An Otherworld Whirl

I was surprised to find it raining already as I walked out in the dark to my car to drive in to work. I didn’t think we’d see much of Ernesto until later this morning. A thin, soft rain, sparse yet insistent, the farthest tresses of that tropical storm slowly churning up the peninsula. There are hints of daybreak to the east, blotches of blue showing around the ragged edges of cloud, but they are fleeting, phantasmagorical, suddenly here and then gone, reappearing somewhere else along the wispy black contrails of cloud.

Wipers in steady rhythm, highway 441 slick, dangerous though lighter with traffic (schools closed), I drive into town, towards the storm, as I listen to stories about Hurricane Katrina on the public radio station -- the long shadow of that great storm like basso rumble offshore this piddly soft surrsurration of rain. Ernesto whispers what Katrina roars: a piddly-ass tropical storm which will breeze hard and dump rain over a state desperate for moisture and terrified of more. (Christ, our homeowners’ insurance has leapt 60 percent in the two years since Jeanne and Charlie and Francis and Ivan mauled Florida.)

Fifteen miles from home the rain lightens then stops. To the east there’s clear weather still, enough to pour the angry corals and powder blues of dawn this way (revealing some ugly-looking uppermizzens of storm cloud level with the eastern horizon, sloops and frigates leading the way of the storm), while the entire southern sky is grey and blank, a great dark void. Call it a wimp on the Saffr-Simpson scale, but there’s enough up and out and down there in Ernesto to dwarf human scale, a sky-wide bleak angel with dripping black wings and a voice, though soft and high and distant, surely from the same chorus as Katrina.

The light for the final miles into Orlando is wyrd, luminescent against that darkness, a sort of reverse satch of evening light, a brief jot of Wednesday normal candescence soon enough wholly covered over (outside my window at work, all now has been covered over with gray). A veil of sorts, neither day nor night, neither dry nor yet stormed, the streets like gray synapses of downward-trailing mind, leaving This for an Other, neither here nor there ...



In the tale “Manawydan son of Llyr,” four heroes depart from dinner to venture onto a fairy mound, where suddenly, in the blink of an eye, the world of what is morphs into that what isn’t. It’s a typical start of an Otherworld foray:

***

When Pryderi returned ((to Dyfed)) he and Manawydan feasted and took their ease. They began the feast at Arberth, since that was the chief court where every celebration began, and after the evening’s first sitting, while the servants were eating, the four companions arose and went to Gorsedd Arberth ((a fairy mound)), taking company with them. As they were sitting on the mound they heard thunder, and with the loudness of the thunder a mist fell, so that no one could see his companions. When the mist lifted it was bright everywhere, and when they looked out at where they had once seen their flocks and herds and dwellings they now saw nothing, no animal, no smoke, no fire, no man, no dwelling -- only the houses of the court empty, deserted, uninhabited, without man or beast in them; their own company was lost too, and they understood that only the four of them alone remained.

(from The Mabinogion, transl. Jeffrey Gantz)

***

Suddenly we aren’t in Kansas anymore: the color scheme has inverted from drab dustbowl to Beverley Hills lalaland, strange high violins tremble in the background, and from the tittering in the bushes and the scrawled up feet of the witch who got smashed by our falling house (or was it a well-bucket tumbling to the bottom of the psyche?), the locals just aren’t the same yokels who were minding the barnyard just an hour ago -- yet are, in their inversed or reversed selves, as if we saw the true inward demeanor of our humdrum dailiness.

Just where does one go, when one traverses the veil to enter the land down under, the fairy mound, the enchanted well or the drowned village at the bottom of the lake? Is the Otherworld a blue face staring back in the pond’s reflection, the visage of the unconscious as it stares directly back into our conscious state? Is it Either, or Other, or Neither, or somehow Both?

What trade or traffic is there in the Otherworld, what labors must be performed? Do we deal in the coin of Pluto there, or pay passage with puns and riddles, taught by wily Hermes? Do we go down to Tartarus to harrow the depths, a la Christ, or fill an inkhorn’s inferno, like Dante? Are there labors to perform there, wielding the club of Hercules against every three-headed dog in Hell? Is there tongues of sooth and truth which can only be loosened by pouring bull-black blood in a trough? Do we barter with Persephone, hoping for the return of Love by singing our most aggrieved love songs? How to gain entrance to that treasure-vault guarded a bling-greedy dragon, or make off the three golden apples hanging luscious over the Bulrog’s thundering bed?

Who woos us from under and beyond? -- fairy princesses with purple eyes and honey lips, or horrific kelpies so virile and lean from the shore with seaweed in their hair? Sirens and melusines and well-nymphs, oh my; mermen and bogies and fin-folk between midnight and three, dancing on the moonlit strand, beckoning our dreams swim with them out past our own crashing land ... They call us as much as we desire them, their voices outside the nights’ window both suitor and abductor, our leap through that window both betrayer and bride. We are matched in our eagerness for each other, This and Other world pursuing and fleeing, revealing and vanishing.

What would this world be without its Other? It would be like a black swan bereaved of its lifelong mate; we could never recover from the loss.

Perhaps as long as we dream, we’ll always have entry to the Otherworld, but I’m wondering what other portals and accesses and raids and immramas this posting community have experienced. When for you has the veil been so truly thin that weird time commenced, beyond history, beyond clocks and maps?

To steal three drops of a Jungian magic from the cauldron, active imagination -- a conscious dive into the blue mysterium -- has proved for me a sure and enduring access to an Otherworld which is as real as it is impossible to ever truly know or understand. Reading myths and fairy tales (like the story above) has for a long time been a conscious form of dreaming for me: a structured narrative into the tapestry hanging behind us which provides a well for the imagination to dive down.

If dreams are compensation for consciousness, as Jung believed, whose truths must be read backwards and upside down (every symbol has halves facing the opposite way), are myths to be uttered in our most meditative whispers, like matins, drawing our minds out through the window and into its wilderness?

Curious and fascinating, a maddening cream left here by elven-hands working in my thoughts during the night. We have lost much of our actual folklore, it has ceased to exist, blinded out by the hot glare of technology, which has largely evicted the little folk, sent them far under the Sidhe and to the furthermost islands of the main. Yet the Otherworld remains in my fancy, in the tales, in the saying of it: How? Can a myth survive its own cultural evaporation, as if the memory of a well were enough to keep it full?

Perhaps it is important for the tribe to hold fast to both its futurity and past, dreaming the tale forward, further into the lands of enchantment. For me, my fascination with Otherworld doors, even ones that only exist on paper in any literal sense, is so deep and abiding that I don’t think I could proceed any other way. The dream demands our dreaming.

Later in the tale of “Manawydan son of Llyr,” the heroes go deeper into the Otherworld forest until they come to an omphalos of sorts, the font and stocks which draw us and hold us fast in the tale until it has worked its magic on us. I leave where it leaves my question -- stuck fast at a truth which is yet cannot be. And hope someome will offer tales & experience & fascination that will not so much free the question and root it still deeper to its abiding thrall.


***

They pursued the boar until they saw a great tall fortress, a new building where they had never before seen any kind of stone or work, and when the boar and the dogs had gone inside they marvelled to see this fortress where they had never seen any before.

“Lord, said Pryderi,” “I will enter the fortress and seek news of the dogs.” “God knows, that is not a good idea,” said Manawydan. “I have never seen this fortress before, and, if you take my advice you will not enter it, for whoever placed the enchantment on the land must have caused this building to appear. “God knows, I will not give up my dogs,” said Pryderi.

Manawydan’s advice notwithstanding, he entered the fortress but once inside he could see neither man nor beast nor boar nor dogs nor house nor dwelling. What he did see, as if in the middle of the fortress, was a fountain with a marble stone round it, and a golden bowl fastened to four chains, the bowl set over a marble slab and the chains extending upward so that he could see no end to them.

Ecstatic over the beauty of the gold and the fine craftsmanship of the bowl he walked over to the vessel and grasped it, but as soon as he did so his hands stuck to the bowl and his feet to the slab he was standing on, and his speech was taken so he could not say a single word. There he stood.





MACODRUM

2005


It is given to them (the seal-
tribe of MacOdrum) that their
sea-longing shall be land-longing
and their land-longing shall
be sea-longing.

-- South Uist farmer

Shall I forever row
this rock which flaunts
below so brute a tail
and brogues the wind
like wings? Standing
here do I ride the wave
which answers every
shore with a hallowed
blue recede? I was just
the next nude nallie
to lose his skin to
your embrace, doomed
to build the lives ashore
with the greater half
of the three hearts
forever pursed in blue.
Half-man, half fish,
between the worlds I
weave my three songs
of fin and breast and
thrall, that music
riven as the tide
which pounds these
rocky cliffs where
you are least of all.
Will you ever give
me back my skin,
that oiled black coat
which I must wear
to dive full back to
the single world,
free of doubletalk at last?
Shall I woo you or connive,
do I ravage the verses
or mount the mare I ride?
Such strategems
I dream atop this lonely
rock which is my writing
chair, reaching out as
far as I know how
to kiss the cross still
burning there, inscribed
aeons ago when love
was young and I woke
in your arms, a naked,
fresh-borne man 18 miles
out to sea with no
way ever to go home.
Your breath has
stayed in my ear
for all these lives,
like the sea inside
a shell, a shining
blue tide my song
has slowly pickled in.
Three cups, three
heavens, three purgatories
here beyond the ninth
wave you folded and
crashed over me --
a charnel house of
every thrill and thrall
to fade from blue to black.
I hear the selkies singing
on moony nights as
this an hour from
first light: I write
their sealskins down.
Inside this oratory
on high rock I
nail that strange music
to my own, a revenant
still revenant of
the blue which
drowned my bones.