Here’s the text of the lecture I gave yesterday at StAnza, the St Andrews Poetry Festival:

MYTH, MAGIC AND THE FUTURE OF POETRY

 A dozen years from now, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land will be a hundred years old. This poem, which ever since its first appearance has seemed to epitomise the modern, the poem of our own immediately recognisable condition, will have been with us for a century. I find this an extraordinary thought, and I hope you do also.  It seems to me that it is time to ask ourselves where poetry is going, and what it can do for us, in a world that has altered immeasurably since Eliot wrote his fractured masterpiece.

            Eliot’s poem was a diagnosis. It drew on myth to suggest that something was missing from the life and consciousness of the twentieth century, and that the result was an impoverishment, a spiritual desert. It was left to another twentieth-century poet, Robert Graves, to add a prognosis or prediction. In The White Goddess, first published in 1948, Graves not only attempted to reconstruct the goddess-worship of ancient Europe, but, in a chapter entitled ‘The Return of the Goddess’, predicted the breakdown of modern civilisation, which he foresaw taking place because of a neglect of the feminine consciousness and a violation of the natural environment. ‘Agricultural life’, he wrote, ‘is rapidly becoming industrialized’… ‘the more exhausted by men’s irreligious improvidence the resources of the soil and sea become, the less merciful will [the returning Goddess’s] mask be, and the narrower the scope of action she grants.’  The function of poetry, he announced (perhaps a little implausibly) ‘was once a warning to man that he must keep in harmony with the family of living creatures among which he was born…it is now a reminder that he has disregarded the warning, turned the house upside down and brought ruin on himself and his family. “Nowadays” is a civilization in which the primem emblems of poetry are dishonoured. In which serpent, lion and eagle belong to the circus-tent; ox, salmon and boar to the cannery; … and the sacred grove to the saw-mill.’ Both Graves and Eliot have turned out to be remarkably prescient. But it has become clear in the past few years that we are reaching the end of an age. As surely as the people who lived in fifteenth-century Europe, we are entering the point of transition between historical periods. These things don’t happen all at once. They are messy and fuzzy processes that seem to have no single cause. But I have no doubt at all that anyone in this audience could immediately list half a dozen factors which indicate a vast alteration in the nature of the world. At the top of these lists would be climate change, which with the rise of sea levels is already altering the world’s physical map; then would come the linking of most of the world’s populations by means of the internet; followed perhaps by the returning of world economic power to the east and to China in particular; the discovery of planets outside the solar system; the popular diffusion of the ideas of quantum physics. And so on. You can extend your own list from there on. Already the first human populations have had to be moved from islands lost to the rising sea levels. Many more will follow.

            If humans survive the immense transformations that lie ahead, and they surely will, then the arts will survive also in some form. And at the centre of them will be, in some form, poetry. I say ‘at the centre’ because, though the attention it gets in public may vary as time goes by, poetry is the fundamental art form because it works in language, which is the fundamental human skill.  Poetry is apparently the most insubstantial of things, embodied in breath or ink, alive only at the moment it is heard or read, continuing if at all only in closed pages or the mortal memory. Yet because it works in language, and moulds language to its purposes, poetry has a vast leverage. We know our world above all through language, and so an art that refreshes and changes the use of language can change the way people name the world, how they view it and how they understand it.

            Modern empirical science has almost no interest in the question of how poetry originates, where it comes from. In pre-modern cultures the case was very different, and the accounts that have survived of the origins of poetry tell us a great deal. In these accounts, poetry doesn’t come first of all from the everyday world. It comes from somewhere else, and it comes from the gods. The earliest account of the composition of a poem in English is in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of England, written in about AD 731. It’s the story of Caedmon, a farm worker who was unusual, in that age of oral culture, in being unable to sing and improvise verses. According to Bede’s account Caedmon left a social gathering one evening to avoid being embarrassed when his turn came to sing. He went out to the stable to attend to the horses, and settled down there to sleep. Now

a person appeared to him in his sleep, and saluting him by his name, said, “Caedmon, sing some song to me.” He answered, “I cannot sing; for that was the reason why I left the entertainment, and retired to this place because I could not sing.” The other who talked to him, replied, “However, you shall sing.” ­ “What shall I sing?” rejoined he. “Sing the beginning of created beings,” said the other.

 Caedmon found himself singing verses about the creation of the world. His poem about the Creation, as it survives, has only nine lines. But Caedmon is, amazingly, the earliest English poet whose name we know and the poem, known as ‘Caedmon’s Hymn’, is the earliest significant surviving Old English poem. We have no other evidence about the Anglo-Saxon view of poetic inspiration, pre- or post-Christian; but the story tells us clearly that it was regarded as coming from a spiritual, superhuman source.

            If we go outside the Christian world at the same period we find stories which point in the same direction, but are far more extravagant. For the Norwegians and Icelanders of Caedmon’s time, one of the supreme gods was Odinn, the god of poetry and in some accounts also the creator of men. Odinn himself spoke only in poetry, and he bestowed on his favourite, the hero Starkath, the gift of being able to make verses as fast as he could talk.

            But where did Odinn get poetry from? Well, when the two warring tribes of gods, the Aesir and the Vanir, made peace, they sealed the peace by each spitting into a jar. They then formed a human figure out of their spittle. This human figure was called Kvasir. hew came to life, ‘and he was so wise that there was no question which he could not answer’. Kvasir was killed by two dwarfs, who drained off his blood into three barrels. They mixed the blood with honey, and brewed in the three barrels ‘such a mead, that everyone who drinks it becomes a poet or a man of learning.’ The barrels of mead were guarded by a giantess called Gunnlöth. But how did Odinn get it? Well, Odinn slept with the giantess Gunnlöth for three nights, and she granted him three sips of the mead. By his magical powers, Odinn emptied one barrel at each sip and so drank the whole lot.

            This extremely visceral story tells us that poetry is (first) the saliva of the gods; then it is (secondly) the blood of Kvasir, the man who knows everything; then (thirdly) it is the mead brewed by the dwarfs, kept by Gunnlöth and stolen by Odinn. We can take this in many directions. Remembering the use made of saliva for fermentation in nomadic cultures, and the similarity of the name Kvasir to words such as the Russian kvass for beer, we have poetry as an intoxicant, a kind of alcohol. But saliva is from the mouth. If poetry is first the saliva of the gods, then it is linked to divine speech and breath, as well as to ingesting food, and both fermenting and swallowing drink. It’s blood and honey – life, death and love. But remember too that Kvasir could answer any question. So poetry is universal wisdom.

            Moving south-westward to Wales, we find a Celtic myth of the origin of poetry in the Mabinogion, in the story of Taliesin. Here, poetry originates in the Cauldron of Inspiration, which was prepared by the enchantress Ceridwen, who boiled up a cauldron of inspiration and wisdom (we notice again the pairing of poetry and knowledge, as with Kvasir). The cauldron was full of special herbs, and it had to boil continuously for a year and a day. Every day Ceridwen had to gather fresh herbs, so she would leave Little Gwion, Gwion Bach, to stir the cauldron while she was out. But one day, as the cauldron bubbled, three drops flew out and fell, boiling hot, on Gwion Bach’s finger. Naturally he put his finger in his mouth, and instantly he became able to see into the future. And he saw that when the year and a day were over, Ceridwen was going to kill him. So he ran away, and once he had stopped stirring the pot it broke in two and spilled the magical liquid.

            Ceridwen went after Gwion Bach, and he changed himself into a hare to escape her. But she turned herself into a greyhound and hunted him. The two of them went through a series of changes until finally Gwion Bach turned himself into a grain of wheat on the floor of a barn, and she turned herself to a hen and swallowed him. Ceridwen thought she was rid of him but she found she was pregnant and after nine months she gave birth to him as a beautiful boy. She could not bear to kill him. He became known as Taliesin or ‘Shining Brow’, and even as a child his poems were so fine that he became the greatest bard of his time. He was also an enchanter, because the intoxicating drink in Ceridwen’s cauldron brought magical knowledge as well as poetic inspiration.

            The connection between poetry and magical powers was equally emphasised in medieval Ireland. Here the poet was known as a fili, a word which meant originally ‘seer’. Poets in early medieval Ireland were expected to have powers of clairvoyance. I quote from the Celtic scholar John Carey:

Various early legal sources make it clear that anyone aspiring to be recognised as a master poet or ollam, must not only be fully trained and artistically gifted but must also possess the clairvoyant faculty known as imbas forosnai, the ‘great knowledge which illuminates’. This imbas could reveal the secrets of the past, present and future; and…its source…is consistently located in the native Otherworld of the hollow hills, the realm of the old gods.

 Carey tells us that a master poet’s job included ‘warding enchantments away from the king at Hallowe’en’. In the early Irish epic the Tain or Cattle-Driving of Cuailnge, which dates from before the 6^th century, Queen Medb, about to set out with her army to invade Ulster, sees a young woman approaching, driving a chariot.

She wore a speckled cloak fastened around her with a gold pin, a red-embroidered hooded tunic and sandals with gold clasps. Her brow was broad, her jaw narrow, her two eyebrows pitch black… You would think her lips were inset with Parthian scarlet. She had hair in three tresses: two wound upward on her head and the third hanging down her back, brushing her calves… Her eyes had triple irises. Two black horses drew her chariot, and she was armed.

            ‘What is your name?’ Medb said to the girl.

                        ‘I am Fedelm, and I am a woman poet of Connacht.’

                        ‘Where have you come from?’ Medb said.

                        ‘From learning verse and vision in Alba,’ the girl said.

‘Have you the imbas forasnai, the Light of Foresight?’ Medh said.

‘Yes, I have,’ the girl said.

            ‘Then look for me and see what will become of my army.’

                        So the girl looked.

            Medb said, Fedelm, prophetess; how seest thou the host?’

                        Fedelm  said in reply:

                        ‘I see it crimson, I see it red.’

 Since Fedelm is a poet, it is assumed that she can see the future – albeit not a future that Medb welcomes, since it means the slaughter of her army.

            In India at around the same period, poetic inspiration was thought of as the milk of a goddess. In the Saundaryalahari or Flood of Beauty, dating from the 9^th or 10^th century, the poet writes:

The milk of your breasts, O daughter of the mountain,

I think is as if from your heart

there flowed an ocean of the milk of poesy;

            when the Dravida child tasted this as you gave it to him in compassion,

            he became the poet laureate of the master poets.

 Again poetry is in the keeping of a goddess; and again it is a drink – this time of divine milk.

            A similar idea prevailed also in the classical Mediterranean world of Greece and Rome. Greek poets attributed their poetry to the experience of being taken over by one or more of the Muses. The Muses were Goddesses who lived on Mount Helicon, and were in charge of a spring of divine water that gave inspiration to those who drank from it. Yet again we have the idea of poetic inspiration as a drink, and in the keeping of supernatural women.

            I have recalled to us these myths because I want us to remind ourselves of the depth, the importance, of what poets do, and the fundamental part that poetry plays, whether visibly or invisibly, in a culture. And here, of course, by poetry I mean all genuinely creative use of language, all fresh metaphor, all song, all new and expressive transferring of words which enriches our consciousness and thus our world.

            What would it mean for us in the present day to enter the fortress of Gunlöth and drink her mead – a brew of saliva, blood and honey which sounds to us horrifying and repellent? What would it mean for us to burn our fingers on the stew of medicinal and psychoactive plants boiled together in Ceridwen’s cauldron? Looking at these myths, it is clear that what they transmit is the memories of a shamanic role, of ordeals and initiations into the depths of consciousness from which – as a dying Alaskan female shaman told the anthropologist Knud Rasmussen in the 1920s – songs ‘take shape…and rise up like bubbles from the depths of the sea, bubbles seeking the air in order to burst. That is how sacred songs are made.’ [Halifax, 30]

            We as poets must be prepared to dive deep into that ocean of contemplation  – the silence, if you like, between words and things – precisely that aporia or gap which the deconstructionists argue cannot be crossed or bridged. It is the poet who bridges that abyss, for an instant, with his or her own body and mind. And even in an age when there seems to be no specific training for poets and no vestige of  the frightening shamanistic initiations which the myths seem to commemorate, such initiations can descend as if from nowhere, breaking through in dreams or in sheer inspiration. Most of us probably know Sylvia Plath’s poem, ‘The Hanging Man’:

            By the roots of my hair some god got hold of me.

            I sizzled in his blue volts like a desert prophet.

            The nights snapped out of sight like a lizard’s eyelid:

            A world of bald white days in a shadeless socket.

            A vulturous boredom pinned me in this tree.

            If he were I, he would do what I did.

The poem is enigmatic in its full meaning. But it manages, amazingly, to combine a personal experience with recollections of the Tarot card of the Hanged Man, the crucifixion of Christ, and the ordeal of Odin, Norse god of poetry, who learned his wisdom and his poetry, according to one story, by hanging for nine nights upon the world-tree Yggdrasill, pierced with a spear, sacrificed as an offering, himself to himself.

            Reading a poem such as this, it is easy to forget that it was written by the same Sylvia Plath who diligently attended Robert Lowell’s creative writing seminars, wrote her early poems with the systematic use of a rhyming dictionary, and sent out poem after rejected poem to the magazines with the persistence of a professional secretary. The imaginative initiation was granted to one who had put in the work, and made the systematic effort.

            Again, Robert Graves found himself seized, in 1944, by what he described as ‘a sudden overwhelming obsession’ which ‘took the form of an unsolicited enlightenment on a subject I knew almost nothing about….my mind worked at such a furious rate all night, as well as all the next day, that my pen found it difficult to keep pace with the flow of my thought.’ Within a very few weeks, Graves had written a 70,000-word first draft of The White Goddess. Graves was aware that he had undergone a spiritual initiation, and his prefatory poem to The White Goddess is a paean of praise:

            All saints revile her, and all sober men

            Ruled by the god Apollo’s golden mean –

            In scorn of which we sailed to find her

            In distant regions likeliest to hold her

            Whom we desired above all things to know,

            Sister of the mirage and echo.

But, like Plath, Graves had earned his initiation. He had mastered Latin and Greek early in life, and had acquired an encyclopaedic knowledge of classical literature and the Bible. He had fought and been seriously wounded in the First World War. He had once sold all his books simply in order to buy the complete Oxford English Dictionary, which he claimed to consult at least once every day. He was a careful and even obsessive reviser of his poems. Once again, the inspiration was given to the poet who had put in the groundwork.

            This might remind us of the ancient Welsh triad: ‘Three things that enrich the bard: Myth, poetic power, a store of ancient verse.’ In a largely oral tradition, poets were expected not only to have talent – ‘poetic power’ but also both to have in their memories a full knowledge of the corpus of myths of their tradition, and also to have memorised the works of previous poets. Learning all this constituted a tough poetic education. Again, the dimension of shamanistic visionary experience was based on a foundation of systematic hard work and poetic training.

            But why should myth be important? (And by myth, I should say that I mean a story that deals with fundamental matters, and whose date and authorship are unknown.) The answer is that we should attend to myth because the mythologies of the world – all and any of them – offer us a timeless mirror in which we can find our own problems and dilemmas reflected, freed from the pressures our personal viewpoints. Myth can be a powerfully transformative agent. To illustrate this, I should like to cite two examples, one extremely personal and the other entirely global. Both of the, I think, illustrate the huge dynamic of myth.

            First, the personal instance. The story is told by the poet Myra Schneider in her book Writing Your Self.  In 2006 Myra Schneider was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a mastectomy. She recalls:

I didn’t give much conscious thought at first to the fact that I had lost a breast. I was too preoccupied with recovering from the operation, coping with the follow up treatment and being determined to make the most of life. Beneath the surface, though, I was acutely aware of being different. Fixed in my mind was an image of a world full of two-breasted women in which I was an oddity. This view surfaced in a poem called ‘The Cave’ in which a voice accused me of being ‘one-breasted’ and ‘hardly a woman’. I confronted the voice, but this didn’t dispel my image of myself.

 But then a friend read the poem and wrote to Myra:

 When I came to the point where the voice reproaches you with the phrases ‘one-breasted,/ hardly a woman’  I found myself thinking, ‘Ah, but in the ancient myths the most powerful women of all were, precisely, one-breasted’; and I wondered if you had looked, or might find it fruitful to look, at the mythology surrounding the Amazons. They were a subject of fascination and a certain amount of fear to the ancient Greeks at least, and a very frequent image in graphic art, especially vase-painting. And although very martial in their doings, they were certainly not thought of as unfeminine, but rather in some odd way as too feminine for comfort.

There is extensive material on them in Graves’s Greek Myths; and one recalls that Hippolyta,  Theseus’s queen who turns up importantly in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, was an Amazon. Possibly other important characters in myth and literature were too. No doubt there are full-length books about them. At any rate, I wonder if there is something here worth looking into?

 Indeed there was. The name ‘Amazon’ actually means ‘lacking a breast’. As Myra Schneider writes, ‘[the] words opened a door. I saw myself in a completely new light and soon afterwards I wrote [the poem] “Amazon”’. Here it is:

For four months

all those Matissse and Picasso women

draped against

plants, balconies, Mediterranean sea, skies

have taunted me

with the beautiful globes of their breasts as I’ve filled

my emptiness

with pages of scrawl, with fecund May, its floods

of green, its irrepressible

wedding-lace white, buttercup-gold,

but failed to cover

the image of myself as a misshapen clown

until you reminded me

that in Greek myth the most revered women

were the single-breasted

Amazons who mastered javelins and bows, rode

horses into battle,

whose fierce queens were renowned for their femininity.

Then recognising the fields I’d fought my way across

I raised my shield

of glistening words, saw it echoed the sun.

 The myth had given Myra Schneider an entirely new view of her predicament. Most importantly, perhaps, she no longer felt alone; in addition, she now felt both powerful and feminine again, as if she had joined a new tribe of women. For such healing, myth is a profound resource. – one of the deepest things one can call on in troubled times. There is nothing, however terrible – blindness, suicide, incest, mutilation – which is not somewhere woven into the tapestry of myth and from which meanings still applicable in the present day cannot be not drawn forth. And I would say that the application of myth to our own situations is in itself a poetic act, an act that draws on the deep shamanic resources we looked at earlier.

            Myra Schneider’s discovery that she was herself an Amazon is an example of personal rediscovery through myth. I want to add a literally global example. This is the naming of the Gaia hypothesis, the theory that the earth and its biosphere form a self-regulating entity which controls its own temperature and other internal conditions. It was the novelist William Golding, a friend of the theory’s proponent, James Lovelock, who proposed the name Gaia for the planetary entity Lovelock was describing. I have no hesitation in calling Golding’s choice of name a poetic act, and it has led the term Gaia for the living earth to become known to millions of people who have never heard of Golding and perhaps have hardly heard of Lovelock either. I am not of course concerned with whether or not Lovelock’s theory is scientifically correct. Gaia was the primordial Earth Mother of Greek myth, and my point is that by choosing this distinctive, previously little-known, but fundamental name (it occurs in the most basic and primitive Greek creation-myths) Golding not only focused Lovelock’s hypothesis around a single word, but provided the earth, seen from this standpoint, with a rediscovered aura of sacredness. Seen through this word, the earth is a goddess, she is a mother, she is powerful, she is vulnerable, above all she is alive. Do you want proof that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world? Consider the long-term effects of the word Gaia.

            But there is something else to this, something profoundly important. For by renaming the earth as a goddess, Golding has helped people to rediscover a sense of the earth’s sacredness. Until quite recently, we have been living through a period when one of the principle missions of the leaders of human culture was the abolition of sacredness. The results on the whole have not been good. The last hundred years have seen experiments in the forceful reshaping of human society which may well lead future historians to dub the twentieth century The Age of Genocide. The record in the non-human world has been no better, because the same period has seen an indiscriminate and short-term application of technology which has obliterated species on earth on such a scale that scientists themselves are now calling the current loss of biodiversity ‘The Sixth Great Extinction’. An essential part of these disasters has been the belief that nothing, and nobody, is sacred. The sociologist Max Weber identified this process precisely as ‘the progressive disenchantment of the world’ and saw it as an essential component of modernity. It is surely exactly this “progressive disenchantment of the world.”"progressive disenchantment of the world.”that was the subject of Eliot’s Waste Land.

            Where shall we find new sources of fruitfulness? As the Buddha points out in the opening words of The Dhammapada, ‘Mind precedes all things.’ In the attitude with which we approach something, in our view of it, lies the seed of what we shall make of it. It is time for our world view to change. Some have called for ‘a re-enchantment of the world’. But the world does not need ‘re-enchanting’. Its magic has never gone away. It is we who have developed tunnel-vision, who have learned, laboriously and painfully, to exclude respect and meaning, let alone any sense of the sacred, from our world-view.

            I want to now to change scale again, from the world to the human body and body-image. The neurologist Oliver Sacks, in a remarkable memoir called A Leg to Stand On, recalls how he suffered an extremely serious injury to his leg, damaging the nerves, muscles and tendons. The leg healed, as far as its mechanical and biological functioning was concerned, but he found to his horror that it no longer felt a part of him. During its time immobilised in a plaster cast and with a temporary loss of sensation due to nerve damage, his mind and brain had at some deep level ceased to experience the leg as part of his body. When he touched the leg within the cast, ‘The flesh beneath my fingers no longer seemed like flesh. It no longer seemed like material or matter. It no longer resembled anything….Unalive, unreal, it was no part of me – no part of my body, or anything else.’ [48-9] ‘The leg, objectively, externally, was still there; [but] it had disappeared subjectively, internally…I had lost the inner image, or representation, of the leg.’ [50] ‘What was disconnected was not merely nerve and muscle but, in consequence of this, the natural and innate unity of body and mind.’ [96]

            Sacks’s leg had ceased to be part of his body-image. It was fully healed, but he had forgotten how to use it. The leg was effectively paralysed because in losing the sense of it as a part of himself, he had also lost all memory of how he had been able to do things with it. It was terrifying. The turning-point for Sacks came when he listened to a recording of Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto. Listening to the music, he felt, he says, ‘a hope and an intimation that life would return to my leg’. Later, when the physiotherapists insisted that he try to walk by placing one foot in front of the other, he still unable to walk until, suddenly, the memory of the music came back. ‘Into the silence…came music, glorious music, Mendelssohn fortissimo!…and as suddenly, without intending whatsoever, I found myself walking, easily, with the music…and in the very moment that my motor music, my kinetic melody, my walking, came back, in the self-same moment the leg came back…I believed in my leg, I knew how to walk. On investigation Sacks found that this experience of limb-alienation was far from rare. Though it had never properly been documented, it was not infrequent for a perfectly-recovered limb to be experienced by patients as something dead, external, and no part of their own body. And this total psychological loss of the limb from their body-image was also felt as an impoverishment of the self.

            And now I come to the point. I believe it is possible that with regard to the biosphere, perhaps with regard to the whole planet, we have suffered, culturally, a similar amnesia, a similar ‘limb-alienation’. That which is seamlessly a part of our being, on which we depend for life, and with which we are entirely interwoven as it enters not only our eyes and ears but our lungs, our mouths, our skins and our bloodstream, the living world around us, has, like Sacks’s leg, been forgotten in a very deep sense. It appears to us as something separate from ourselves, an object called ‘nature’ or ‘the environment’, which we push out of the way, cynically exploit, or simply collide with, not realising that it is in fact an extended portion of our own body and mind. This is the point to which Weber’s ‘progressive disenchantment of reality’ has led us. What is required is not a re-enchantment of the world but a recovery of the sense of our integration with it – for better and for worse. Otherwise we have little future.

            And just as Sacks’s recovery of the power to walk, and his recognition that his leg was truly a part of himself, was precipitated by music, I believe that poetry has a part to play in the recovery, the re-membering of our world. And this is because, poetry works in language, and language is that which is at the source of our experience of the meaning of the world.

            In arguing for a recovery of a sacred vision of the world through a poetry that draws on the language of myth, I am not of course arguing for a revival of religion as we know it. Religion – dogmatic religion – is precisely what happens when myths become rigid and are taken, falsely, as facts. When this happens, it is precisely their poetic meaning that is lost. Myth itself – true myth – is inherently tolerant, many-sided, polytheistic. It is full of multiple viewpoints and multiple gods and it invites us to constant reinterpretation. You may recall that earlier in this lecture I mentioned that Odin acquired his poetic powers by stealing the mead of inspiration from the Giantess Gunnlöth. Later I said something quite different, that he acquired his poetry by hanging as a sacrifice for nine nights on the world tree Yggdrasil. Is this a contradiction? No, these are just alternative versions, alternative stories. The ancient writers on Greek myth are full of statements beginning ‘Some say that Zeus did this; other, however, say…’ and something quite different follows. Scientists and priests may argue over the authenticity of the Turin shroud. Poets and myth makers look at it and see a wonderful symbol around which they can weave stories and insights which reach towards a deeper truth, many different truths. Sacredness might almost be defined as an infinite potential for generating meanings. It is that meaningfulness of the world which it is the task of poets to bring back.

            As Ovid perceived, Metamorphosis – transformation – is a fundamental characteristic of myth. As Ted Hughes sums it up in his Tales from Ovid, ‘to tell how bodies are changed/Into different bodies.’ This applies whether we are looking at the loving wife and husband  Baucis and Philemon, who were transformed into intertwined oak and linden trees when they died, or at the African creation myths, where a god creates man or woman from a lump of clay which then comes to life and acts with free will. The central presence of metamorphosis or transformation in myth testifies to our experience that transformation is also the central fact of our own lives. We change throughout our lives: the baby transforms to the old man or woman. Our food comes from the earth and transforms into our bodies which themselves end as earth or ash. It is clear that Ted Hughes, when he wrote his Tales from Ovid,  recognised that he was himself writing at the end of an era. He writes ‘The Greek Roman pantheon had fallen in on men’s heads. The obsolete paraphernalia of the old official religion were lying in heaps…[The Metamorphoses] establish a rough register of what it feels like to live in the psychological gulf that opens at the end of an era…We certainly recognise this.’ [Hughes, 11]

            In recent British and Irish poetry, the signs are that our sense of the end of an era is leading us to rediscover not only the mythology we think of as ‘classical’ – that is, from the ancient Mediterranean region – but also the myths of the North. The twenty-first century began with Seamus Heaney’s masterly version of Beowulf, and not far behind it, in 2007, came two translations of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, by two leading poets, Simon Armitage and Bernard O’Donoghue. None of these versions has any difficulty at all in making us feel the human relevance of the stories they tell. Surely one reason for this is that the world has grown more dangerous. Monsters, apparitions and the darkness of the unknown are all around us. The future is uncertain, and human community more important than ever.

            In contemporary poetry, the versatility and richness of myth as a vocabulary for newly envisioning our situation continues to be as prominent as ever. Dreaming of return to a lost lover, Carol Anne Duffy in Rapture takes the image of Ithaca, the long-sought homeland, from the Homer’s Odyssey:

            And when I returned,

            I pulled off my stiff and salty sailor’s clothes,

            slipped on the dress of the girl I was,

            and slid overboard.

            A mile from Ithaca, I anchored the boat.

            The evening softened and spread,

            the turquoise water mentioning its silver fish,

            the sky stooping to hear.

            My hands moved in the water, moved on the air,

            the lover I was, tracing your skin, your hair,

            and Ithaca there, the bronze mountains

            shouldered like rough shields,

            the caves, where dolphins his,

            dark pouches for jewels,

            the olive trees ripening their tears in our pale fields…

The late and much-missed Mick Imlah, whose warm and humorous voice I still miss, calling me from the TLS to commission a review of some new biography, significantly took as the epigraph of his final book Edwin Muir’s remark that ‘no poet in Scotland now can take as his inspiration the folk impulse that created the ballads…’ Imlah’s point, of course, was absolutely to disagree with Muir and to show that the folk-memory, the ballad, the legend had once again become possible. Imlah treats them with wit, farce and parody but also often with pathos, as in the poem ‘Michael Scot’, about the legendary Scottish wizard who

            spurned his shepherd’s birthright, and rode south

            on a grey mare, after the star of knowledge…

- travelled to Palermo to become an alchemist,

            [and] went upstairs at night to play with fumes

            and phosphor, and many a weird and future thing

            hallooed from the pink mist of his magicking.

Michael Scot renounced his magic, but still ended up in Dante’s Hell, with his head screwed round backwards on his body as one of the diviners who impiously foretold the future (though not, apparently, his own).

            The return and flourishing of these timeless, fantastic and yet intimately moving stories and images in recent poetry is, I think, a welcome sign, an indication of a renewed expansion and flexibility of the imagination which is connecting us beyond our time to the imaginative riches of the human inheritance as a whole. And we have of course only started in recent decades to see the riches of African, MesoAmerican, Indian and Islamic legends and mythologies entering the mainstream of British writing.

            The American poet Louise Glück has spoken of ‘myth’s helpless encounter with the elemental’. This is something which we all share. In birth, death, sex, love, illness, time, whatever may happen to ourselves or to our society, we all helplessly encounter elemental forces. Myth provides us not with answers but with a way of surviving, a refreshed vision, however painful. In Louise Glück’s recent poem ‘Persephone the Wanderer’ the poet, questioning why she should be alive, and speculating that she has lived many times before, becomes Persephone herself, asking why she should return to the earth in spring. She says:

            I think I can remember

            being dead. Many times, in winter,

            I approached Zeus. Tell me, I would ask him,

            how can I endure the earth?

            And he would say,

            in a short time you will be here again.

            And in the time between

            you will forget everything:

            those fields of ice will be

            the meadows of Elysium. [Avernus, Carcanet, 2006]

Our world will always appear to us to move between these two conditions. Sometimes it will be ‘fields of ice’; at other times we shall see it as an Elysium. We have seen more than enough fields of ice during this winter just past: fields of ice, and sheets of water as well. If the scientists are right about climate change we may well see more and worse. But my hope for future decades of the twenty-first century will be that even at the worst times we shall find the myths, the timeless and fundamental stories, which will give us a language to imagine, render meaningful and reshape our predicament. Perhaps we can hope that the poems which will embody our predicament, as The Waste Land embodied the predicament of the twentieth century, will be enriched by a renewed sense of the sacredness of life, of our planet, and of existence as such. That there will be water ‘under the shadow of this red rock’, and that the Hanged Man of self-sacrifice and transformation – evoked but absent in Eliot’s poem – may once more be present. Our world, and our lives, will always oscillate between a kind of paradise and a kind of hell, and when we find that the perspectives of our selves, and our poems, are rendered helpless or powerless, it is to the timeless and implacable yet infinitely forgiving world of the myths that we shall have to turn.

            I recall once again, and find a curious kind of comfort in, Louise Glück’s phrase about ‘myth’s helpless encounter with the elemental’. Whatever happens there will be hard times ahead. And it will be the task of poets to hang like Odin on the tree of sacrifice, to steal the mead of the giantess, to climb to the spring of the Muses, or simply to listen like Caedmon to the angels – bringing the new words, and the new songs, which will enable humanity, like Glück’s Persephone, once more to ‘endure the earth’; and perhaps even to love it.

[ENDS]

I’m just taking a break from packing for the journey up to St Andrews for StAnza – the St Andrews Poetry Festival www.http://www.stanzapoetry.org).

St Andrews

Sorley MacLean

The theme of this year’s Festival is ‘Myth and Legend’, apparently, so I’m going to speak on ‘Myth, Magic and the Future of Poetry’, at 3.30 pm on Thursday.

The blurb – not too pretentiously, I hope – is:

It seems clear that (as Robert Graves predicted sixty years ago in ‘The White Goddess’) we are approaching the end of an historical era. Climate change and many other factors are already altering the world fundamentally. To find an adequate creative response, poets will need to look again at the deep roots of their art. The lecture will explore ways in which an awareness of myth and a sense of the shamanistic role of the poet, may help us to survive and even flourish imaginatively in a world very different from the one we thought we knew.

and I’ll be reading my poems with Jean Sprackland at 11.30 on Friday.

Seamus Heaney

A few days ago I was in London and, as I usually do, I found time to drop in at my favourite bookshop, Treadwell’s of Covent Garden.

Treadwell’s is certainly London’s most magical bookshop; and I don’t just mean that metaphorically. Besides holding a large range of poetry, fiction, history and biography, Treadwell’s specialises in the occult: magic, mythology, folklore, witchcraft, druidry, paganism, ancient religions – and all that appertains thereunto. Besides scholarly works and popular surveys they sell grimoires and collections of spells, ranging from teen-friendly paperbacks to leather-bound, limited-edition tomes that can set you back upwards of a thousand pounds.

And they don’t just stop at books. They sell every imaginable type of herb and incense. They sell pure beeswax candles. They sell magic wands (wooden or crystal, just as you choose). They have silver chalices of every size, and athames (traditional witches’ knives) in a variety of designs.

Part of the joy of Treadwell’s is that you never know what extraordinary thing you’re going to find. Last time I was there, their ‘occult antiques’ display included a 1930s Egyptian sorcerer’s ring. This time, one showcase had a display of ’snakeskin parchment’; and, yes, it was actual snakeskin. Not my personal writing-surface of choice, but I suppose if you had the right spell it might be just what you would want.

The sofa that really refreshes your browser

If I’m making it sound scary or barbaric, I’m getting it wrong, because Treadwell’s is also the cosiest and most welcoming bookshop I know. You can browse as long as you like over the endless fascinating second-hand books, many of them very cheap indeed. If you’re there more than a few minutes, you’ll probably be offered tea or coffee, and you can enjoy it on the comfortable Browser’s Sofa. You can even have a personal tarot reading done while you wait.

Treadwell’s also hosts a fascinating programme of talks, lectures and courses on countless magical and spiritual topics, from both academics and practitioners (two categories that are not mutually exclusive, thank goodness). I’ve spoken there myself on Robert Graves and The White Goddess, and in the autumn of 2010 I’m going back to speak on ‘Gods, Dreams and Magicians in Latin America’.

Owner Christina spreads a strange enchantment...

There’s always been some shop in London where those of a mystical and magical bent congregated. In the 1920s it was Watkins’s of Cecil Court; post-1945 it was Atlantis near the British Museum. Both are still going strong, and good luck to them; but nowadays the real focus of the cosmic crystal, I’m sure, is Treadwell’s. You can find them at 34 Tavistock Street, London WC2E 7PB (website www.treadwells-london.com) and I recommend a visit for the sheer fun of it. Though I should warn you that there is a curious enchantment about the shop: somehow I never seem able to leave without buying something. Quite uncanny.

I have to say in conclusion that if it weren’t for Treadwell’s, this blog probably wouldn’t be here. Last year a businessman from New Orleans called Ken McCarthy was passing by. He’d just finished reading a book on Haitian Vodun and noticed that Treadwell’s wanted second-hand magical books. He dropped in and made them a gift of it, taking in their lecture programme at the same time. He came back for a lecture, and it was mine. We talked, became friends, he invited me to New Orleans (I’ll tell you all about that another time!), he told me I should have a blog, and he put me in touch with the guys who set this one up. The rest is history. Or rather, the rest of this particular post is a video clip: the owner of Treadwells, Christina Oakley-Harrington, talking to Richard and Judy about the Toad Spell. Yes, really. Enjoy!

Today’s been a good day. Not only has the spring sunshine finally broken through after an winter of arctic rigour, but I got a wonderful letter this morning.

Chris McCabe of the Poetry Library on the South Bank wrote to say that he’s editing a special issue of that very fine New York magazine, The Manhattan Review [www.themanhattanreview.com] . The issue is to be concerned with Liverpool and Manchester poets, and he and senior editor Philip Fried would like to include some of my work.

Nice cover image...

So how wonderful to be actually asked to submit work! Better still, these wonderful editors said that they already had two earlier poems of mine (which they kindly termed ‘classics’ – though I think that was just a kind way of saying they’d been around for a while) and wanted to republish those anyway.

And that was what really warmed my heart above all. One of these poems – I won’t name it, as I imagine the editors want to keep a bit of suspense for the magazine’s publication day – was written back in the 1970s. In those days I never asked myself whether a poem of mine would last in any sense: I was too excited to get it published somewhere. But just a few times over the years, someone has wanted to republish a poem of mine written decades ago – 25, 35 years back – and the delight of feeling that something has actually lasted a little bit, has gone on living after its immediate occasion, is quite intense.

I don’t have vast ambitions for my work. I grew out of dreaming about the Nobel Prize a long time ago. Nowadays I’m content just to enjoy myself in my poems, craft something I think is nicely-made, and hope to play a very small part in handing on the traditions of poetry in good shape to the future (when, my intuition tells me, poetry is going to be needed very urgently indeed as the world undergoes drastic change).

But the sense that something has lasted through a generation, that it still looks good to someone coming on it freshly, is a source of great happiness. So Thank You, editors of The Manhattan Review, and may your magazine never be short of great work to publish!

Meanwhile I’m getting ready to go down (or should that be up?) to Oxford, where I’m reading in a spoken word event as part of the Oxford Folk Festival Fringe tomorrow, Friday 5th (click the ‘Latest News’ button at the top of this page for further information). If you’re in Oxford, it would be great to see you there, so do come along and introduce yourself.

Back in Manchester on Saturday 6th for a reading with Myra Schneider, John Killick and others (again, click Latest News for the full details). Hope to see you at one or other of these if you can make it.

I visited the Welsh poet R.S. Thomas in 1997. The visit turned out very differently from what I had expected, and I wrote an account soon afterwards. Here it is again for those who missed it when it appeared in the magazine PN Review.

* 

August 1997 was an exceptionally hot month, and on one of its hottest afternoons I found myself following a faint footpath across rough sheep-pasture in the north-west corner of Anglesey, heading for Llanfairynghornwy.

I was in a state of trepidation, and not at all sure I was doing the right thing. The sweat induced by a slow progress uphill, over the acres of long dry grass, through rusted iron gates and over stiles built into dilapidated grey stone walls, did nothing to raise my confidence as the horizon shimmered and the village came into view, straggling along the side of a low hill. I plodded on in a spirit of grim determination.

For several years I had come with my family every summer to stay on a farm at Cemlyn, not far from Cemaes Bay. It was, in good weather, a quietly marvellous place. The sea was five minutes’ walk away. The roads were tiny and led only to other farms, or petered out by the shore, so cars were a rarity. A lighthouse, spectacular at sunset, blinked on the horizon in one direction; in the other, gently rolling fields stretched away to the skyline, dotted with sheep and the occasional house or ruined, enigmatic stone farm building. Seals groaned and hooted in chorus from the rocks, or lolled in the shallow offshore waters, occasionally lifting a round, doglike head to return one’s gaze, relaxed and supercilious. Children could be left to run wild over the fields or seashore whilst the adults did pretty much the same at a slower pace.

And every year, at some point during our visit, the farmer in whose house we stayed would tell me, as if for the first time, that I should visit R. S. Thomas, who, he said, lived nearby. Thomas, he would continue, was seen occasionally at the local church – a tiny ancient stone building, dedicated to an obscure Celtic saint, overlooking the sea from a nearby headland. Thomas had even taken the service there on occasion. Every year I would consider the suggestion and decide against following it. Not that I was at all reluctant to meet Thomas. On the contrary, I’d admired his poetry since I’d first encountered it at school. The notion of meeting him face-to-face was an attractive one. But it was also daunting. I had heard that Thomas was reclusive, that he didn’t like the English, and that he resented them above all as holiday-makers in his country. I would embody, I thought, everything he most disliked. In any case there was no obvious way of testing the water. No one seemed to know his address, though they could describe the house, and his telephone number was (of course) ex-directory.

I’m not sure what changed my mind. Partly, I suspect, the encouragement of my wife, generally braver about these things than I am myself. Also, perhaps, some intuitive sense that the years were passing, that the opportunity might not recur – followed (as in so many of life’s less comfortable situations) by the reflection that, at worst, the person concerned could only tell me to go to hell.

And so I found myself at last in Llanfairynghornwy, turning right at the village church and taking the road over the brow of the hill. The house was easily recognisable: a large former farmhouse with a traditional Anglesey courtyard, the various buildings converted into separate dwellings. There was a view towards the sea, about a mile away, and a large garden, evidently well-watered since it showed no sign of desiccation. An open hatchback was parked in the courtyard and a white-haired woman was unloading bags of shopping.

As I approached she turned towards me. It struck me that she was beautiful, and I was startled by the intensity of her pillar-box-red lipstick, a perfect match for the cardigan she wore despite the heat. There was now no turning back so I introduced myself and asked if R. S. Thomas lived here. I also presented my one small visiting card, in the form of a suggestion that Mr Thomas might remember an enthusiastic review of his Later Poems which I had once written for the T.L.S. It was, of course, the right house. The lady disappeared inside, and I could hear her calling ‘Ronald!’, followed by sounds of muted conversation.

Then Ronald loomed at the door, instantly recognisable: craggy face, white hair, towering height. He wore a blue shirt and grey trousers (as with many elderly men, the trousers somehow seemed to extend a long way up) and a tie exactly the shade of deep red favoured by traditional Labour Party supporters. If he was inwardly cursing my intrusion, he gave no sign of it. His welcome was subdued but unambiguous, and he asked me to come in. I had expected a Welsh accent, but he spoke with an almost exaggeratedly perfect English enunciation recalling BBC radio broadcasts from the 1940s and ’50s. The old phrase ‘cut glass’ floated into my head. I followed him along a passage (his walk a little shaky, a little shuffling, but his bearing very erect) into a cool, attractive sitting-room with stone walls, hefty exposed wooden beams, large windows and antique furniture, including some sofas covered with a sumptuous, satiny Chinese print fabric – Sanderson or the like. There were a great many books, and half of one wall was taken up entirely with the brown spines of something (periodical or vast reference work?) called British Birds.

Thomas seemed interested in the fact that I knew Professor Brian Cox, editor of the Critical Quarterly and my former boss, evidently an old friend, so we made conversation about him and other mutual acquaintances. Any tension rapidly dispersed. The lady in red was introduced to me as Betty: I assumed her to be Thomas’s wife, only learning long afterwards that they lived together as unmarried friends. She soon disappeared, returning with a tea tray loaded with, amongst other things, a rectangular lemon-iced sponge cake, cut into precise squares. (It was a very good cake, and when I said so Thomas looked gratified. ‘I made it myself,’ he confided, ‘in an off moment.’)

I suppose he asked me what I was doing in the area; at any rate I mentioned that I’d taken my son to fish from the old breakwater at Holyhead the previous day. Thomas immediately produced extensive information about which parts of which breakwater were the best for fishing. ‘My father worked on one of the Holyhead ferries,’ he said, ’so I had a marvellous childhood. I could ride on the ferry-boats whenever I wanted.’ Holyhead, he said, was now very run down and had terrible drug problems, ‘but then it’s the same everywhere, isn’t it?’ Lately, after living for a long time in the Lleyn Peninsula, he had, as a keen ornithologist, moved to Anglesey for the birds. ‘But the birds are not nearly as interesting here as in the Lleyn. Though we do go down to Cemlyn occasionally, if there’s an unusual bird there…’

Holyhead is a strangely Irish town, its buildings and general atmosphere strongly coloured by the daily traffic with Dublin. I asked Thomas if he he’d had much contact with Irish writers in his youth. His eyes lit up and he explained that at the beginning of his career he’d been ‘taken up’ by Seamus O’Sullivan, editor of the Dublin Magazine, and had spent a good deal of time in Dublin. ‘O’Sullivan was an oldish man then, but still something of a dandy. Good clothes, close-cropped silver hair, attractive to women. And every so often he would produce a poem and show it round, saying “What do you think of this? I wrote it the other day…” But everyone knew that it had been in a drawer for twenty years. It was very sad. He couldn’t accept that he was no longer writing poems. Sheer vanity.’ O’Sullivan had advised Thomas to try the New English Weekly, ‘and that,’ he said, ‘is where my first poem appeared.’

Was Thomas himself, I wondered, still writing poems? ‘Still writing,’ he said, ‘but whether anyone else would call them poems is another matter. Anyone,’ he added, ‘can be pardoned for writing rubbish, but there’s no excuse for publishing it!’ Such aphorisms came from time to time throughout the afternoon; another was ‘Never believe what a man says in his poems. Art is art because it’s not nature, that’s my belief.’

I was curious to know what Thomas, as a uniquely gifted master of the short free-verse line, would think of William Carlos Williams. It turned out that he liked ‘Asphodel, That Greeny Flower’ but was dismissive of the shorter poems, and had no time for ‘frippery like “Red Wheelbarrow”‘. He couldn’t really imagine, he said, how people could write poetry at a typewriter, ‘let alone a computer’. Williams, he thought, must have been ‘a very odd man.’

In current British and Irish poetry he saw no value whatsoever; or at any rate, ‘nothing of any significance.’ ‘Heaney?’ I ventured. ‘A better prose writer than a poet,’ was the reply. The only poet of any substance, he thought, was Geoffrey Hill. He asked me if I’d seen Hill’s latest book, Canaan. I said I’d read a few of the poems in Agenda and hadn’t much liked them, so I’d avoided looking at the book itself for fear of disappointment. ‘I’m afraid you were right,’ said Thomas. ‘But he has been very ill lately, he’s had heart trouble and so on, and I suppose it’s affected his poems. But his publishers should have noticed the lapse in quality even if he didn’t.’

Thomas had recently met Czeslaw Milosz at the house of Dennis O’Driscoll, a mutual friend, and they’d got on well. Thomas thought Milosz ‘a very nice man’. (‘A very physically powerful man too,’ Betty added.)

Since I was then working with Kathleen Raine on Temenos Academy Review I asked Thomas if he knew her. Not really, he said. He’d met her at Vernon Watkins’s memorial service. He didn’t greatly like her poems, though there were ‘a few good ones’. He had included four of them in his Penguin Book of Religious Verse. He had heard her speak on some occasions, and been mildly amused at her self-esteem; he claimed to have heard her refer to herself as ‘the world’s leading Blake scholar’.

Betty had a good deal to say on the associated subject of Gavin Maxwell, author of Ring of Bright Water, for whom Kathleen Raine had cherished an unrequited passion (chronicled in The Lion’s Mouth, the third volume of her Autobiographies). Betty had, it seemed, lived with her first husband next door to Maxwell, and had had to look after ‘the blessed otters’ when he was away. They had been a huge handful. ‘And,’ she said, ‘don’t believe half of what Gavin said about them in his books.’ I asked whether she had been bitten (otters are ferocious biters, and the broadcaster Terry Nutkins, a former Maxwell protégé, lacks a finger to prove it). ‘No,’ said Betty, ‘but then my husband was a hunting man and he wasn’t going to stand any nonsense from a couple of otters.’ That seemed to settle it.

Betty also knew the explorer Wilfred Thesiger (‘A very nice, genuine man,’ put in Ronald). Gavin Maxwell had, said Betty, conceived a notion that he would like to go to the Arabian ‘Empty Quarter’ with Thesiger, so they had met in London to talk about it. Ten minutes had been long enough to convince Thesiger that under no circumstances would he go to the Empty Quarter or any other place on earth with Maxwell. ‘Thesiger,’ Thomas summed up, ‘had nothing of the playboy in him. Whereas Maxwell…’

Somehow we got on to the subject of  poetry readings. Thomas was wary of Performance Poets. He wouldn’t, he said, want to read on the same platform as one of them (an unlikely scenario, it seemed to me, though I didn’t say so), ‘those people who use drums and jazz and things, I think I should come off very much the worse, very discomfited.’ Ted Hughes he thought a good reader, of ‘plainness and intensity’. He found himself irritated, he said, by ‘poets who end the last line with “thank you very much” as if it were the last words of the poem. W. B. Yeats used to do that. Are they anxious to get away?’ (‘Or maybe just polite,’ Betty put in.)

Thomas said he had travelled to read at a festival at Cley in Norfolk, agreeing to go partly because it is a famous bird-watching site. One section of the audience turned out to be made up of local fishermen and the like, and ‘afterwards one of them came up to me confidentially and said, “Now you’re a real poet, you are.” I was very pleased at that.’

Betty said that even now and despite his lack of gimmicks, teenagers in Thomas’s audiences seemed enthralled by him. ‘You do have to rehearse to go on the reading circuit,’ said Thomas. ‘Ronald’s training for the ministry has probably helped there,’ added Betty.

In due course the conversation turned to the question of what work I was doing. I said I was editing De Quincey’s complete writings, and also Graves’s The White Goddess. Rather to my surprise both Thomases turned out to be enthusiastic about De Quincey. ‘Especially,’ said Ronald, ‘”The Flight of the Kalmuck Tartars”‘. Betty asked how my eyes were standing up to the work, adding that ‘one thing about poetry is that you don’t have to bother so much with footnotes’. I pointed out that some poets – Southey for example – had used a great many. Was there a correlation: the more footnotes, the worse poet? Thomas cited David Jones as a counter-example, ‘though some of his could have been better omitted. It’s annoying to find a reference to Llangollen and then a note saying “pronounced Thlangothlen” or something like that. You’d be better off without that kind of thing; but then David Jones was always very meticulous.’

As for Robert Graves, Thomas thought him ‘a good poet and a good influence’. John Crowe Ransome, also a good poet, ‘came entirely from his [Graves's] work.’ Graves had written too much, Thomas thought, but considering the period when he had lived, yes, he had done well. (I was unable to get elucidation of this tantalising remark about the ‘period’.) Asked what he thought of The White Goddess, Thomas said he’d never read it. ‘More Kathleen Raine’s department than mine,’ he added, whereupon Betty hazarded the suggestion that perhaps Kathleen Raine had been one of Graves’s ‘mistresses’. Ronald rejected this idea firmly. ‘I don’t think so. No, Kathleen Raine was a bluestocking; and Graves, like Yeats, preferred them…’ The sentence was left unfinished, but its drift was clear enough.

Betty mentioned that she was trying to fill gaps in their collection of Thomas’s own books. They lacked, especially, copies of his first three volumes (The Stones of the Field, An Acre of Land and The Minister), and also ‘a little book for children’ (which I cannot identify). Booksellers, she said, offered his early books at around £150 ‘and they won’t reduce them, even for the author, even without the jacket.’ ‘Well,’ said Thomas, ‘they’re not in the bookselling trade for love.’

It was getting towards evening so I left soon afterwards, with invitations from the Thomases to visit again. I never did, though we exchanged one or two letters and Thomas sent a good poem for Temenos Academy Review (where, through no fault of mine, it failed to appear). Within a few months the Thomases left Anglesey for another part of Wales, and some two years after that R. S. Thomas died.

To me, that afternoon at Llanfairynghornwy is still a bright and happy spot in memory, and I remain deeply grateful to the poet and his remarkable companion. Nothing of great significance, perhaps, was said or done. Still, an encounter between a famously ‘cantankerous’ Welsh Nationalist poet and a holidaying Englishman arriving unannounced on his doorstep might have been expected to turn out rather differently. Since his death, R. S. Thomas’s reputation as a poet has shown no sign of sagging, nor do I believe that it will. His integrity and independence have never been doubted. But it seems worthwhile putting on record that his virtues also included generosity, hospitality, wit, and the baking of excellent cakes.

Salsa with Heart: La Casa de la Salsa

It was a lovely evening. Gorgeous table settings, beautiful balloons everywhere, an imaginative cocktail menu at good prices, Mike Parr’s usual suave and seamless DJing, and of course friends, lots and lots of friends, and wonderful dancing.

Open Break with Vicky

But it was a good enough evening to make me want to say, Watch out for La Casa de la Salsa and their future events. Check them out on Facebook and keep up with what they’re doing.

Braz, Tina, Silvia: Awesome Threesome

What else? Well… Several people said they’d had a terrible time finding the Hotel. Maybe better directions could be available next time? Lighting: perhaps a bit bright on the dancefloor. Any chance of dimmer, warmer, coloured lights or even a disco ball? Music: maybe a bit bland (and no merengue, no reggaeton? well, perhaps you can’t expect reggaeton at a Valentine Ball…) – but some faster, heavier music, some salsa dura, might have been welcome. Though I admit this is from the viewpoint of a Cuba fanatic: all those hours of sweaty dancing on cracked concrete in near-darkness, moving between the tropical heat outside and the freezing air-conditioning inside, have probably warped my brain more than a little.

Thanks, Girls: And here's looking at you too! (Next time I'll bring my camera...)

Gustav Mahler - currently celebrated in Manchester

 But they proved equal to the task, and if the Third didn’t send us out quite as dazed and elated as its predecessor, it was mainly because this symphony, though just as complex, is more contemplative, a slower-paced work with quieter dynamics relying more or mood and melody than on stark contrasts and shattering climaxes.

Vassily Sinaisky took the first movement, with its resounding opening fanfare on the horns representing the great god Pan arriving to reanimate nature after the winter, at a steady but not rapid pace – very much the approach Stenz used last time for the opening of the Second. The brass section was superb throughout, playing with resonance and precision. Just as well because in every movement the brass has vital thematic parts to play, most often to remind us, in some way, of that opening motif of descending horn notes. The first movement as a whole gave an experience of restrained power, deep strings sporadically throbbing and surging, with the brass and the more fragile, fragmentary woodwind floating over the top.

Here’s an extract from the movement (LSO, splendidly conducted by Valery Gergiev, looking more than ever like Boris Karloff):

Mahler’s idea for the symphony was to make it ‘a work of such magnitude that it actually mirrors the whole world…In my symphony the whole of nature finds a voice.’ The movements aim to layer one tier of being on top of another. The orchestra gave second movement (originally titled ‘What the flowers tell me’) a light, almost staccato touch and brought out the exuberant, dance-like qualities of the third (‘What the animals of the forest tell me’, according to Mahler’s early notes). The distant horns (how Mahler loves those!) sounded here like a faint reminder of the world of men, rather thanan eruption of the animalistic Pan.

Reaching ‘Night’ and the world of men, the 4th movement, mezzo-soprano Karen Cargill got her entrance exactly right: the voice seemed to emerge and radiate without an identifiable starting-point, simply welling up out of the orchestral sound, as if uttered by the universe as well as by humanity. This lovely setting of the mysertious Nietzsche poem was a delight.

Mahler’s gentle audacity is astounging and wonderful:  having begun the symphony with Pan, then led on to Nietzsche (who loathed Christianity), he then dances into the fifth movement with a children’s folksong – it sounds almost like a skipping game – about Jesus, St Peter, and God’s forgiveness. And every so often what sounds like a reminiscence of a Bach choral sweeping in to underline the religious elements. The CBSO Youth Chorus made a fine job of the children’s chorus, vigorous and precise, entering with the ‘Bimm bamm…’ of the church bells. Personally I would have liked a bit more volume from them, and I suspect Sinaisky held them back a bit too much; but it wasn’t a major blemish.

The transition to the sixth movement made me see something I’d missed before, listening to the symphony endlessly on disc, which is that having brought Christianity and Gid into the structure, Mahler goes a step further and higher. Where the 2nd symphny ends in song, it’s as if he now sees that words aren’t enough and nothing but pure music will say what he has to say. We’ve gone beyond God too, beyond anything that can be formulated or imagined.

The final movement was wonderful, with that  sense of endlessly-shifting and changing and evolving harmonies as Mahler finds his way very slowly through a vast musical mist, drawing notes out and mutating the harmonies so that you constantly find a chord emerging that’s different from the one you expected, and then that melds into yet another and so on. Sinaiski did a good job with the dynamics here, very slowly building and building the movement until all the layers came together in those vast closing chords that show you the whole imaginable cosmos towering up octave above octave, layer above layer, energised and tranquil but completely alive, like a vast wall of glass or water that doesn’t topple but just settles and poises there, with the brass finally folding harmoniously into the picture and the timpani slowly repeating deep notes that echo the bell-chimes of the children’s song. The combination of energy and peace at the end of the symphony was very impressive. Here’s a clip (Dudamel, La Scala Philharmonic):

I didn’t cry this time (though the girl next to me was in tears throughout the final movement). There’s less melodrama, more serenity in this than in the Second Symphony, but the vision is vaster. Maybe Sinaiski didn’t always make the dynamics as exciting as he might have done. I overheard one departing audience member talking about the difficulty of staying awake, in a way that made me wonder if the work is just too big and complicated to grasp until you’ve heard it over and over again and got all those details into your system. The applause was loud and long but it didn’t really match the reaction to No 2.

Certainly I notice these days how closely-integrated the Third is. The pattern – melodic and rhythmic – of that opening fanfare, for example, comes into just about everything in the work. Sometimes I think Mahler 3 has an entire symphony for its first movement, and a whole other one for its last, with a suite of other things in between. Then again I find myself thinking the entire work is a single movement. The first time you hear it, it’s a sprawl. By the tenth time, you just notice the mind-boggling precision with which it’s all integrated. Very strange. But how wonderful to hear these masterpieces one after another, so well-played. Not sure yet if I’ll make the Fourth on Thursday. Lorraine’s Rueda class at Cuba Cafe is calling, and Amanda is able to dance again now her broken arm has healed. A dilemma. But I’ll post something as soon as I get to another Mahler extravaganza. Meanwhile there’s always salsa and a million other things.
And don’t forget: starting 5 April, BBC Radio 3 will broadcast the entire series on consecutive Monday nights at 7 pm. Listen to any you missed and see if you agree with me! And do post your comments.

Republic of Salsa: Manchester's Best Cuban Salsa Nights

I don’t want to leave without giving you more fun than that, so here’s something a bit different. Last night at Pauline’s rueda class (Tuesdays, Spreadeagle, Chorlton, Manchester) I heard some good music on Jordan’s iphone. He told me it was Orquesta de la Luz. Ever heard Japanese salsa? No? Then take a look at this clip, recorded in New York. I guarantee it’ll blow your socks off!

That’s all for today. But watch out shortly for posts about the wonderful, rediscovered Ennerdale poet Tom Rawling, and about Anacaona – the song, the woman, and the stories behind the song we all love to dance to!