Absolute Beginner

The rain it raineth every day in Maine! And someone on my street is getting a well drilled. Why not just set out a few buckets?

Had we but world enough, and time…. Actually, I do have enough time on my side and I have been doing some light reading: Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, Calvino’s Cosmicomics, Duncan’s The Last Werewolf, Swamplandia, Simmons’ The Terror, Saunders’ CivilWarLand,Donald Barthelme’s short stories, and Stanislaw Lem’s The Cyberiad.

My job search is still a work in progress. I have applied to everything from a post at the Republican Journal to a freelance copy editor job at HBO to working as a faucet in the kitchen sink.

“This is one moment,/ But I know that another/ Shall pierce you with a sudden painful joy.” TS Eliot

I’ve also been applying for a teaching gig, but, get behind the fool if it isn’t almost impossible to break into this line of work without a bruiser or simony. I don’t have enough teaching experience, and won’t get any if nobody takes a chance on me, Abba-style, and adjunct positions are now the new feudal economy. It bites the biscuit. And I have an MFA but I can’t teach high school English!? I feel like an English aristocrat with a big manor and not money to buy himself a fucking brolly. I sometimes think Jude the Obscure and I would have a lot to talk about in the pursuit of happiness. But, then, I’ve never done things according to civilized conduct.

“I’m all lost in the supermarket, I can no longer shop happily….”

I feel mildly like what’s his name, you know, Caedmon, that herdsman in Whitby around AD 680 who rushes back to his cows instead of singing at the feast.

Where’s a Gilles de Rais when you need one?

And between me and my shadow, the writing world can sometimes, well, loose its romantic ideal and give way to routine. And everywhere I look now all I see are writers loaded down with degrees and accomplishments and happy, professional smiles. What the hell happened to writers who are exiles, outsiders, runaways, castaways? Did I fall asleep like Rip Van Winkle while somebody pinched my idea of a writer? As someone with an MFA, whatever happened to writers whose imaginations detonated life? Or writers who didn’t come out of the binding fully formed without a blemish, without a writerly deformity or failing? Am I not reading enough? Am I living too much a sheltered life in my cosmos while the incandescent form around me? Is my individual path as a writer merely atoms scattered in curved space? And when they kick down my front door, how am I going to come, with my hands on my head or on the trigger of my gun?

“My life had stood – a loaded gun.” Dickinson

“Life was beautiful in those days.” Calvino

I know, I should Twitter about my frustrations and get a jolly following of custard pies.

Instead, I’m listening to the 80s Scottish band Lowlife. Damn if the lead singer doesn’t have a voice like a fallen angel walking Dante’s dark wood. And I’m lounging with Pigbag, post-punk English band with fusion running in their musical veins.

In A Dark Wood

“I found myself in a dark wood,” wrote Dante. Ancient, mysterious woods are an eldritch power that have enchanted, frightened, and inspired humanity since the dawn of time. In Robert Holdstock’s award-winning book Mythago Wood, it is the titular wild woodland of Celtic and English folklore that is at the centre of this dark and disturbing novel.

But there is more than forest spirits and shadows that haunt Holdstock’s primal forest. The woods are alive with ancient and limitless archetypes of myth that are transformed into flesh and blood. Heroic kings and brave outlaws; beautiful noblewomen and savage huntsmen; and the Urscumug, who “decks himself with woods and leaves, on top of animal hides. Face seems smeared with white clay, forming a mask upon exaggerated features below.”

The wood is Rhyope, and it has been the obsession of George Huxley for many years. With a febrile mind, he has kept notebooks that are filled with both the beautiful and deadly mythago creatures he has encountered in the woods.

Weary and wounded from the global conflict of World War II, George’s son, Steven, returns home to Oak Lodge, his family home in Herefordshire. His father is dead from an illness that has inflicted him for years and Steven’s brother, Christian, is master of the old estate.

But Christian has been delving into his father’s notebooks. And he has fallen in love with one of the mythagos, Guiwenneth, who “had lived a thousand times, and never lived at all.” Steven finds his brother becoming as obsessed about Rhyope as their father, returning back to it time after time and returning home with the “air of the primitive about him… reeking of sweat and vegetation, as if he had spent the days away buried in compost.” It is only when Steven finds the buried body of Guiwenneth in the back garden that he begins to understand that there is a brutal, disturbing, unknowable, pre-Christian consciousness at work at the heart of this primal wood.

The narrative is told through the tight first-person of Steven. It’s the perfect choice as the plot unfolds and the primal personas emerge from the wild wood to entice Steven into their mystery. Like his brother Christian, Steven, too, soon discovers his father’s notebooks and begins to be at once attracted and repulsed by the brutal and primitive spirit of the wood. He also falls in love with a reincarnation of the mythagos Guiwenneth. But this is a tale of star-crossed lovers because Christian returns from the wild wood, having gone “native” like Kurtz in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The bewitching power of the wood has transformed Christian into a savage leader of a band of even more bloodthirsty warriors called Hawks and he has come to snatch Guiwenneth away.

And now begins a gripping, outlandish quest as Steven and his friend Keeton decide to venture into the woods, forging their way to the heart of the wood and being aided by a host of myths: Saxons, Roman, pre-Christian Celts, and Neolithic clans, tribes out of fable, and even older legends that time has forgotten. Steven is on the trail of his brother, now known as the “outsider” in the fabled wood, his name passing into lore and legend the further he goes into the wood, the more he kills and menaces the mythagos within the wild wood.

Throughout it all, Rhyope Wood is a fantastical character in this novel. Holdstock weaves its own dark psychology on all who enter.  The wood is febrile, unreal, visceral, deadly, and beautifully brutal. It contains its horror, its secrets, and yet so freely unleashes it on all those who wander in.

In fact, Holdstock’s novel is remarkably original and avant-garde for its time. It is so strangely and wonderfully at odds with the ever-pervading idea that the world-building of fantasy must be feudal, sometimes even sentimental. In Mythago Wood it is pagan, brutal with a shamanistic subconscious; a bewildering mixture of a lost pre-historic world where the lost instinctual energies of animal and human spirits are alive and hungry.

Robert Holdstock more than most writers can rightfully assert: “I found myself in a dark wood.”