Winter Seed Catalog Moon
Got my manuscript back today from the copy editor, Robert Klein, at quickproofs. I haven’t looked at it, but I will, probably not seriously until I get back from Denver. Some nervousness about it, because after I accept or reject his various edits then I have to get serious about submitting it to agents. This is the point at which I’ve clenched over the years, a combination of perfectionism and self-doubt. I’m determined to push through that this time.
Winter New (Seed Catalog) Moon
The new year has begun, or as I thought about it in light of a post below, the next year has begun (Happy Next Year!). It finds me following trails laid down in other times.
In the morning I went through, for the second or third time, parts of the Lycaon story that I have previously translated. The goal now is to sight read the passage, translating with minimal helps. Right now I have to write a definition over the word, perhaps a grammatical note, but the way to get fast is to read Latin as I read English. That’s a long way off, but I can see the horizon line of that skill. When I reach that point, I’ll be able to do serious scholarly work as well as learn great stories.
In the afternoon I picked up Loki’s Children, itching to get my fingers on the keyboard, putting some pages behind me. Got waylaid looking up material about Thor, who is a very interesting god, probably the most loved god in Norse antiquity and mainly a giant-slayer, though he had a sideline in the inadvertent killing of dwarfs. He killed Alvis, for example, by asking him questions until the sun rose and the light of dawn turned Alvis to stone. Alvis wanted to marry Thrud, Thor’s daughter. Thrud, not exactly an elegant name, is it? Maybe it sounds better in Old Norse.
The research turned out to be very useful, allowing me a thread I can use for building a strong throughline in Loki’s Children. Sorry, but that part’s top secret.
Winter Solstice Winter Moon
The long night continues. Kate and I had our bonfire together. All three dogs came out and sat with us for a bit before taking off for doggy business barking at something deeper in the woods.
(Lorraine_Williams_Rainbow_Serpent_Dreaming)
The silence has fallen and will stay with us until morning. Then the sunlight will wake up the birds and the newspaper deliverers and those who work on Sunday mornings. And the long trek into darkness begun last summer in June trades places with an equally long ancientrail of light.
These are not opposites, not poles of a dialectic, but two sides of the world, entered through dawn and twilight, and with us every single day of our lives. I’m still intrigued with the notion that the darkness may be our brains normal state and all this waking activity is clever misdirection by the dreamtime.
This will bear more thought and reading.
I do know this. The ancientrail of darkness is katabatic, like Persephone’s or Orpheus’s or Odysseus’s. That is, it is the trail which leads to the underworld, the dark places within us and that it has always drawn me more than the journey toward the light.
Let me say exactly what I mean here. This is a bodily sensation, a sense of familiarity and comfort, a feeling of spirituality and it correlates to the increasing darkness. It becomes most intimate this night, a night that is different from all other nights. Yet, the same.
It’s not that I reject the light or feel oppressed by it. The garden, the growth of plants and the chance to wander outside easily has its joys, certainly. It’s just that for me the darkness is richer, takes me further.
Does this have any correlation to my depressive or melancholic or dysthymic states? Maybe. Does that mean it’s bad in some way or counter productive? I don’t think so. It seems to me that this is descriptive, not prescriptive or proscriptive.
My guess is that our bodies and our early life experiences give us a tendency to lean more toward the dark or the light. My guess further is that since waking activity has a natural though not necessary linkage with the day, in particular work and school, that we privilege those who tend more toward the light, perhaps even suppressing in ourselves a tendency to favor the dark.
At any rate I’m of the dark persuasion and this is the moment in the year when I feel, as Tom Crane suggested, at home.
Samhain Winter Moon
Samhain ends tomorrow with the arrival of the Winter Solstice. The long fallow season following Summer’s End fades into the coldest months of the year. Here in Minnesota the coldest days of the year begin on December 1st, meteorological winter; the old calendar reflects a different climate situation in Ireland and Britain. Still, that calendar and its larger cultural context is the one which continues to influence our holy day practices. Christmas comes on the celebration of Sol Invictus, the all the conquering sun, a Roman holy time set by the coming of the Winter Solstice.
Paul Strickland heard a Christian talk radio show lamenting the re-emergence of Winter Solstice celebrations and complaining that everyone knows Christmas came long before such pagan holy days. We all laughed. Christmas is a late addition to the Winter Solstice celebration collection and not a very important holiday among Christians until the Victorian era.
When Samhain ends at the Winter Solstice, the old growing season shifts from the death and desiccation of fall into decay and enrichment, preparing the way as the light begins to increase. When Persephone returns to the Underworld to rule with Hades, the active forces of the soil begin their work in earnest, breaking down the fallen, dead and rotting materials into rich nutrients that feed soil organisms and will feed plants when Persephone returns home to her mother Demeter in the spring.
James Hillman said we see the gods today in our pathologies and I suppose that’s true in his sense, but the gods of polytheism suffered their Nietzschean fate long ago and have come again in more than psychological ways.
As Paul Ricoeur suggests, Christian’s familiar with biblical scholarship might return to the texts with a second naivete and see them once again as holy; so, I would suggest that the gods and goddesses of polytheism have long since resurrected, once again ready to offer themselves to us. All we need is our second naivete to see them. They can help us follow the recurring cycles of nature and understand them as powerful and dynamic realities, ones to which we owe allegiance.
Our blasphemy toward the old gods has created environmental havoc. We wantonly pollute–in the religious as well as the chemical sense–Poseidon’s ocean, Persephone and Hades’ soil, Zeus’s sky and even Aurora’s dawn. Perhaps only Apollo’s Sun has escaped our meddling.
We are heretics to the old religions and we have paid the price. If we do not repent, it will lead, as the logic of religion suggests, to our damnation.
Samhain Winter Moon
Another 6 lines of the Lycaon story. Sort of. Lycaon’s story per se ends with the piece I published the other day. It continues, however, as Ovid recounts how the enraged Jupiter goes from transforming Lycaon into a wolf to plans for a deluge, a wiping out of humans. The other gods are mostly okay with this except they do ask, “who will carry incense onto our altars?” A bit of divine pragmatism.
Must of been eating my Latin wheaties because the translation is coming faster and faster now, the results of my work most often squaring with the Loeb English translation. That’s not to say they match but I understand how Miller got his translation and how mine differs in a way that makes sense. The Loeb’s purpose, as I understand it, is to offer a close to literal reading of the Latin, though once you learn the Latin it’s clear how far from the Latin even the literal readings are. This is not criticism; rather, it shows the gap between languages and how bridging those gaps is a quirky business, yielding all manner of contraptions from elegant trussed spans to rickety ropes.
This is what I got into it for, yeah these many years ago. After studying the Bible, written in Hebrew and Greek, you learn the need for careful attention to this work, exegesis. I never mastered either Hebrew or Greek, but I really wanted to experience the world behind the Wizard’s curtain of the translator.
As a vehicle for that journey, I chose the Metamorphoses because it is the reference text for the entry of Greek and Roman mythology into the Western stream of the humanities. This way I ground myself in mythology while satisfying a more abstract desire. It’s working.
Samhain Winter Moon
Winter Solstice. It comes with silent steps, the moon shining through leafless trees, scattering the snow with shadows. This is a moment between one turn and the next, a still point, a dark still point out of which will come light, enough light to thaw the ground, lure plants from beneath the earth, give them strength and plump up their fruits. But now, this night, is the culmination of darkness coming toward us one minute at a time until we reach the longest night of the year.
This waning of the light has killed back the plants of summer, shucked the leaves off the trees, frozen the rain so it falls as snow. This is the season that shows the other face of nature. This is earth as a receiver of the dead, as a particle disaggregator, a rapacious devourer of life. Earth as scavenger, cavern, dark sea bottom. This is the earth as whole, not only giving, but also taking.
When Hades comes for Persephone, he takes life back inside the earth. He changes her, makes her a part of his realm. In this marriage of Hades and Persephone we see death preceding life as the Mexica poet said.
In the dark and the quiet of the Winter Solstice night we can draw near to this truth. We can know that even our own death will do no more than take us back to the earth from which we came and that even that death will not be final as our consciousness is born anew with each birth and our physical self is born anew as plant and animal. What more wonder do we need at this time of year, in this, the Holiseason?
(Hades and Persephone: King and Queen of the Underworld)
Samhain Winter Moon
Started using Dramatica this morning, entering characters, thinking about plot progression and story points. It forced me into a new way of considering the task of writing a novel, something I want. If you’re not pushing, you’re going backwards.
It also intimidates me. My confidence level is never at its highest with writing, but I decided a while back to stick with it, keep on typing. With Missing I focused on revision.
With Loki’s Children I plan to focus on the craft, creating interesting characters who do things you want to follow and taking the story to a satisfying conclusion. I’ve considered those things before, of course, they’re basic, but I’ve never given them attention before writing. I always dove right in.
The new novel feeling for me is like standing on a path that leads into a distant land, a place mostly invisible, over the horizon and writing moves me along the path, opening up new vistas, new experiences as I go. It’s a lot like travel, maybe exactly like it. I leave home, familiar territory, behind and go off to see how they do things far away. And I report back about what I find.
Spent more time with Lycaon this morning, too. Here’s a snippet, still requires some work, but it shows the heart of Lycaon’s crime. It’s Jupiter who is speaking:
He had planned to destroy me,
225 weighted with sleep and not expecting dark death.
226 He is not yet measured against my strength: one of the race of Molossa
227 Was put to death for an ambush, his throat opened by a sword.
228 A portion of him softens, half-dead joints in
229 Boiling water, another portion roasted by placing under the fire.
Samhain Winter Moon
After a time devoted first to getting Missing ready for the copy editor and a time after that focused on my new translating method, I have returned again to Loki’s Children. Still in the research phase, still learning and organizing material. Ready to use Dramatica to start the run-up to actual writing.
(Loki strikes Þjazi with a rod in this picture from an 18th-century Icelandic manuscript)
Right now I’m trying to grasp the Loki figure, his ambiguous, malevolent character; his leading role in the things to come. How to present him. Then, how he drags the other characters, already established, into his field, challenging them with the world’s destruction.
The weather and the season are conducive to time focused on the inner world, just right for this phase of work.
Samhain Winter Moon
It was nine years ago the first of November that I left for Southeast Asia, visiting Mary when George Bush again won the presidency. Mary and I went to the American Club for brunch around 8 a.m. to watch the polls close and night-time punditry begin.
Later a Singapore taxi-driver, Chinese, explained how much he disliked Bush and how much an American election, 12 time zones and 12,500 miles away, affected him. It was, he said, a strange and not a good feeling to have so much of your future tied up with a foreign land and its peculiar decision making about leadership.
Singapore has a distinctly pro-Western bent for all its declaiming about Asian values; it is capitalist and materialist to its fingernails. Mary and I experienced Diwali, the Hindu Festival of Lights, saw firewalking in a Hindu temple and broke the Ramadan fast in Arabtown.
Bangkok came next, a $60 introductory rate flight by Tiger Air, a cut-rate airline beginning to service Southeast Asia. Bangkok’s ChinaTown, my home base for the two weeks I spent there had sidewalk fold-up restaurants at night, vendors during the day and always people, lots of people and cars streaming by on Yaowarat. The neon lights gave the after dark old main street of Bangkok a garish look, but also made it enticing. Exotic.
After some time in Bangkok, I got on a Bangkok Air flight for Siem Reap, Cambodia. We landed next to a plane from the Republic of Vietnam. On the flight from Bangkok bomb craters had been easy to pick out in the fields below. Taxiing up to a spot beside that plane, in Cambodia, brought back anti-war memories from the 60’s.
The highlight of this trip was still ahead. Angkor. Most people identify this complex with
the name Angkor Wat although all that means is Angkor Temple and there are many, many temples. The temple widely known as Angkor Wat is closest to the small Cambodian city of Siem Reap. It is huge and well preserved. I spent a full morning climbing its ritual and mythic architecture, it recapitulates a sacred landscape, and took most of my time at the object that made me travel all this way: the churning of the sea of milk.
(This bas relief, carved intricately at all points, runs round the bottom most walls of the temple, roughly 1/4 of a mile. The panels are maybe 12 feet high.)
This sentence from the Unesco world heritage website will give you an idea of why Angkor Wat is just a taste of what’s in the area. “(Angkor) extends over approximately 400 square kilometres and consists of scores of temples, hydraulic structures (basins, dykes, reservoirs, canals) as well as communication routes.”
This is not a week’s journey, not even a month’s. Three months would be a good start, especially since early morning and late afternoon are the only times you can really visit since the temperatures are so intense in midday. I had four days.
All my photographs are on an old hard drive and I haven’t retrieved them yet, a project ahead of me. There are a lot of photos: Bantay Serai, Ta Phrom, Bayon, Preah Khan.
Morning and night for four days I explored, dodging scorpions, nodding to saffron robed monks, amazed by the kapok tree roots reclaiming these 9th through 14th century sites.
A memory that stands out came on evening the third day. I had clambered around the temple mountain of Bayon, the temple with the four-faced stone monuments you’ve probably seen in pictures. Incense drifted over from a contemporary Buddhist temple across the dirt road, following the smoke was music from cymbals and gongs.
Sitting on tumbled down stones near Bayon’s west entrance, a reverie overcame me and I drifted back, back, back in time to the days of the Khmer and the god-kings who built these monuments to politics and divinity. To a time when the Khmer carved living rock from quarries far-away and floated the carved rock down river to these sites, using an elaborate system of canals.
(Bayon’s west side.)
This was when I realized a strong part of me was a soul in ruins, captured by the past, most alive while picking my way through Ephesus, Angkor, the Forum, Delphi, Delos. Through ancient texts like the Metamorphoses and the Odyssey and the Iliad. Learning the ancient Roman language. That realization has shaped much of my work since then.
Samhain New (Winter) Moon
Today I finished translating the story of Lycaon in Ovid. Most of it anyhow. Some still awaits consultation with Greg. I plan to go back and forth through this story until I have a clean, idiomatic and interesting text. That’s the next couple of days, maybe more. Probably more. Lycaon’s tale is the origin of the word Lycanthrope, a coined word for werewolf. Lycanthropy is the study of werewolves.
In this story Jupiter, angered by an Arcadian king’s (Lycaon) human sacrifices, comes to earth to investigate. When Lycaon tries to serve him human flesh, a test to see if he is truly divine, Jupiter in a rage turns King Lycaon into a wolf, but a wolf with human feet, eyes, grayish hair and the former king’s wild and fierce countenance.
Translating it word by word, line by line, idea by idea and then going back to create a polished English version is the task I set myself so long ago, producing a translation of Metamorphoses so I can embed these stories in my own consciousness. Yes, there are over 15,000 verses in total, and I’m only at verse 235 (plus several hundred other verses I translated, stories I chose to keep me interested) but I’m now beginning to see myself as a translator and not only a student. That’s a big transition.
I will post the text when I finish.