Oral
storytelling necessitates a framework. Anyone who’s tried singing or
storytelling, or any kind of performing in a
crowded public space, knows that you have to call for attention before you can
begin. That’s why Shakespeare’s plays often begin with a prologue – a
man standing on the stage to deliver a speech about the background to
the drama, or a couple of minor characters loudly joking and
quarrelling, or a shipwreck with lots of dramatic sound effects –
something that won’t matter if you miss half of it, something to shut
the audience up and make them settle down and pay attention.
A song will begin with a chord or a run of
notes upon the harp or guitar, and the beginning of a story is signalled
by a stock phrase: ‘Once upon a time’. It’s a device to arrest the listener and locate the story in a place and past that never was, yet is still relevant. ‘Il était une fois’, or ‘Es war einmal…’or ‘It wasn’t in my time, or in your time, but once upon a time, and a very good time it was…’
The device is common to so many languages, I
think people must have been beginning stories in this way since
paleolithic times. I'm told classical Arabic stories begin: There was, oh, what there was or what there wasn’t, in the oldest of days and ages and times…’ North American Mi’kmaq stories begin, ‘Long ago, in the time of the Old Ones…’ Czech and Hungarian stories begin, ‘Once there was, once there wasn’t…’
And this sort of opening phrase sends a
subtle but distinct message to listeners. It says: ‘Pay attention!’;
but it also says: ‘Though this is going to be amusing or stirring or
exciting, it’s probably not true.’ It says, ‘This is a story. Sit back and listen.’
And so the room hushes, the people attend, the storyteller spins her tale. There’s a real physical element to listening to
a story. It’s like going on a roller coaster. It’s not like reading,
where everything happens at exactly your own pace, and you can glance
ahead, or turn back to check on something, or put the whole book down
for ten minutes to make a cup of coffee. Listening to a story, you are
in the power of the storyteller. You must keep still and listen
carefully not to miss a word. You watch her face as she frowns or
smiles. The flash of her eyes, her gesturing hands. You don’t know
what is coming next, or even how long the story is going to be. For she on honey-dew hath fed, and drunk the milk of paradise. Everything is a surprise.
Some stories are very short. Some are very
long. Some divide into almost separate segments, picaresque narratives
in which one thing follows upon another with the most tenuous of
links. The princess and the prince are married, they become king and
queen. The audience draws breath - but that’s not the end. The
storyteller is still speaking. The king goes to war, leaving the young
queen in the care of his old mother. But the old woman hates her, and
so, when the queen gives birth to her first child, the old woman orders
it to be killed and the blood smeared over the queen’s clothes so that
everyone will think she has killed her own child…
No, it’s not the end yet!
And so, when the end does come, it is often
signalled with another stock phrase, to show that the show is over.
Puck delivers the epilogue, Rosalind steps out of the framework of the
play to flirt with the audience about their beards. Fairytales conclude
with the words ‘and they all lived happily ever after’ – or sometimes,
‘they all lived happily till they died’ – or even, ‘if they haven’t died
yet, they are living there still’…
It’s getting more conscious and ironic, isn’t it?
Fairytales, contrary to what people
suppose, are not naïve. Their very existence floats in the relationship
between narrator and audience. Indeed it is naïve to imagine that
‘happy ever after’ – much derided as a banal or smug or thoughtless
conclusion – was ever intended as much more than the signal that the
story is over. The bite of narrative has been chewed and swallowed: the
show is done. The listeners can get on with drinking beer, eating,
bargaining, gossiping, telling rude jokes, or heading off outside for a
piss, or trudging home to their own difficult wife, husband or parent.
Beginnings are important, endings less so, because the stock phrases
that signal the end of a fairytale do not call for attention, but
dismiss it. They don’t place the story in the mythic past, they
undermine it. ‘If they haven’t died yet, they are living there still’
(but how likely is that?). And so fairytale endings are far more varied
than beginnings: in fact they can be purposely surreal and
disconnected.
‘They found the ford, I the stepping stones. They were drowned, and I came safe.’
‘This is a true story. They are all lies but this one.’
‘There runs a little mouse. Anyone who catches it can make himself a fine fur cap!’
‘Snip, snap, snout – this is the end of the adventure.’
‘And when the wedding was over, they sent me home in little paper shoes over a causeway covered in broken glass’.
I am delighted to welcome Laura Marjorie Miller to the blog. Laura writes about travel, Yoga, magic, myth, fairy
tales, photography, marine conservation, and other soulful subjects. She
is a regular columnist at elephantjournal.com, contributing editor at Be You Media, and public-affairs writer at UMass Amherst, and has a feature forthcoming in Yankee magazine. Her work has appeared at Tripping, GotSaga, and Dive News Network, in the Boston Globe and Parabola. She is based in Massachusetts, where she lives with a cat named Huck.
In this thoughtful piece, Laura considers the tragic beauty of the selkie legends, and wonders if it's time to find a new way of retelling and interpreting them. The wonderfully moody photographs appear by kind permission of Ralph Pace, http://www.ralphpacephotography.com/and the magical illustrations are courtesy of Scottish artist Kate Leiper www.kateleiper.co.uk. Many thanks to both.
My favorite place in all of Boston is
outside the harbor seal habitat at the New England Aquarium. The seals, shining
silver-grey, their thick oily coats spattered with inky speckles, glide back
and forth by the glass. Sometimes they barrel-roll to soar on their backs, navel
slits to the sky, flippers folded like wings. Sometimes they bob vertically in
the water like corks, serene expressions on their faces.
Every time I’m in Boston, no matter where
in town I am, I’m aware of their presence. I am pulled to them, the shredded
iron filings of me to the steady strong magnet of them. One doesn’t even have
to pay admission to the aquarium to watch the seals, but can view them from
outside, so once I park my car, I race there along the pavement of the harbor
wharf. It is all I can do in public not to break into sobs at their beauty. I
stand by the glass, weeping silently with longing, undried tears coating my
cheeks with a rime of salt water, but also smiling with unaccountable joy. I
want to be with them. I am a river running to their ocean.
I love seals, and because I am a woman who
loves seals, and loves mythology and folktales, merfolk and sea songs, I love
selkies. I love them not for the tragic nature of their stories but because
they are both human and seal.
Part of the utter core of the traditional selkie
story is that the selkie, in the end, leaves. So naturally, my boyfriend,
knowing I love both selkies and stories, started to become alarmed, thinking
that I would leave him the same way. I told him our story was different,
because I choose to be with him.
And that was when I realized that we all need
a new selkie story, that our myths can guide us but not lock us: that there can
be a new, variant myth, not to replace the old, but to give a sense of
possibility, both for the relationships between lovers, and also humans and
animals: to shine in the world in its newness.
The old selkie story has a basic,
archetypal framework. Details swirl around and modify these fundamental components:
a fisherman sees a mysterious woman emerge from a sealskin, at night on a
beach, perhaps to dance with her kin under the moonlight or perhaps in her own
private reverie. He falls in love with the sight and idea of her, and knowing
by lore that she is a selkie, a seal woman, he knows that if her pelt is in his
possession then she is under his rule. Without her skin she cannot return to
the sea. So he steals and stashes her skin.
When she realizes her skin is missing she
is distraught. He then reveals himself to her. She follows him home to be his
wife. She apparently has no choice.
Whether the woman is attracted to the
fisherman or not, we are never told. He begets children on her, and they live a
pleasant enough existence, but there is always something melancholy about her,
an absence, a way of gazing yearningly towards the sea. One day, one of her
children will discover something like an oilskin raincoat in a trunk in the
attic, or stuffed into a notch in the eaves. Her son or daughter will ask her
what it is. Her eyes will go wild with joy, and she will snatch her skin from
him, clutch it to her breast, and say hasty farewells as she races to the
beach. She cannot run fast enough for herself.
Sometimes afterwards the selkie will keep
watch on her family from the water, following their boats in the form of a seal:
generations of descendants with webbed phalanges and distant expressions.
Sometimes she is gone forever from the story, her husband pining away in regret.
But what if there were a new selkie story?
One in which she chooses the man? One in which the man courts her, makes
himself loveable to her, that she wants to come to him; that he loves her for
being what she is, part seal, and knowing that, loves the wild part of her? And
when she needs to, she runs to the ocean, pulls her skin back around her, swims
with her family. She comes to back to land. Back and forth, as seals do anyway.
While she is gone, he does man things.
The story has drama, just not the
inevitability of failure. The crux of the new
story is its inner quarrel, the bit of resistance in the man, her
uncertainty with him, and the back-and-forthing within them that gives way to purer
love. Such would be a new possibility, and a new way.
The old selkie story is both about the
relationship between lovers, and our relationship to the wild. In the way that
sometimes humans in our weakness try to control our loved ones, through
manipulation, through emotional blackmail, sometimes even through abuse and
coercion, because we fear that their independence means they will leave and
betray us, or that their self-sovereignty implies faithlessness, in the same
way we have been doing things wrong in regards to animals, and so have trapped
ourselves: keeping animals in tanks, in enclosures, jars, bowls, corrals. We
seldom do this out of purposeful cruelty, or even sheer profitable callousness,
but so much oftener out of misguided love. So since the story is made of love,
it is malleable, it can be reoriented, rewritten, redeemed.
What we love in wild animals is their wild
nature, their otherness, but for some reason that is the first thing we want to
take away from them. In our infancy, both historical and personal, we wanted to
contain it. I don’t think we always took animals from distant lands and kept
them in iron enclosures with concrete floors solely to display our dominance
over the exotic and oriental: maybe that was part of it, but not all. Knowing
what I know of humans, I suspect it is because we wanted to marvel at their
beauty, and have it close by, without fully understanding that separating them
from their environment would eventually kill them. A child who puts a mantis in
a jam jar does not do that out of an impulse to dominate: she does it because
she loves it, she wants to keep it, to behold its angular alien elegance under
the holes she has punched in the jar lid. She does not know otherwise; her
curiosity is ignorant of consequences, and she wants to hold the moment of that
joy forever. She does not want it to be over.
We fear the moment the creature leaves us.
We fear we will be left behind, that it will not choose us.
So instead of courting the selkie as a decent
man would, the fisherman traps her. He takes away her ability to choose him and
so his story ends tragically, because he stole her life. But if he had taken a
chance of not being chosen, of being patient, of allowing her to come and go, she
may actually have come to love him, and he would have continued to behold her
in her true nature, not in a diminished form.
Compelling is bad magic no matter how it’s
done. Any savvy and sensitive magic-user knows that love-spells, with their
undertones of binding, come with a price: which is their success. Their success
is their curse. If you get what you think you want, you will never know whether
you are freely loved, whether that person would have chosen you if you had not
forced them. Forever, while you are with them, something gnaws at the underneath
of you, the wrongness of what you have done, taken their free will, stowed
their skin, and stolen a love that should have by rights been freely given.
Although in my life I seem to insist on learning things the hard way, this
sounds so utterly miserable for both parties that I have never even been
tempted to test it. I have heard enough tell of those who have.
Forcing something against its nature is the
dark side of tameness. If you have seen the children’s-book-like French movie Le Renard et l’Enfant, The Fox and the Child, you know that it
is very frank about wildness versus tameness, and arguably the opposite of the
fox-taming discussion in The Little
Prince. The little girl grows to befriend and love a wild fox, but over the
course of the movie you feel the dread of the inevitable drawing nearer, as the
girl’s affections start to close in on the fox, like the collar-like scarf she
puts around the fox’s neck. We sense what will happen when the protagonist
finally lures the fox in her house. But again, like the fisherman in the selkie
story, the girl does what she does out of yearning, out of wanting to keep.
In our culture, we used to collect nature
without an afterthought, to stick it in iron cages, to make its sensitive and
articulated paws walk on flat concrete surfaces, so that we could possess it.
Increasingly, to do this seems so absurd, as though we are suddenly shaking
ourselves awake: ‘What are we doing?’
In the last several years, and rising
faster and faster, there has been an upwelling of consciousness, through the
movies The Cove and Blackfish, about the high cost of
keeping marine mammals in captivity: in human casualties and injuries, but
also, quite spectacularly, awareness of the cost to the animals themselves: the trauma to their families,
emotionally bonded in ways that we can only begin to comprehend, so much that
their families are their very selves and taking someone out of the unit is like
ripping off a body part, an unspeakable psychic torture that goes on and on.
The collapse of their mighty bodies, visible in their
sagging fins, which in the wild are pirate-masts of their spirits. The torment of
imprisonment with strangers from other whale tribes who may bully and harass
them and they have no means of defense or escape. The mockery and misuse of
their might by being forced to do clown tricks. The acoustic torture of being
trapped in a featureless concrete pit, the walls of which bounce their
echolocation, meant to travel for hundreds of miles, back again and again into
their sensitive ears. The torment of endless loneliness and utter isolation,
unbearable except it offers no choice except to be borne.
Yet I sense that something is changing, and
rapidly so. I don’t know quite what caused it, this waking-up, this critical
mass, but something is indeed happening that can’t be denied anymore, or
stopped: human people have begun to care more about animals for the animals’ own sake, through recognition of their
intelligence and consciousness, and the implications of those. We are seeing
them increasingly as other peoples, their own and different tribes, with their
own perceptions and languages. A zoo mentality is giving way to a sanctuary
mentality, a rehabilitation mentality. There is an urgency and impatience now
for change. The change has already happened, and like the River Isen when the
Ents break its dam in The Lord of the
Rings, and release the river, consciousness comes rampaging through and
cannot be re-contained. What has seen cannot be unseen, and what is known
cannot be unknown.
All that remains is for reality to catch up
with it. Rachel Clark, in a stunning essay in Psychology Today calls Blackfish a bellwether
presaging “more than cetacean freedom. It foreshadows an urgent global uprising
to set things right everywhere. We are seeing an international frenzy for
justice.”
The selkie story calls out to us for
justice in territories of personal and natural concerns, in both cases about
power. And that is why we need a new story. One that explodes the old model of
grabbing and holding and stealing life and freedom just because one wants it.
One that celebrates the sovereignty of other beings, human or non-human. One
that is a ballad of justice.
Myths live in us, in response to us. So the
new selkie story is this: that we trust whom we love. That we try to win their
love so that through their own agency they choose to be with us. That we be
brave enough to gamble our fear of loss. That we accept that just because we
want to possess a being, no matter how badly we want to keep it, its right to
be sovereign over its own life will
always outweigh our desire to possess it. That freedom will always trump desire.
That we are responsible for protecting that freedom in one another, that it is
never ours to take, by any means.
We can write a new selkie story, to coexist
with the old. The old will continue to exist as an instruction manual of what
not to do, a sorrow, a caution. We can chant this new one by driftwood fires,
and the seals in their wildness can spyhop to listen, dark eyes regarding us
from the night ocean. Or they can ignore us altogether, as is their right. But
one thing is sure: except for their own private and tribal reasons, seals should
never be sorrowful.
As I am standing by the seal tank, a little
girl next to me says to her mother, ‘What are they dreaming about in there?’
Her mother answers, ‘I don’t know; what do you think?’ ‘I think they are
dreaming of being back in the ocean,’ the little girl says firmly.
The new selkie story is already being
written. The new world has already begun.
Postscript: A song for pinnipedal people,
seal and soul, clan and clade, Otariidae, Odobenidae, Phocidae, for all who
have an ancestor who grabbed her sealskin and ran toward the waves. For women
and men, and all other wild creatures:
In this fabulous picture, Arthur Rackham depicts the beauty, vastness and terror of the sea as a white storm-goddess. There's a shipwreck behind her, and before her, dwarfed on the strand, is a bedraggled mariner who looks as though he very much ought to flee. She's the embodiment of the terrifying waves we've all been seeing photographed in the news over the last few weeks, like this one from the BBC website http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-25618080
It's at times like these that we're reminded of what our ancestors always knew: the sea is dangerous. We can walk along its edges, we can set out across it in our frail boats; we can even swim and dive in it, but always with a risk. We don't belong there, we can't live there. And so we're fascinated by the animals that do: we tell tales about them. The seals, so like ourselves: warm-blooded breathing mammals - surely they must be magical creatures, to be able to inhabit this place we can't survive in? We follow them in imagination into their strange underwater world. We make myths of mermaids and selkies.
Mermaids and selkies represent the Other – they look like
humans but they aren’t, or perhaps they are only half human.
In all the folklore I’ve read about mermaids, they have no souls,
and sometimes they mourn this and sometimes they don’t care… Hans
Andersen’s little mermaid will disappear
like foam on the sea if she doesn’t win a soul: but when she does gain a
soul,
she stops being a mermaid. She becomes a spirit of the air, a sort of
angelic Christian spirit – and so in either case she ceases to
be, or at least loses her identity...
Most mermaid stories are sad. Some mermaids are actively dangerous. One Greek legend tells of a giant mermaid who rises out of the sea to
demand of passing ships, ‘What news of King Alexander?’ Unless she
receives the response, ‘He lives,
and reigns, and conquers the world!’ she wrecks the ship in her fury.
So mermaids are also a metaphor for the
beauty and danger of the sea, which has the power to wreck ships and
take men’s
lives. There’s a lot going on in mermaid
stories.
All fiction is affected by contemporary concerns. Hans Christian
Andersen’s ‘Little Mermaid’
was concerned with salvation because he wrote in a highly Christian
century. Nowadays, in our
multi-cultural, multi-faith, multi-everything society, I think writing
about
mermaids offers an opportunity to explore issues of trust and
communication
between individuals who may look different from one another, who may
appear to
come from different worlds. What is it
to be ‘human’? How do we define it? How do we recognise similarities
and
reconcile differences? In very different
ways, Liz Kessler’s 'Emily Windsnap' books and Helen Dunmore’s ‘Ingo’
and its
sequels explore these questions, as well as issues of pollution and
climate
change. In 'Ingo', merfolk and humans were once one people, who have
diverged and now live in separate worlds - except that each race still
impacts the other. Liz Kessler's 'Emily Windsnap' is a little girl who
herself bridges the gap: her father is mer, her mother human. To which
world does she belong? Is it always necessary to choose?
And what about the original legends, such as the Cornish
Mermaid of Zennor or the Scottish selkie and kelpie stories? The legends are tremendously inspiring - but
you have to think about them, find out what they are saying to you. I wrote about the selkies, the shape-shifting
seal people, in ‘Troll Mill’, the second part of my trilogy ‘West of the Moon’. The legend is of a fisherman who
sees the selkies dancing on the moonlit beach in the form of lovely women, and
he snatches up one of their discarded sealskins so that the selkie girl can’t
escape into the sea. She has to marry
him and bear his children, but one day she finds where he’s hidden the
sealskin. At once she throws it on,
returns to the sea and abandons him and her human (half-human?) children forever.
For me, this legend seemed to be about the difficulty of
understanding one another, even in a bond as close as marriage – in a sense,
one’s partner is always the Other. It
speaks of the power struggle between couples – and the grief of a failed
partnership – and, very strongly I thought, about the new mother’s plunge into
post-natal depression. And that was how
I used it in my book, though keeping the magic and lyricism. In my short
mermaid book ‘Forsaken’, the human-mer partnership is the other way around,
based on an old Scandinavian ballad about a Mer-king who marries a mortal
woman, and one day she hears the church bells ringing above the sea, and goes
back to the land and leaves him forever.
Rarely in folklore do these stories end happily. But I read the legend, and my spine tingled,
and I wanted to see what would happen if one of the half-mer children went
looking for her mother… Would the ending
be different?
Margo Lanagan, in ‘The Brides of Rollrock Island’ (Australian title 'Sea Hearts') has found
something quite different in the selkie legends (see her post and my review). In her book, the seals are manipulated and
transformed in a way which denies their nature and damages the
wrongdoers. It’s a marvellous book which
will keep me thinking for – I suspect – years.
The beautiful women who step out of the seal carcasses appear, to the
rough island men who have obtained them like mail-order brides, to be the culmination of delight: but they and their sons
must live year in, year out, bearing the guilt of the seal women’s ever-present
mild but steadfast grief.
Franny Billingsley’s ‘The Folk Keeper’ is another story which is concerned with
questions of identity and belonging, a wonderfully
creepy take on the selkie legend. And
Gillian Philip’s ‘Firebrand’ and ‘Bloodstone’ include not only selkies, as
sinister death-omens, but her heroes of the Sithe, the Scottish faeries, ride
kelpies too (water horses from the lochs): sleek and dangerous and
man-eating. Kelpies appear again in Maggie
Stiefvater’s wonderful ‘The Scorpio Races’, an evocative and thrilling story of
racing the savage water horses on a wild Scottish island. Should men take and attempt to tame these
otherworldly creatures? Is it courage or
cruelty? Should they, perhaps, be left
to their own world and their own nature?
These are all strong, wonderfully written books. If you feel like taking a plunge into the perilous
seas of fairyland, do try them! And on Friday, the blog will continue to explore the selkie theme with a guest post from Laura Marjorie Miller.
This wonderful little city stands as if sprung from the soil, in a neighbour's garden. It reminds me of the medieval French city of Carcassonne, whose name was used by Lord Dunsany for a faerie city in one of his tales; though rather oddly he seems to have picked the name from a reference in a friend's letter and never to have known it is the name of a real place.:
Some had heard of it in speech or song; some had read of it and some had dreamed of it. ...Far away it was, and far and far away, a city of gleaming ramparts rising one over the other, and marble terraces behind the ramparts, and fountains shimmering on the terraces. To Carcassonne the elf-kings with their fairies had first retreated from men, and had built it on an evening late in May by blowing their elfin horns. Carcassonne! Carcassonne!
This little fairy city - for me - irresistably conjures a beautiful poem of Kipling's, from 'Puck of Pook's Hill'.
CITIES and Thrones and Powers Stand in Time's eye,
Almost as long as flowers, Which daily die:
But, as new buds put forth To glad new men,
Out of the spent and unconsidered Earth, The Cities rise again.
This season's Daffodil, She never hears,
What change, what chance, what chill, Cut down last year's;
But with bold countenance, And knowledge small,
Esteems her seven days' continuance To be perpetual.
So Time that is o'er-kind To all that be,
Ordains us e'en as blind, As bold as she:
That in our very death, And burial sure,
Shadow to shadow, well persuaded, saith, "See how our works endure!"
Deep in the enclaves of Unseen University (in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels, in case anyone reading this doesn’t
already know) is the
University Library, where the presence of so many books has warped space into a mysterious form called L-space
(or Library-space) expressed by the equation:
Books are entrances into other worlds: in UU Library this is not a
metaphor. And, a consequence of the properties of L-space, the shelves contain every book ever written, unwritten or yet to be
written. Terry Pratchett's UU Library is thus - probably - different from Jorge Luis Borges' Biblioteca de Babel, in which the books additionally contain every possible combination of the letters of the alphabet - and are therefore mostly gibberish.
The Babel library would be a bad place to work. I would like, therefore (if I have the Librarian’s permission), to take you
on a small tour of UU library, concentrating on a section I often like to visit: the section for
Imaginary Books. These, of course, are books which exist only between the covers of
other books and are therefore fictional to the power two: fiction².
I’ve delighted in many such titles over the years, so let’s tiptoe past
the chained, uneasily-slumbering grimoires of UU Library’s extensive
magical sections, and I’ll show you my favourites.
The first is ‘The Orange and the Apple’, which exists between the covers
of Arthur C Clarke’s ‘A Fall of Moondust’, the story of a ‘moon-bus’
full of passengers which plunges into the deep soft dust of the Sea of
Tranquillity following a moon-quake. During the desperate rescue
operation which ensues, the trapped passengers organise an entertainment
to keep their minds off claustrophobia and the fear of death. It may
not be one of Clarke’s best-known novels, but it contains some good character sketches and is often very funny. The passengers take
turns reading aloud the only two novels on board, Jack Schaefer’s
classic western ‘Shane’ and a ‘new historical romance’ ‘The Orange and
the Apple’, featuring an affair between Sir Isaac Newton and Nell
Gwynne. Let me reach it down from the shelf for you: a cheap paperback
with a lurid cover and a cracked spine:
The author certainly wasted no time. Within three pages, Sir Isaac
Newton was explaining the law of gravitation to Mistress Gwynne, who had
already hinted that she would like to do something in return.
…“Forsooth, Sir Isaac, you are indeed a man of great knowledge. Yet, methinks, there is much that a woman might teach you.” “And what is that, my pretty maid?” Mistress Nell blushed shyly. “I fear,” she sighed, “that you have given your life to the things of
the mind. You have forgotten, Sir Isaac, that the body, also, has much
strange wisdom.” “Call me ‘Ike’,” said the sage huskily, as his clumsy fingers tugged at the fastenings of her blouse.
Close beside this on the shelves is an array of titles from Douglas
Adams’ ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’. There’s the Guide
itself, of course, clearly an e-book on an e-reader:
…a device which looked rather like a largish electronic calculator.
This had about a hundred tiny press buttons and a screen about four
inches square on which any one of a million ‘pages’ could be summoned at
a moment’s notice. It looked insanely complicated, and this was one of
the reasons why the snug plastic cover it fitted into had the words
DON’T PANIC printed on it in large friendly letters.
That was written in the late 1970’s, so you can see the power of
L-space right there. Next to the Guide is an entire bookcase sagging beneath the
weight of the many volumes of the Encyclopaedia Galactica. Oh, and here
are a couple of paperbacks which look to have been much thumbed by the
wizards of Unseen University - so long as they’re sure no other wizard
is watching: Eccentrica Gallumbits’ ‘The Big Bang Theory, A Personal
View’, and ‘Everything You Never Wanted to Know About Sex But Have Been
Forced To Find Out’. Next on the shelf - in a far more pristine
condition - is Oolon Colluphid’s galaxy-rattling series of popular
theological texts: ‘Where God Went Wrong’, ‘Some More of God’s Greatest
Mistakes’, ‘Who Is This God Person Anyway?’ and ‘Well That About Wraps
It Up For God’.
If you’re not interested in science, or philosophy, we can move on to
the literary biographies. Here's one I’ve always wanted to read:
‘Pard-Spirit: A Study of Branwell Brontë’ by one Mr Mybug - nestling
within the pages of Stella Gibbons’ ‘Cold Comfort Farm’. It’s a
handsome looking hardback. I suspect he had to pay for its publication,
but he made sure there was a large and arty black and white photograph of himself
on the back of the dust jacket.
‘It’s goin’ to be dam good,’ said Mr Mybug. ‘It’s a psychological
study, of course, and I’ve got a lot of new matter, including three
letters he wrote to an old aunt in Ireland, Mrs Prunty, during the
period when he was working on Wuthering Heights.’ He glanced sharply at
Flora to see if she would react.
‘It’s obvious that it’s his book and not Emily’s. No woman could
have written that. It’s male stuff… Secretly, he worked twelve hours a
day writing Shirley and Villette - and of course, Wuthering Heights.
I’ve proved all this by evidence from the three letters to old Mrs
Prunty. His letters to her are little masterpieces of repressed
passion. They’re full of tender little questions… he asks her how is
her rheumatism… has her cat, Toby, “recovered from the fever”… … how is
Cousin Martha (and what a picture we get of Cousin Martha in those
simple words, a raw Irish chit, high-cheekboned, with limp black hair
and clear blood in her lips!) …’
Delicious!
Oh look - here, bound in leather and lying on a slanting wooden stand, is the Magician's Book from the 'The Voyage of the Dawn Treader'! I flick back the two lead clasps which hold it shut, and lift open the cover to reveal beautiful illuminated vellum pages filled with spells -
cures for warts (by washing your hands by moonlight in a silver basin) and toothache and cramp, and a spell for taking a swarm of bees...
... how to find buried treasure, how to remember things forgotten, how to forget things you wanted to forget, how to tell whether anyone was speaking the truth...
Dangerous stuff, all of it. I can see you're taking a little bit too much interest, so I close the cover and fasten the clasps(the book tingles and buzzes under my fingers as I do so) and we move on.
Ah! Here, sticking quite a long way out from the shelf and leaning slantwise to fit, is a tall folio manuscript bound in a red leather cover. The catalogue label coming unstuck from the spine reads: 'Travel:
Imaginary'. I pull it tenderly out. Odd though it may seem, this could be
the most valuable book in the entire section. It's written 'in a wandering hand' in spiky black ink with lots of curlicues.
The title page has many
titles on it, crossed out one after another: so:
My Diary. My Unexpected Journey. There and Back Again. And What
Happened After. Adventures of Five Hobbits. The Tale of the Great Ring,
compiled by Bilbo Baggins from his own observations and those of his
friends. What We Did in the War of the Ring.
Here Bilbo's hand ends, and Frodo has written: THE DOWNFALL OF THE LORD OF THE RINGS AND THE RETURN OF THE KING'.
Bilbo and Frodo's own autobiographical account! I know you'd love to
stand here and leaf through it, but today I'm just showing you what's
on the shelves, and we haven't time. You can come back by yourself
another day.
How do you fancy Victorian poetry? Courtesy of A S Byatt’s ‘Possession’,
allow me to pull out this stout green book, the ‘Collected Poems of
Randolph Henry Ash’ including of course ‘The Garden of Proserpina’ and
‘Ask to Embla’ -
No? Then how about my own preference, this slim volume in limp violet suede, with
faded spine and curling corners, whose embossed gold title reads simply
‘The Fairy Melusine’ by Christabel LaMotte, a writer who owes a clear debt to Emily Dickinson. As we pluck it from the
shelf, out flutters a loose manuscript sheet with a poem on it:
It came all so still The little Thing - And would not stay - Our Questioning - A heavy Breath - One two and three - And then the lapsed Eternity - A Lapis Flesh The Crimson - Gone - It came as still As any Stone -
Is there anything you'd like to see that I haven't shown you? It'll be here. Just let me know...
It is a northern land, a hard place
where the trees bend always to a cold, flowing wind. At night the north star
flashes and beckons, a jewelled finger.The skies turn like a dial, so big and remote…
A
child lived there who thought how huge everything was, and was afraid of the
emptiness between stars and beyond stars.But her grandmother whispered, “There’s nothing to be afraid of.Don’t you know the whole universe is knotted
up in a handkerchief in God’s pocket?”
So
the child grew up fearless. Often she spent her nights wandering on the high
moors with a stick of yew in her hand, calling the owls, who would whirr down
in a soft blur of feathers and clutch her arm, turning their black brilliant
eyes here and there. But as sunrise streaked the sky she would be back at the
cottage to blow the fire aflame and put the kettle on the hob and kiss her
grandmother awake.
Then
her grandmother died and was buried. After
the funeral, the young girl sat alone in the cold cottage and cried.“Grandmother, where have you gone? Why have
you left me? How can I find you?” And each night she wandered further and
further afield, following the bright beckoning of the North Star, axle of the
sky, till she came to the country where it is always dark and day is no more
than winter twilight, even at noon.Underfoot was heather, and black bilberries,
and withered bracken.One night she came
over a ridge and saw a lake lying beneath her.
Its waters were
still and dark and very cold, and it lapped a shore of granite pebbles that
glinted in the starlight.And, straining
her eyes, she thought she saw the dim loom of an island far out in the lake,
and at once she was overcome with longing to set foot on it, but there were no
boats on the shore, and the water was too cold to enter.It would have frozen her heart.And it seemed the North Star shone directly
over the island, tugging her towards it.
Three
times the stars wheeled overhead as she walked along the shore, watching the dark
shape of the island sleeping on the water, and in all this time she saw no more
than a quick meteor threading the high heaven, and heard no more than the
crunch of her own footsteps and the knock of her staff striking the shingle.
At
last she came to a beach where, scattered here and therein the rough gravel, were round pebbles that
glowed like tiny moons; and an old man sat huddled on the shore beside his
boat, a patched old leather coracle.He
was staring at the ground, but when he heard the young woman coming he
scrambled up, crying, “Go away, go away.All this is mine!”
“What
do you mean? I only want you to lend me your coracle so that I can cross over
to the island.”
“Island? What island?” asked the old man.Then he looked cunning, and counted on his
fingers, and mumbled to himself, and said, looking up, “You must pay me for the
use of my coracle.”
“I
have no money,” she said.“But I will
work for you.”
The
old man set her to pick up all of the glowing pebbles and heap them near the
coracle.
Under
the turning sky the girl went back and forth, collecting the stones till her
hands were cold and bruised, but although the pile grew higher and higher, the
old man was never satisfied.Soon all
the shingle close by was dull, while the pile beside the coracle shone like a
white beacon.She was so stiff she
wondered if she would ever be able to straighten up again, but still she had to
go to and fro, and each time she asked for the coracle, the old man shook his
head.
Finally
she went back and threw the last stones on the high pile. “I have done enough.”
“Not
yet, not yet,” said the old man, groping in the heap.
“Yes;
if you do not give me the boat now, I will take it – I have earned it! – and I
will crack your head into the bargain.”
The
old man turned to her then and put two stones into her hand – but at the last
moment he snatched one back – saying, “The coracle leaks and will not
float.These are opals.Take your fee and go.”
“Row
me over,” the girl demanded, throwing the jewel down.But because the old man moaned and clutched
at his dead heap she lowered her stick, saying, “You would do better as an
honest fisherman, I think,” and dragged the coracle into the water, which
lapped her foot and seeped into her shoe, so cold that she gasped.She climbed in and poled off with her stick,
then took up the paddle and began to make her way towards the darkness that lay
on the centre of the water, just showing an island’s shape against the star-prickled
sky.
The
leather sides of the coracle were cracked and dry, and the cold water welled in
so that she had to stop paddling and bail with cupped hands till they stung and
ached with cold.At last the leather
swelled with the moisture and the cracks were closed.Then she picked up the paddle and went on.
Slowly
the island drew nearer, and larger, until she was working into a little bay
where small, gnarled trees grew right against the water and leaned out above
it.She grasped their branches and
pulled herself out of the boat, and they shook bitter bark down into her face
and hair, and her fingers were sticky with resin.
Slowly
she hobbled inland with bent back and frozen hands, and she blundered in the
darkness, for gall and bark were stinging her eyes.But she dragged herself uphill, tearing her
skin on brambles, till she reached a high mound in the centre of the island,
free from trees and bushes, covered with short, dry grass.At the top of the mound she drove her staff
into the turf and sat down beneath it and wept in the cold air, and the tears washed
the bark from her eyes and splashed warm on her hands, watering the ground with
salt.And when she looked up there was
the north star, straight overhead, brighter than she had ever seen it.
And the stick at
her back rooted, and put out dark leaves and small white flowers.
Stand in Time's eye,
