The Great Bridge Builder

Part Two

Voyage to the West

 

It chanced on a time that Elwe, lord of the Teleri, came alone to the starlit wood of Nan Elmoth, and there suddenly he heard the song of nightingales. Then an enchantment fell on him, and he stood still; and afar off beyond the voices of the Iomelindi he heard the voice of Melian, and it filled all his heart with wonder and desire. He forgot then utterly all his people and all the purposes of his mind, and following the birds under the shadow of the trees he passed deep into Nan Elmoth and was lost. But he came at last to a glade open to the stars, and there Melian stood; and out of the darkness he looked at her, and the light of Aman was in her face.

She spoke no word; but being filled with love Elwe came to her and took her hand, and straightaway a spell was laid on him, so that they stood thus while long years were measured by the wheeling stars above them; and the trees of Nan Elmoth grew tall and dark before they spoke any word ...

And of their love came into the world the fairest of all the Children of Illuvatar that was or ever shall be.

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion

 

(Apologies that Blogspot and myself have failed to access accents, 'characters' or symbols :-0 )

 

 

 

 

The English poet, David Gascoyne (1917-2001), suffered greatly, like many artists and creative types, from a deep sense of alienation and separation. For him, there existed an unbridgeable gap between the often mundane nature of daily life, and the insights poetry had given him into a deeper, richer, yet seemingly unattainable way of living and being.

 

Like Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy in Prince Caspian, this dislocation was exacerbated by memories of Gascoyne's younger days, when a heightened, charged, more intense mode of awareness had frequently appeared on the brink of making itself manifest in his life:

 

"There seem to have been certain evenings in those days," he writes in his Journal 1936-38, referring to his teenage years, "when I was a prey to a particular kind of excitement that I would give much to recapture now. The shadows in doorways, the empty spaces of windows took on their greatest power of suggestiveness. An imperceptible smell of sulphur in the air. How finely attuned the nerves were to the least possibility of the miraculous. It seemed that at any moment one was going to be able to walk right through the screen of surface appearances, as through a mirror, into a strangely violent but exalted world of poetry and revolution."

 

 

 *******

This theme of heightened modes of awareness, or levels of perception, seems to have found particular resonance, throughout the centuries, in the Celtic imagination. Saints and mythological heroes, the stories tell us, set sail into the sunset, seeking out the Otherworld, a luminous zone of transfiguring clarity, known by a host of names: Tir-na-Nog, The Isles of the Blessed, The Lands of the Young, The Isle of Avalon, and many more.

 

The voyage to the west unfolds, more often than not, in tiny coracles without oars. The Saints and heroes place themselves unreservedly in the hands of God, venturing across the waves towards the western rim of the world and whatever (or whoever) may lie beyond.

 

On other occasions, in Celtic legend, the individual stumbles upon the Otherworld suddenly and unexpectedly, on the way home from a country fair, perhaps, or from visiting friends in a neighbouring town. Pwyll, King of Dyfed is drawn into it in The Mabinogion via his encounter with a mysterious pack of hounds - white with blood-red ears - while out hunting one day. In all these cases, as with Elwe in the passage from The Silmarillion above, the everyday world - what Gascoyne calls the 'screen of surface appearances - shatters like glass and is instantly forgotten, superceded by the wider, deeper reality of the world on the far side of the mirror.

 

 

 *******

 

So, we can ask ourselves - and begin to write from, maybe - the extent to which we have discovered imaginary worlds or kingdoms on the flip side of our own quotidian lives. If we feel that we have already made the discovery, then when did this extra dimenson spring to life in our minds and hearts? Was it when we were children and experienced a natural and easy sense of enchantment with the world around us? Or was it later - when we joined the world of work, perhaps, and felt subconsciously compelled to construct an alternative pole of imaginative reality? Or when we baceme parents ourselves and found the miracle of life such a stimulus to our latent creative faculties that we were forced again - rom deep inside ourselves, - to forge a zone of mental 'free play' of our own?

 

If, on the other hand, we feel that we do not have access to anything resembling a private 'Narnia', then what do we think our ideal setting or milieu might look, feel, taste and smell like? How would we imagine it?

 

Where are we? Are we standing on a rocky, precipitous ledge, for instance, with hawks and kestrels wheeling overhead? Or are we sitting in a secluded dell - under the shade of a great oak tree - sunlight slanting down through gold and russet leaves?

 

Or do sites of natural beauty leave us cold? Perhaps we are more attuned to the hubbub of the city and the whirl and rush of life at the heart of intense, bustling streets and squares?

 

What goes on in our secret world or kingdom?

Whatever it is. Wherever it is.

What is it that gives it its magic and makes it a place of refuge, hope and inspiration for us?

 

 

*******
 

It is worth noting, as a warning and aside, that the Otherworld is by no means an unreservedly pleasant place. Like the 'Zone' in Andrei Tarkovsky's film, Stalker, it is an ambiguous realm, with a penchant for tricks, deceptions, shape-shifting gods, goddesses and demons, sudden mists and blinding, overpowering lights. A sense of uncertainty and apprehension seems part and parcel of the mystery. Its challenging and perplexing nature acts almost as a guarantee of authentic, otherworldly experience. As with Julie Carlton, in the first draft of my work-in-progress, All Saints:

 

No, she decided, she wouldn't turn around and look at her visitor. That was the last thing required. She'd stay where she was - as still as a statue - safe and sound on top of the tower.

'As long as I look ahead and nowhere else,' she said to herself, 'then nothing bad can happen.'

But there was nothing to see - no trees beyond the battlements, not hills nor shapes of other buildings - only the level floor of mist, as if this spirit and she were tucked away in some secluded nook overlooking a world of spectral white.

 

 

*******

 

How do we begin to connect these apparently diametrically opposed worlds - the everyday and the otherworldly?

 

It is the response to this gauntlet that forms the next part of our Inklings Imaginative Writing journey.

 

 



 



  

The Great Bridge Builder

Part One

The Disenchanted World

"While Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy were in Narnia they seemed to reign for years and years; but when they came back through the door and found themselves in England again, it all seemed to have taken no time at all. At any rate, no one noticed that they had ever been away, and they never told anyone except one very wise grown-up.

That had all happened a year ago, and now all four of them were sitting on a seat at a railway station with trunks and playboxes piled up around them. They were, in fact, on their way back to school. They had travelled together as far as this station, which was a junction; and here, in a few minutes, one train would arrive and take the girls away to one school, and in about half an hour another train would arrive and the boys would go off to another school. The first part of the journey, when they were all together, always seemed to be part of the holidays; but now when they would be saying good-bye and going different ways so soon, everyone felt that the holidays were really over and everyone felt their term-time feelings beginning again, and they were all rather gloomy and no one could think of anything to say. Lucy was going to boarding school for the first time."

C.S. Lewis, Prince Caspian

Lewis, in the above passage, depicts a drab, disenchanted, disconnected setting, mirroring perfectly the characters' disappointed states of mind. This, unforunately, is how the day to day world all too often can appear to ourselves as well. Our daily round of cares and responsibilities dulls spiritual and emotional perception and chips away at our sense of wonder. Ever-increasing noise and chatter pulls us away, like the train in Prince Caspian, from the stillness needed for unhurried contemplation. Our inner resources become scattered. We feel nebulous, diminished and diffuse.

This imaginative barrenness feels particularly poignant if, as with the children in Lewis's tale, we can remember times when the world around us appeared very much enchanted. 'Will those days ever return?' we ask ourselves. 'Were they even real?' suggests the sceptical inner voice. 'Is it not far more likely that that they stood for nothing more than figments of the imagination and random slices of wish-fulfillment?'

*******

So, with this in mind, is it possible for us to recall and start writing from those times and places when we felt this way - when the magic and sparkle we once knew with on getting up each morning has departed from us and left our everyday experience of the world shorn of depth and meaning?

Where are we when this happens to us? Are we in the city or the country? What impact is the weather having? Are we drenched to the skin or is the sun beating pitilessly down on our heads? Are there other people around and about? Does the surrounding scenery match our mood? Are we fenced in by weeds? Or frightened by a crumbling, teetering mass of ancient ruins?

Or are we simply feeling lost and lonely, alone and adrift - here and now - drifting aimlessly around a crowded shopping centre, where the Divine has been, to all intents and purposes, expelled?

*******

At the end of my novel, The Red Diamond, the central protagonist, Julie Carlton, undergoes a profound sensation of loss and pointlessness. The adventure is over, the quest has failed, and Julie is standing outside Edinburgh Waverley Station, contemplating her mistakes, while waiting for the train back home to her old life in Liverpool:

"An empty can on Tennent's rattled across the asphalt, just by her right foot. Julie booted it angrily back across the road - into the far wall - into big black pools of sturdy darkness. The echo surprised her with its manic reverberation, leaving her feeling for a moment like a dweller in Plato's cave.

Then the noise ebbed and faded, ceding place to the soft seductive patter of rain, the rumblings of the station and the double-edged peace of a dreamy night-time fog - containing neither comfort nor resolution - just question after question after question ...

The voice of Edinburgh Waverley cut through the mist once more: 'Haymarket, Linlithglow, Polmont, Falkirk High, Glasgow Queen Street.'

And Julie's soul was filled with sadness: 'It's all my fault. There's nothing I can do. Nowhere I can go. Oh, it's all so hopeless.'"

Illustration by Rob Floyd - www.robfloyd.co.uk





One Step Beyond

The Poetry of Elizabeth Jennings

Looking into the heart of light, the silence.

T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland

Elizabeth Jennings (1926 - 2001) was born in Boston, Lincolnshire. Her family moved to Oxford when she was six, and she remained in the city for the rest of her life.

She read English at Saint Anne's College, but there is nothing remotely 'donnish' or anything smacking of Oxbridge in her corpus. Her poetry is universal in scope. It is a genuinely catholic body of work, both in terms of the religion she practiced and the breadth of mythic vision that informs her poetic world:

Then I remembered words that you had said

Of art as gesture and as sacrament

A mountain under the calm form of paint

Much like the Presence under wine and bread -

Art with its largesse and its own restraint

(Visit to an Artist)

This sacramental view is balanced throughout her oeuvre by a rich and fecund exploration of European mythology:

Alternatives to loss ...

Will always fail. Mythology is better, will point you

To the old stories of Diana and Eurydice.

(The Inheritors)

or:

Leading us gently into labyrinths within us where half-bulls sometimes wake in our own darkness

And where we must be both Theseus and Ariadne.

(The Minotaur)

What distinguishes her canon, however - in both its religious and mythological aspects - is a subtly expressed sense of the numinous, allied to a recognition of the mysterious, uncertain, fundamentally inexplicable nature of human consciousness and our role in the universe:

Always it was the half-seen, the just-heard that enthralled.

(Precursors)

Jennings' work pushes beyond dogma towards regions behind and beyond our Maya of verbal/written formulations and constructions. Jennings drinks straight from the source - the archetypal wellsprings, which pour forth the 'choice and master' themes, words and pictures of our imaginations.

In Alan Garner's novel, Red Shift, the action unfolds in the same location but at three different points of history: Roman Britain, the English Civil War and the early 1970s. Jennings' poetry gives a similar impression of belonging to both here and elsewhere - yesterday, now and always. It posesses a depth of texture and richness of tone that - like all true art - conveys the sense that our lives are more nuanced, multi-layered and freighted with possibility than the daily grind would sometimes have us believe.

But we have to pay a price. With depth comes darkness. Araidne's thread ushers us into the labyrinth. A mental breakdown in the early 1960s brought Jennings face to face with the 'heart of darkness' in herself and the world. And out of this 'dazzling dark', the voices of the great Spanish mystics - John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila - spoke to her with an authority and resonance authenticated by the pain and crushing loss of the dark night of the soul and spirit. The lives and writings of these two Iberian saints highlight the agony and also the vitality of this Via Negativa - this purging of the mesh of images and desires that lock us into our small selves and keep us alienated from the true gold lying on the far side of despair.

This is a tough road, mind. It requires exceptional levels of mental, emotional and imaginative discipline. As T.S. Eliot comments in East Coker:

I said to my soul, be still, and let the darkness come upon you

Which shall be the darkness of God.

This is difficult for a poet like Jennings. Paradoxical too. Because, to a tremendous extent, she relishes and revels in the whirl of images. She thrives off the forms, figures and energies triggered by the free play of human imagination.

This is no bad thing. In a world forever plagued by the dead hand of fundamentalist literalism, the balance she strikes, like C.S. Lewis, between the religious and the mythological is a sterling example indeed. But she doesn't leave it there. She goes further. Much further. She's not content to stay there. Not at all. She presses on - one, two, three steps beyond - beyond madness, beyond idols, past projections, severing the web of wish-fulfillment and self-promoting fantasy.

She steps into the truth instead. There isn't anywhere else for a poet to go. Into the heart of light: 

It was by negatives I learned my place.

The garden went on growing and I sensed

A sudden breeze that blew across my face

Despair returned, but now it danced, it danced.

(The Resurrection)





Reality Bites

The Place of the Lion

by Charles Williams

 

This piece originally appeared as part of a 'guest blog' series on Sorina Higgins' Williams site: www.theoddestinkling.mymiddleearth.com

 

I thoroughly recommend this site (as well as Sorina's own blog: www.islandsofjoy.blogspot.com) for anyone with an interest in Williams, C.S.Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. Even if you're not an 'Inklings' fan, they're still very much worth a look. Like Alan Garner's Elidor, in many ways, they prowl the borderline between the everyday and the numinous. But, as The Place of the Lion series illustrates, this 'otherworld' is anything but a cosy, cuddly, sub-Freudian slice of wish-fulfillment. It's the real thing - so real, as Lewis remarks of Heaven in The Great Divorce, that you 'could cut your finger on a blade of grass'.

 

Reality bites ...
 

 

 

 

 It seemed that at any moment one was going to be able to walk right through the screen of surface appearances, as through a mirror, into a strangely violent but exalted world of poetry and revolution.

 

David Gascoyne, Collected Journals, 1936-42.
 

 

*******

 

The Place of the Lion contains little in the way of characterisation and psychological depth. It is not that kind of book. But this is by no means to suggest that Williams's fourth novel (published 1932) is in any way a shallow or a trivial read. Quite the reverse. It is a 'novel of ideas', certainly, but also a carefully crafted work of art about the power and reality of ideas themselves. It is about ideas in a way that most twentieth and twenty-first century literature, with its tendency to foreground human emotion and sensibility is not. It deals with ideas in the raw.

 

Viewed from another angle, however, one could equally construct a case that the human condition is central to the text's concerns. The story explores, in sixteen tightly-knit chapters, the turn events might take were angelic intelligences to break through from the archetypal realm and start disturbing the everyday commerce of the safe, predictable world human beings have fashioned to keep them at bay.

How men and women react to this rupture - how imaginatively (or not) we respond to the challenge - is always going to be germane. It will never be far from the heart of the matter:

 

"You're doing what Marcellus warned you against," Richardson said, "judging them by English pictures. All nightgowns and body and a kind of flacculent sweetness. As in cemeteries, with broken bits of marble. These are the principles of the tiger and the volcano and the flaming suns of space."

 

What results, as the narrative unfolds, is nothing less than the collapse, re-imagination and re-integration of an entire world.

 

 
 

 

The clash of levels, collision of worlds, and ensuing discordance, portrayed in The Place of the Lion, occurs more frequently (if less dramatically) in our daily lives than we might think. Illness, bereavement, redundancy, any kind of trauma or emergency or - conversely - experiences of joy, love, harmony and connection, can strip us of our egocentric defences and open us up to what reality might be like at deeper, more essential levels.

 

The moral of the novel, if there is one, might be for us to try and remember (though it's hard to think straight when worlds collide) never to batten down hatches, curl in on ourselves and drift aimlessly with the flow. Better by far to dig deep, kindle our specifically human qualities - integrity, faith, creativity - and map these onto the world, as best as we can and in concert with others, as Damaris, Anthony and Richardson are compelled to do in the book.

 

'Human kind cannot bear very much reality,' wrote T.S. Eliot in Burnt Norton. He was right. It bites. But, as Williams shows, here and elsewhere, that need not always be a bad thing.

 

"You'll never be comfortable," says Anthony to Damaris. "But you may well be glorious."