Bedside Reading

I think I had Byron's Don Juan in my hand.

Exploration's Joy

When I first found and read Charles De Lint's "The Little Country" back in grad school--on the heels of De Lint's "Dreams Underfoot"--it felt as if I were rediscovering the best aspects of play and treasure-hunting and discovery itself. I was having a fine time as a Renaissance / Medieval / Restoration / Neoclassic / Romantic specialist--I kept changing my fields, for I'm a hungry and ambitious generalist at heart--but I was spending my days and nights bearing down perhaps too hard as a student, as a researcher, and not as the learner, as the adult-child, as the explorer that I am most at home being. I relearned to refresh my professional studies with such spirited and generous storytelling--and to bring such spirit and generosity to my professional duties in the classroom and in the carrel.

Passage: "Trader" and Paying Attention

My own oracular devices: stones and shells.

Actually, I keep the bits of shell and stone in an old spice jar to shake out the rhythms for the songs on the radio in my truck as I drive; yes, I'm that guy. The abalone pendant I wear fairly often; I found the piece of shell under a rock on the bottom of a favorite cove. Both the maraca-jar and the necklace help me to focus.

The passage I keep thinking about from Charles de Lint's fine urban fantasy novel Trader:

"I guess it all depends on how you look at it," Bones says. "Now me, I figure all oracular devices are just a way for us to focus on what we already know but can't quite grab on to. It works the same as a ritual does in a church -- you get enough people focused on something, things happen. The way I see it is, it doesn't much matter what the device is. It's just got to be interesting enough so that your attention doesn't stray. Fellow reading the fortune, fellow having it read --same difference. They've both got to be paying attention.

"What you get's not the future so much as what's inside a person, which," he adds, "is pretty much the real reason they come to you. They're trying to sort through all this conversation that's running through their heads, but they get distracted. Me, what I'm doing with my hands, with the bones, it forces them to pay strict attention to me. The noise in their heads quiets down a little and they can hear themselves for a change. It's my voice, but they're doing the talking."

"So will you read my fortune?" I ask.

Bones looks regretful, but shakes his head.

"Why not? Let me tell you, I could use someone to make a little sense out of what's going through my head."

"You don't believe."

"But you just told me that it's just a matter of paying attention. I can do that."

"It's not the same."

Passages: Boland's "Daphne" and Mythic Art

Mythic literature--I've always loved it, from the translations of the Greek, Roman, and Germanic classics to the retellings and adaptations by contemporary writers. And, by mythic literature, I don't just mean the sorts of things Robert Graves or Mary Renault have done with Classical figures and beliefs, but also the sorts of things Charles de Lint or Robert Holdstock have done with Celtic, Indo-European, Amerindian, and other figures and beliefs.

Poetry is rife with mythic borrowings and mythic intonations from the earliest days. I almost wrote "from the days of belief," but who says belief doesn't exist now, exist in ways that matter most, figuratively, metamorphically (and that's not a misspelling for "metaphorically"). Right now, I'm thinking of Gluck's "Gretel in Darkness" (folklore counting as mythic, to me); Yeats' "Leda and the Swan"; Kizer's "Hera, Hung From the Sky"; Graves' "Ulysses"; and H.D.'s Helen in Egypt.

I could--and will--quote half a hundred good poems that use mythic material, but here's the first, the one that held me fast today when I was just reading around, open-eyed, not a care in the world, for that half hour I try to devote to the practice each day. Dangerous habit, that reading around, that openness; I recommend it.

Here's Eavan Boland and her poignant contemporary take on the myth of Daphne, a mortal woman transformed into a tree to escape the lust of the pursuing god Apollo.

DAPHNE WITH HER THIGHS IN BARK

I have written this

so that,

in the next myth,

my sister will be wiser.

Let her learn from me:

the opposite of passion

is not virtue

but routine.

Look at me.

I can be cooking,

making coffee,

scrubbing wood, perhaps,

and back it comes:

the crystalline, the otherwhere,

the wood

where I was

when he began the chase.

And how I ran from him!

Pan-thighed,

satyr-faced he was.

The trees reached out to me.

I silvered and

I quivered. I shook out

my foil of quick leaves.

He snouted past.

What a fool I was!

I shall be here forever,

setting out the tea,

among the coppers and the branching alloys and

the tin shine of this kitchen;

laying saucers on the pine table.

Save face, sister.

Fall. Stumble.

Rut with him.

His rough heat will keep you warm and

you will be better off than me,

with your memories

down the garden,

at the start of March,

unable to keep your eyes

off the chestnut tree—

just the way

it thrusts and hardens.

--Eavan Boland

An Origin Like Water: Collected Poems 1967-1987. W. W. Norton @ Co. New York & London: 1996.