by the late 1800s. But Yeats criticized his predecessors: “...collectors of Irish folk-lore ...have made their work literature rather than science... The impulse... came from a class that, did not... take the populace seriously, .... What they did was not wholly false; they merely magnified an irresponsible type,.....” 

Yeats lauded: “But the best book since Croker is Lady Wilde's Ancient Legends.” (FFTIP 1888). However in a later review, Yeats complained of L.Wilde’s lack of methodology. Sir Wilde “... threw all his gatherings into a big box,... Lady Wilde has quarried the materials of her new book: a farrago of spells, cures, fairy-tales, and proverbs... districts seldom specified and the dates of discovery never. I ... wish they had been... more scientifically treated, but I scarce know whom to blame: Lady Wilde, Sir William Wilde, his collectors, or the big box.” 

In another review Yeats wrote: “Dr Hyde is by far the best Irish folklorist by the right of his incomparable skill as a translator from the Gaelic (Miscellanies). 

According to Yeats, the collector of folklore should take the tales down in the native language, and to document his informants. But Yeats didn’t speak Irish, and didn’t document his collections in CT either (though one may presume he documented the stories in his journals? In a 1924 edition, he added more documentation). 

Yeats wrote “If a poet cannot find immortal and mysterious things in his own country, he must write of far-off countries oftener than of his own country,...” (Miscellanies). But Yeats didn’t have to go as far afield as that: Paddy Flynn of Sligo was his main informant as was Mary Banner, his maternal uncle’s maid in Mayo. 

Yeats also collaborated with Lady Gregory, collecting tales from her servant Biddy Early. The landscape is pastoral (hard romanticism), the stories, an admixture of ancient tales, folk belief in the Aes Dána as shrunken faeries; other classes of spectres and inexplicable phenomena. Echoes of saint’s lives and heroic epics with a smattering of Classicism. Homer, Finn and Ulster tales, snatches of the Danu cycle.

Yeats’ writing style is very readable. I loved the Blind Raftery stories—since there is some doubt as to whether or not he was real or made up. A criticism later applied to Wentz, is that Yeats, desiring to believe in the occult and supernatural, might have colored his spectral lens with imagination.

One wonders how much he shaped the stories to fit his own cultural agenda? Somehow I am left with the feeling that their servants were also having one off on the gentry...

However I did recognize bits of stories that my grandmother was always afther telling me...except she was more earthy: the púca pissed on the berries on Samhain. And the ghost lore is familiar as well. We have the knocking at the door in the middle of the night before a family member dies—even I have answered the door only to find no one there, except once, the Morning Star bright as a moon in the predawn sky.

Journal entry, Johnny Foley’s pub, poetry reading Campbell, Boland, Tracy 10/5/00

10/5/2000 We’re gathered at Johnny Foley’s pub in San Francisco for a poetry reading with Siobhan Campbell, Eavan Borland, and Bob Tracy. Johnny Foley’s does it up right with little sandwiches, and cheese bites. When I was last here was for the Irish poetry festival Finnegan’s Awake. It’s the same crowd, the event is funded by the American Ireland fund. Bob Tracey, an eminent James Joyce scholar, is emcee, introducing what he calls the 70s wave of Irish women poets. Bob Tracy says the second book can either make or break a writer, Eavan Boland is most renowned for her second book, The War Horse, published in 1975, she has nearly 20 books under her belt. She explores themes in the Mother Ireland tradition, she explainsthat so many poems were written by men where the women became objects, incapable of speaking. She explores the permutations of the role of women and Irish national identity. She mentions how permanent wave can be a gesture of greeting, or a farewell. In Her Own Image (1980) and Night Feed (1982), explored the ordinary lives of women and the extraordinary obstacles women poets faced in a male-dominated literary world. Her poetry is liquid nitrogen. She invokes the air, Saint Brigid, and the forced silence women bear. Words draw meaning out of sound. If a prayer cannot be read aloud, is it any less of a prayer?

The Poems of Ossian, by James MacPhearson, summary

Klar, Celtic Romanticism 170
Summary

THE POEMS OF OSSIAN (sic)
by James MacPhearson


I am flummoxed, my flabber is ghasted by this primo-genital Celtic Ur-“tale” that sparked off the Romantic Movement. were they nuts? Since I can’t seem to retain any of the elements of the storyline except lots of swords and blue-eyed heroes named Fingal, Ossian, Cuthullen, Morva, Gaul and Orla, I am at a loss as to what MacPherson was actually writing about—his storylines and even his so-called summaries left me in the dark.

When the footnotes are longer than the so-called poems, it spells trouble. Their only purpose, as far as I can see (which isn’t very far at all), is to give an “authentic” and learnéd flavor to the texts, which I consider to be badly written archaic diction, and certainly NOT poetic. Is there a decent metaphor in the house? 

I’m sorry, but I’m a VERY tolerant reader, prone to reading cereal boxes and junk mail, but this text stretches my very patience (and dyslexia). For the record, I HATE exclamation marks!! (she said!!!) And O when thou speakest in sacred tongues—a Romantic notion of ancient language and diction—it simply makes me want to smack MacPherson in the gob.

How could Napoleon have carried a copy around with him, ere he saw Elba, during his campaigns—no wonder he was imprisoned. The Moscow mud was a just punishment for bad literary judgment. But then again, did he really know English? (Was he holding the book hidden in his jacket front all that time?).

The errata page prefacing the opening lines of Fingal, with its hyper-minute corrections of prepositions and articles set the (anal) tone. Poor Fingal, the hero, only gets two lines in edgewise before the author MacPherson interjects an “apologia” in both first- and third-person perspective, rendering some 15 lines of footnotes of disclaimer, which continues onto the next page another 35 lines about finding the “fragments,” and the orthography of CúChulainn’s name, thus merging him with the 3rd c. Fingal. Strange anachronisms indeed. 

The story isn’t about Fingal at all, it’s about what MacPherson, the scholar, knows, he’s wanking off. His spear is a blasted pine, all right. OK, so he professes to know Greek, makes textual comparisons to Homer’s Iliad, Virgil’s Aeniad, Ovid’s Metamorphosis, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Shakespeare, Pope’s Homer and Iliad, Dryden, Himself, Thompson, Gray, et al., in order to perhaps authenticate and place his own work with that of the great English poets, and to demonstrate a Scots-Celtic link with ancient Greece. 

Methinks the author doth protest too much. Does Toland’s book actually exist? Check out footnote 2 on p. 185/6 about his explanation of a “false translation” as to why the ancient Celts couldn’t have been drinking beer or wine...or the author’s “review on p. 206. Perhaps the author himself imbibed, if not in spirits, then in Robert Grave’s favorite hallucinogen, the amanita?

“The poet teaches us the opinions that prevailed in his time...” (p62, footnote 9) holds true for MacPherson: this is a hopelessly jumbled, deluded text. I’m surprised anyone ever took it seriously. 

OK, like B-movie commentator Joe-Bob Riggs, I will attempt to describe the action which takes place mostly in the Scottish Highlands and to the West, perhaps Scandinavia and Ireland as well: lots of battles, ghosts, spears, grimsome deaths, slaughters, heroic combat, suffering fair, lovesick damsels, Viking-like heroes, brave and stately in tall ships, chieftain-kings, druids, and bards, warring tribes...the mighty have fallen in battle indeed, and this author succumbed to sheer verbiage, a fallen warrior on the battlefield of muddled words.

Suggested reading order: 1) read footnotes, 2) read chapter summaries 3) read story—if you are able.

GROWING UP IRISH, take one, (final v. missing)

ASCII destroyed final version!!!

It was one thing to grow up Irish Catholic in the Mission

where shamrocks were painted on the sidewalk

but after the Depression my family fled to the country 

and I grew up in the sticks

where everyone else’s grandmother was a member of the DAR,

my classmates were Rainbow Girls or Bluebirds; clubs for WASPs only.

Like the San Geronimo Tennis and Country Club.

No matter that most of us were too poor to join.

The same Protestant ascendancy right here in America.

You were labeled a freak once the nuns came in their penguin suits

asking us Catholics to raise our hands.

There we were, branded in grade school, while they—

the Bluebirds and Brownies got cookies and milk after school

while we were hammering nails into our martyred psyches

by stealing candy after catechism 

from old man deLacy at the Lagunitas store.

Having left one revolution behind,

we were facing the religious segregation again

diminished like those of the sidhe who shrank

during the centuries of Christendom

disappearing into particle theory 

only to became invisible quarks and muons....

10/2/2000

Irish Cures, Mystic Charms & Superstitions, Lady Wilde, summary

Klar, Celtic Romanticism 170
Summary

IRISH CURES, MYSTIC CHARMS & SUPERSTITIONS
by Lady Wilde

This new compilation of Irish folklore from Lady Wilde’s two collections over 100 years after first US publication, is arranged and compiled for the modern reader by Shiela Ann Barry, which made me suspect the authenticy of the texts. The recipes are in Lady Wilde’s style, but it feels as if I’m viewing them through a Victorian Celtic Twilight veil—occluded by a New Age shroud. 

I don’t know how much of a scholar Lady Wilde was, or if she knew Irish (the internet yielded little). I recognize some proverbs from the Irish, but translations differ. Is binn béal ina thost/ a mouth is melodious in its silence becomes: “A silent mouth is musical” Some sean fhocail seem to have been “Bowlderized” (to borrow an Irish term). Too bad the Irish originals (or where she collected them) weren’t available. 

And who is writing the introductions, Wilde or Barry? “All nations... have held the intuitive belief....” or that myth and superstition become fixed that they “...form a national character and cannot be dissevered from it. ...especially...the Irish who have been wholly separated from European thought and culture for countless centuries...clinging to old traditions with a fervor and faith that cannot be shaken by any amount of modern philosophic teaching.” Yikes! 

The landscape is comprised of 18th c. antiquarian scholarship where the superstitious peasants hold sacred/arcane knowledge of a Golden Age. Themes: pre-Christian and Christian. Druid/aristocratic, peasant: The banshee only appears to aristocrats. “Ancient Druid charms...continued to hold their power over the people who believed in them with undoubting faith. ...and they are used to the present day amongst the peasants, who consider them as talismans of magic...no amount of argument would shake their faith...” She’s referring, in essence, to my great-grandparents! I can hear my grandmother grumbling, even now. 

I find the Cures to be the most genuine. They also have the most druid/healer references. The snail and insect recipes seem to be authentic folklore as I’ve browsed the Rosa Anglica (14th c.) by Chaucer’s immortalized “docktor of physik” (sic) John of Galen. 

Spider butter sandwiches and poitín cures aside, I’m insulted, by the fact that Wilde suggests that we Irish are indebted to Egypt for herb lore, festivals and even gods. I be alarmed by the foxglove and nightshade cures as my grandmother insisted upon their poisonous nature. 

I found the reference to the magpie as frankach (p. 92) interesting, as “Frenchman” is also the name of the Norwegian rat that stowed away to Ireland with the Vikings. (No rats, snakes, or magpies are native to Ireland). 

My grandmother said if a bird flies into the house, it was a portent of death, but the towhees, like small chickens, who came to peck the crumbs at her feet, were said to be “lucky.” Approaching 80, she once risked life and limb returning baby tree swallows to their nest under the eaves-—two stories up a broken ladder. And our cats were never thought of as evil, though Lady Wilde asserts that all the Irish believe this to be true.

The White Goddess, by Robert Graves, summary

Klar, Celtic Romanticism 170
Summary

THE WHITE GODDESS
A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth
by Robert Graves

Poet, novelist, scholar and translator, Robert Graves’ pioneering classic, The White Goddess, a poet’s mytho-Bible on the history of Western civilization is not a text to be swallowed in one sitting. Having mined it for some 20-odd years, I’m daunted by the thought of writing a summary!

Farrar touts the book as a historical grammar of poetic myth; Graves called it a “verbal iconograph.” Graves, an Anglo-Irish Romantic poet, gained literary fame after WWI as a war poet, when he began to question the very foundations of Western civilization. He began with his own Celtic roots (his father was a renown Celtic scholar-poet from Kerry (?). 

A convergent mytho-evolutionist, Graves draws from many sources including Semitic and Indo-European myths, but his primary objective is to explore the arcane (druidic) knowledge in medieval Welsh and Irish material. 

Graves attempts to decode the “hidden knowledge” of medieval Celtic poems and myths by categorizing common motifs—especially the alphabet of trees. Using myth, folklore and poetry—especially the Brittonic source of inspiration—Graves links Europe and Asia Minor with a pantheistic, matriarchal worship of the (triple) White Goddess as the moon/ earth—who after the Fall, was demoted from primary goddess to patriarchal muse.

The 1948 publication date of The White Goddess (amended in 1960) is a post-WWII book (the original ms. written in three weeks). So the cultural landscape was in desperate need of a Goddess: a shell-shocked Europe recovering from demoralizing wars. 

What’s interesting is HOW Graves came to write the book—synchronically—a Romantic notion. His Balearic and Berber artifacts “spoke” to him in 1944, while he was writing historical novels, The Golden Fleece (I, Claudius, in 1934), King Jesus; The Hebrew Myths, and The Greek Myths were also a result of his questing. 

Graves himself commented that The White Goddess reads “queerly” but it shepherded a generation of post-war writers into imagining a Golden Age of mytho-poetics and magic. 

The book is a little more accessible than its eclectic predecessor, Frazer’s The Golden Bough. 

In rereading the text, I find that I am able to hold onto his ideas now that I’ve developed a historical matrix. However, I read his Celtic synopses with a Celtic Twilight lens, because, as he complains in his preface, that “no expert in ancient Irish Welsh has offered me the least help in refining my argument...” 

I have trouble when Graves insists that Classical culture is the model for Celtic myth. When Graves looks back to remnants of an earlier Old European landscape for surviving fragments, he links them to what he knows best: the Graeco-Romans. 

He utilizes observations of the Classical writers, weaves several strands of Eurasian, Old- and Indo-European myth and folklore, and attempts to categorize their common elements. Some of the Bible-as-myth references, especially the apocrypha, are interesting. 

Like Graves, I consider Judaeo-Christian /Islamic philosophy the taproot of modern Western civilization’s travails—especially in the context of war and ecological disaster. It is part of my own poetic mythos.

ENVOI: Graves’ book evoked memories of my grandmother’s tree idiosyncrasies (wood: our only source of heat). Why she wouldn’t cut alder: it bled (so did oak). Or willow: it was a sally (arthur-itis) tree. Madrone/ manzanita: too like a woman, too hot a flame. Or the big Doug firs: OK to burn the scrub ones, but not the tall Bishop pines—there was some fussing over the cypress, but it was diseased. 

Any aromatic fruitwood was OK. Acacia was OK to burn, but it was one of the four lintel woods. She wouldn’t let anyone cut the oaks: sacred tree/mistletoe; doors were made of it, but it burned the cleanest and was the best (you’d think its white ash was face powder). 

Bay was fine to burn—even if the Greeks made laurels from it—but was considered inferior because it wept and sang when burnt wet, leaving a dirty scum, and it burned too fast when dry. Black/white Hawthorn was NEVER allowed into the house. EVER. The haws, yes, we ate them in Fall. Woody herbs: sage, rosemary, etc., were burnt for their cleansing smoke (smudging).

The Life and Death of a Druid Prince, summary

Klar, Celtic Romanticism 170
Summary:

THE LIFE AND DEATH OF A DRUID PRINCE
The Story of Lindow Man, an Archaeological Sensation
by Anne Ross & Don Robins

Taking a scant handful of facts, archaeologists Anne Ross and Don Robins create a mytho-archaeological sensation by interpreting a possible scenario of the Lindow Man, a rare 2000-year old bog body (the oldest preserved body in Britain) found near Manchester.

Using solid Sherlockian deductive reasoning, they resurrect and name him as a druid prince sacrificed under extreme and catastrophic duress on Beltine, ca. 60 AD, after the rebellion of Boudicea, on the evidence of a burnt finemeal griddlecake (ritual meal), mistletoe pollen, a noose, forensic data (3-fold death), manicured nails and an armband of unidentified fur. 

Perhaps the clue as to how to interpret this text is embedded in the title: Sensation. I am reminded of Marija Gimbutas’ construct of Old Europeans as matriarchal, egalitarian, and peaceful (unlike warlike Indo-European horsemen) on the basis of archaeological evidence found in burial mounds. 

Pots may not speak, but I find my credulity stretched to the limit by Ross’ and Robin’s post-mortem analyses, though in retrospect, their weird logic seems to make sense—which makes me distrust deductive reasoning. I found the appendices more reassuring.

It is true that warriors would have scars, be clean-shaven and that the learned/princely class would be well-nourished, unblemished, manicured (and hairy). Safe to say, that the Lindow Man was not a warrior, craftsman or serf, though he could have been a poet (but not a bard—no long nails, etc.) 

That the authors pin Lindow Man’s death to a specific date is even more incredulous. However, the authors’ deductions as to where the body was found is interesting. By contrast, they compare Lindow Man with other bog bodies—including those found in Scandinavia, many of which were mere executions rather than ritual death. 

Another interesting factoid was their concept of Celtic warlords ruling in Scandinavia, as I’ve always had trouble accepting the notion that there was a pan- Celtic or Germanic tribal homogenaity east or west of the Rhine.

One thing that did excite me was the way that the authors tied in the three-fold death with the three gods of the elements (air/Esus, fire/Taranis, and water/Teutates, and by extension, earth, with Lindow Man as consort of the bride/goddess/Anu, and the limnal boundary of the underworld). 

Linguistically tying in Lindow with Dublin (though according to Professor Melia, Dublin is a grammatically incorrect construct), was also of interest, as was the trade connection. The authors’ tying in with the folk tradition was brilliant (reminding me of Professor Dundes’ description of the Palio), but I wonder how intact a folk tradition would remain after 2000 years (considering that’s the half-life of a language).

I CAN'T GIVE YOU UP

I CAN'T GIVE YOU UP

I sit in the center of my heart's dream
between two worlds, between water and air,
between the two banks of the same creek.

Can't give you up, wilderness.
Can't let go of the stream
or bathing in the same water even once.

Can't give up the rocks
collecting along the banks
where washers lingers
but singing, mostly singing,
talking to me of desert thirst.

Talking to me of the roots of the stream iris,
then the red of willow roots, fanning out like hair.

Earlier, I heard thunder in the mountains
and thought of the odd gods.

I sat midday, midstream, in a creek
called Independence
on the day of the fall solstice,
facing west, midway between
the sun and the new moon.

Mount Williamson and stream
aligned with my hearts stream,
a desert hawk makes his way
across the scree
industrious jays and crows take sudden shelter.

Can't give you up, blue dragonfly,
small tule rushs, and fremontia
reminding the sun not to forget
the color it needs to remember.

My skin turns the color of foxes.
I sit midstream, and I can't give you up
licking my skin like that.
Stream bring me the translation
of your songs so that I may transcribe
the vowels on my heart,
 for the winter that is coming.

I gather barberries and paint an ancient path
to the secret heart of the mountain
where dwells the great spirit of the Paiute Nation,
the stream sings of its purity, assault and light,
glistening precious transformation
of snowmelt and glacier wisdom
destined for the LA aqueduct
and the black base writing of civilization.

Why should I hesitate to bathe
in the stream called Independence
soon to be trapped in the dark pipes of the city?
Menstrual blood offering to sacrifice to snowmelt,
offer myself up with intention to the sun and moon
of this new millennium—how we measure time and age.

Downstream, where an ex-lover will drink my blood,
womb approaching the end of its season,
in retribution for the child we let slip
into the sewers of clinics.

I know now that one can never quite separate
from the other, we shared language undiminished by time,
a migration towards the other, the beloved enemy.

I can't give you up. Just like the stream
can't give up the riverbed.
I find abandoning dells lined with rock barrows.
Soon I will become a more permanent resident
of the landscape. My flesh and bone
nourishing small plants in another cycle.

I fear I've lost my ability to write
but after trying to read my poem aloud to Veronica
I burst into tears. The potency of words.

I can't give you up, even if the art is gone.
All that remains is the poem.

9/23/2000

Lone Pine, CA
added 10/16

VERONICA'S FATHER, and MR RAUTIO'S HANDS — 2 poems

VERONICA'S FATHER

Veronica reads a poem
of her father's poor hands
eclipsed by fossil fuel
supernovaed for one brief second
circling the bread to illuminate
the mechanical soul of engines
how they were articulate
warriors of other muses,
those hands earning daily bread,
with darkness, cuticled in midnight oil
encircling the bread.

Lone Pine, CA

9/23/2000

MR RAUTIO'S HANDS

I was mesmerized by the shape
of Mr. Rautio's rubber hand
as he bent over the hood
of the old yellow school bus,
the gasoline bleaching it
to the color of sunlight.

How it radiated up his arm,
hidden by the mystery of cuff
and sleeve, curled as if in rest,
a dove of peace, by his side
as he performed delicate surgery
and the engine purred into life.

He escaped a world war
that had robbed him of his hand
and I thought of Caesar
who cut off the hands
of the last Aedui warriors,
in that final country of our ancestors,
to teach them a lesson.
What was taught, the lesson learned—
other than the defeat of a nation?
Stories of that one hand
had been given to another,
in a better time, a better place.

Lone Pine, CA
9/23/2000
added 10/16
slightly revised
(I couldn't read all of it).

Journal entry, back side of the Sierras

I am sitting on the backside of of the Sierras, looking into the Owens Valley. Mount Williamson rises up 14,375 feet. The great eastern wall divides California from the Great Basin region. A collision of ecosystems. The bare bones of the White Mountains harbor a different story, and the Inyo fossils dream of ancient seas. this is the land of cloud of consciousness and lava flows where the wind wakes the morning on a thousand miles of sage. The Owens Valley water wars, Chinatown, the Tinemaha reservoir, the beginning of the journey of water to the LA aqueduct. I find myself naming things. As if that could stop time in its tracks. Onion Valley, Kearsarge Pass at 9200 feet, the saddle, the old road ,sedimentary versus volcanic. Kings Canyon, Mt  Gould, and the Bristlecone Pines, Methuselah clocks in at 4700 years, Schulman Grove and the Alabama Hills faulted up from the Sierras in 1872, an 8.1 earthquake, the valley floor dropped 20 feet mount Whitney risers 14,496 feet up touching the sky. A mountain still growing.

9/23/2000

Equinox in Independence

Winnadumah Hotel, backside of the Sierras, Independence, California,

I'm back in the saddle again, a CPITS retreat in Independence, backside of the Sierras with an ex-lover, John—of all people. Ten years have healed many wounds. We're still a little stiff, testing the boundaries, but it's okay. Safety nets in place, we still like each other.

We've been separated twice the length of the distance of the relationship. But we are still in sync on some level. Perhaps it's that way with most ex-lovers who know each other so well, if you get the chance. The anger rarely subsides. It's true. It's vestigial.

John's recent letter of apology ripped me open again, revealing the secret hurt that had to be purged. Scar tissue. When he later sent me a snippy email that being alone with me in a car for eight hours just wasn't feasible, I was stunned. He later apologized, said it was a frog-leg jumping on an old electrode.

I was relieved. I had no idea he still harbored resentment toward me. But I did blame him for opening old wounds—just because his 12-step program told him he had to do it. You have to mean it too, or it's just a futile exercise.

John was cavalier, but there were consequences. My reaction, which he hadn't counted on. I told him any feelings I had for him had long since died out, or rather, had been burned out, that he no longer meant anything to me one way or the other. He was silent as the grave. Perhaps he was expecting something? Histrionics?

Other than the discomfort, I must admit that it's been fun reminiscing about old times, resurrecting old memories. The good ones, and there were many. We did many things during that four-year period. Many adventures under our belts. It's the common experiences that still bind us together on some level. We know each other so well, and on such a deep level.

Few people know me like that, so I can be who I am with him. He said I was feral, raised by wolves. Something Neil also says. Though I consider myself urbane, sophisticated, tamed—even taming up nicely—as Neil parrots, what is it they see in me, this wildness?

Coming across Tioga Pass I wasn't prepared for the beauty of Cloud's Rest. John tells me of the time he climbed Cloud's Rest. Though I've seen it many times, I hadn't been on that road since I broke up with John. Last time we came through, there was a forest fire. Traces of a newer fires have left more scars. This time we're left with the aftermath as we resurrect memory.

Independence is a town of many bells, established on 4 July 1862. Once a military camp, now it's the county seat. Lone Pine, Mt. Whitney, and Mt. Williamson, the great eastern wall, reach for the sky. Young mountains, still growing. Whitney has gained another foot, since I last climbed it.

Inyo means the dwelling place of the great spirit in Paiute. In Mary Hunter Austin's world, the Great Basin is the land of little rain, or the country of lost borders where the wind wakes the morning on a thousand miles of sage.

The bare bones of the Inyo, and the White Mountain ranges are home to the world's oldest trees, the Bristlecone pines. I once touched Methuselah, a tree harboring 4,700 years of light.

The Owens Valley is the epicenter of the LA water wars, Mulhulland, the Tinemaha Reservoir, Chinatown, the beginning of the LA aqueduct. Unshed tears and alkali dust. Pah-in Paiute, is the word for water, more precious than gold. 

We define our borders, redrawn from memory, and the past. We approach the gates of our own Manzanars. Inside, outside? It's all the same in the end.

Welcome Equinox.

 9/22/2000

Adamnán of Iona: Life of St Columba, summary

Klar, Celtic Romanticism 170
Summary:

ADAMNÁN OF IONA: LIFE OF ST COLUMBA
Fisherman of the Fishful River

St. Adamnán, 3rd paternal cousin to Columba (of the northern Uí Néill princes: Cenél Conaill, the religious dynasty of Iona) writes a Tripartite Life, 100 years after Columba’s death.

Using earlier Lives (Sts Antony, Benedict) as his models, he portrays his kinsman as a Christ-like archdruid and warrior-king—much in the vein of the Tripartite Life of St. Patrick and the Historical Life... by St. Fiacc, ca. 500. 

Though the three sections of the book are loosely modeled after the (150) Psalms (Columba dies while writing the 34th Psalm), many of the stories are straight out of folk tradition. 

Foremost of Columba’s larger than life accomplishments is his ability to control the weather (wind, water: especially the sea), a druidic function. Good following wind (lateen sails) for good sailors. A religious hero, Columba is associated with pagan heroes and gods: is he Mananán mac Lír, or Finn? Light is heavily associated with him (probably the Aurora Borealis), making him a half-mortal CuChulainn type hero: Lug comes to mind. We learn angels travel at the speed of light.

Lots of epic tags—with feasts lasting 3 days and 3 nights, Otherworldly music, water monsters, chariots, a magic cloak, magic hunting stake, ruddy cheeks, holy/evil wells and floating magic white healing stones thus making him a healer as well... Along with Columba’s beseeching that no one is to breathe a word that he’s special “he wanted to avoid boasting,” is the monkish preoccupation that the community will be overrun with pilgrims who, under the laws of hospitality, would have to be fed and housed. 

Adamnán mentions “Soldiers of Christ” reaffirming the fianna warrior role of monks who dip white robes into red blood (priestly & warrior functions). Heaven and death (many stories record saints’ deaths) takes on the guise of the Otherworld, the Land of Promise. 

Several saint/heroes are mentioned: Brendan of Birr, Colmán, Finnian (St. Uinniau—the ‘F’ silent/lenited) to titillate the crowd. The cult of Columba is so strong he can even perform posthumous weather miracles.

Columba has a way with animals: salmon leap into his boat (don’t eat his seals!). His white horse (king-function?) buries his head in Columba’s lap (paying homage?) and weeps at his upcoming death. Many cattle/milk-demon stories (bull’s milk = white blood; a sacrifice story. 

He spends time on an unidentified islet called Hinba: h-in-ba (h-inis bó) could be translated as the isle of the cows. He raises laymen to nobleman status with 5-fold (105) herds of magic cows. As the Life was written in Latin, it seems Eilean Shona (the S is silent) where they built longships? could be construed as a garbled form of Iona (a scribal error?).

Several references to holy or “righteous” pagans earning their way towards heaven—smack of Pelagianism—baptism, an afterthought. The landscape is fraught with remote isle hermitages; every monk searching for his own little hut (in a bee-loud glade), an influence from St. Antony of Egypt. 

Curious are the painstaking references to “...three witnesses as required by law,” Adamnán inserts: he sounds like a Brehon. 

Adamnán sternly addresses his future audience: the reader/copyist several times: this ms. wasn’t just meant to be read aloud to assembled monks after dinner, but also to be read alone in the scriptorium. There is a preoccupation with copying manuscripts: whenever Columba absent-mindedly blesses something is when he’s copying a book—the very reason why he was exiled to begin with (and, a war). 

The story also documents the first copyright, and the first reference to proofreading (the missing letter ‘i”). Adamnán makes light of Columba’s crime, and beseeches readers to copy HIS text word-for-word (to receive blessings and to establish Ionian Church claims farther afield—a missionary effort.) 

It is Adomnán’s last wish that copies of the ms. of Columba reach the far corners tripartite Celtic homeland (& Christendom): Spain (Celto-Iberia), Italy Beyond the Alps (Cisalpine Gaul), and Gaul—even to Rome.