I’ve been working on some music for the next film, and taking more photos. This one was taken just before sunset on the stretch of the Icknield Way near Pegsdon Hills. I thought I had never been there before, but as I approached I realised that it was probably the place I went to once on horseback from the other side of Hitchin on a 20-mile ride at 14. There was a huge, steep hill at the end of the ride, amazing views, enough to give you vertigo. More music and photos to come…
This is the project I am working on at the moment:
A quirky and elemental documentary about the people and places along a 5,000-year-old thoroughfare across the chalk downs and ridges of England. The Icknield Way is known as a Roman Road, but it conveyed livestock and goods back and forth between East Anglia, the home of the Iceni, and ancient harbours of the southwest, long before that.
This film will seek out musicians, poets, artists and songwriters who have been inspired by the route in its ancient and modern guises alike, as well as archaeologists who dig up its cultures and the ramblers and riders who use it as an escape from the ugliness of modern life.
This film will show the earthiness of ancestral remains, the airiness of the chalk downs and the flight of the Red Kite, together with the water of the clear chalk springs it traverses, some marked by ancient earthworks and stone circles as sacred spots by those who came before. The fire of human thought and inspiration surrounding our still-visible past will transform the experience into something that will stay with the viewer for a long time to come.
I have uploaded the short version of the Welei film, following a very successful shoot on Sunday with Poetry ID from Letchworth, of which I am a member. I put this together when I had only just understood the very basics of video editing. I hope the next version, which will be 10 minutes, will give a more satisfying story.
It will consist of a group of poets giving their response to a ‘lost village,’ the peculiar amalgam of kinship and horror that the medieval era induces in popular culture, and to the traces of the imaginable past on our contemporary landscape.
My current project is about the village of Welei, near Preston, Herts, that disappeared from public knowledge in spite of being named as a manor in the Domesday Book.
Philip Wray has an informative and evocative account of Welei on his Preston website:
Today, nothing visible remains of Welei. The ancient road is now a track. Two ponds stagnate nearby. The Green is a tangle of trees and undergrowth. But, lurking just beneath the surface of the flora and fauna are foundations of houses, abandoned artefacts and skeletons in unmarked graves.
The other day, I went up to the possible location of the village:
View Larger Map
I made a few video notes with my Flip camcorder and edited them into a rough clip to give a sense of the atmosphere:
According to this old map of Hitchin, my house stands in what was probably either Beech Tree Field or Herne Shot. When I first saw the name Herne, I immediately thought of the Hunter. But then I realised that there are still herons on the Purwell River, and that the field could have been named after them. There is also a “Purwell Grove” marked on the map, possibly denoting a place with religious connotations from pre-Christian times. It is there that I recorded the following track, and to the spirits of that place that the tune is dedicated.
“Imagination is crazy
Your whole perspective gets hazy
You end up asking a daisy
What to do, what to do…”
“Imagination”, by Harry Connick, Jr
Comment on a recent blog post “Random Shots in the Dark“
What’s missing here is the idea, long since ditched in Western experience, of imagination as a path of knowledge. As far as I know, you only hear Henry Corbin, Jung and James Hillman taking it seriously as an intellectual proposition in the 20th century. Practised as Hillman intends it, soul-making, as he calls it, is a difficult discipline; neither philosophical nor literal/materialistic. So far as I can tell it induces changes in the way a person experiences the world. Presumably, that means neurological changes (in the same way that any long-term discipline will do). Musical training of 10 years or longer may reduce the risk of dementia, for example. My experience of working with the imagination and dreams over more than a decade is that they affect neurology and brain chemistry, so that I experience myself more in harmony with the world around me. The benefit to me has been improved mental health, self-awareness and a drug-free management system for depression and anxiety (and blood pressure). If lots of people did this, there might be a benefit to the planet, too, ecologically speaking. I don’t think it matters how you do it, as long as it’s meaningful to you. It’s not a religion. There is no set path through the imagination; it’s a question of individual exploration and experimentation. I am guessing [from reading science journalism] that there is probably an adaptive benefit to the lived experience of harmony with nature and other humans. Harmony isn’t conflict-free. But conflicts that can be played out more fully in the imagination are less damaging than those that are immediately literalised. I am also guessing from recent writings about the religious brain that an appreciation of cosmic harmony might be part of our neurobiology, might link us up to a less literal way of seeing and being. I think it might work as an evolutionary tool that keeps us alive as a species. It has included imagining various deities for me, but they don’t make a system, they don’t answer prayers, and they don’t punish me if I don’t worship them. I don’t try to control, placate or manipulate them, although I treat them with respect. For me, they are nexuses (nexi??!!) of collective image, thought and emotion all rolled into one. I think they help to synthesise neurological changes (which includes changes in top-speed limbic-system-level emotional response to stimuli and also in the much slower processes of cognition.) I have also found that a lot of images (from my dreams and imaginal journeys) contain very close-packed ideas that take years of unravelling through reading, writing and thinking. But there is no God and no scripture. Just an imagined structure for ‘getting in there’ that anyone could make in their innerworld if they imagined it enough times and laid down enough neurological pathways to make it stable. This is basically what Jung did in the Red Book, and then had to distil further in a more scientific manner through his clinical practice, theorising and lecturing. The result was a system for understanding people’s social and emotional difficulties as seen by psychoanalysts. In my experience, it’s a useful one: defined enough to be communicable to other people, but still open enough to be modified by and synthesised with other systems. Like Freud’s, Winnicott’s and Bowlby’s it does a good job, not a perfect one, of describing psychological experience. If Jung had been someone else, that imaginative/imaginal process could have resulted in other forms of understanding. Like dreams of scientific problem-solving. They’re not scientific or reliable. But they make the crucial contribution of allowing the individual scientist to step into the imagination for the synthesis of an important piece of knowledge that s/he can’t yet see, although they have all the parts there. My view is that the irrational can lead to more inclusive and creative forms of knowledge and synthesis, if used as a working partner with the rational ego, and not continually talked down to or treated with contempt. (Personification and dialogue seem to go with the territory.) These atheists treat reason as a god, and are oppressive to anyone who doesn’t worship the intellect as the primary source of all knowledge.
Afterthought: I don’t know why I bother. One commenter mentioned William James. James describes a panoply of beliefs primarily as phenomena. He doesn’t argue for each and every one of the beliefs he reports. He just points out that they exist, that they are part of what we are and do, and that they shouldn’t be mistreated. I don’t argue for belief, either. I argue not to be argued out of a valid place in society. I argue for my life as I live it and the world as I experience it to be allowed to exist without government intervention. I argue for the right to a non-rational practice that is useful and meaningful to others as well as myself, that I can talk about in a public place without some kind of licence. I argue that people who espouse only rationality make up all the rules of the game, and then tell anyone saying that the rules should be more inclusive, that any attempt to suggest this breaks the rules of the game. If I can’t play by the rules, I shouldn’t try to play their game. Out of order. Random shots in the dark. And everyone brays, with the satisfaction of having their own world view reinforced. With the satisfaction of not having to tolerate difference, and uncertainty, and not knowing, even though many scientists tolerate all those things all the time. Science, for better or worse, is the overarching meaning system of our time, and yet there is plenty of room for mess and mistakes and power games. That’s because it’s a human endeavour. Atheism is something else. It’s an abstraction which is used to negate (the name itself is a negation) belittle or ignore other views and experiences. Without monotheism, it couldn’t exist, and yet non-monotheists are collateral damage in the logocentric death-wrestle between fundamentalist religion and fundamentalist atheism. It stinks of celebrity and politics. It, too, is a form of power-gathering, and it is just as dangerous in the political arena as the intrusions of organised religion. It is part of the same system; a reaction to it; an anti-religion that confers all the psychological benefits of a religious affiliation with none of the inconvenience of having to attend rites or modify behaviour in any way, or to surrender to anything greater than one’s own cleverness. I am sick of reading contemptuous and venomous comments about any form of non-rational practice. I know charlatans exist. But so do charlatan scientists. So do plagiarising academics. I want a government that is truly secular, and atheism isn’t the same as secularism. Rationalism isn’t by its nature always morally correct or always emotionally or ecologically appropriate. People shouldn’t have to live in a premasticated world that makes such assumptions for them. They should be allowed the moral and intellectual freedom to work it out for themselves.
The Tree of Green Flame and the River Spirit
Rise! you waters
Pure welling
Rise from the Nine Springs
Rise!
Dream, Dec. 28, 2009
I am upstairs and I hear a noise downstairs, in the house I currently live in. A is there, but I take the lead in going downstairs to see who the intruder is. It is the estate agent and another, familiar-looking man. “Who are you,” I say in a stern voice, “and what are you doing in my house?” The other man turns, and I see it is James Hillman. The estate agent says he is my landlord, and he has a right to be in my house. I am not happy about this at all but I am excited to meet him, and come down to welcome him as a guest. As I move into the same space as him I wish I could be more welcoming but I resent the way he barged into my house. It feels like a violation. He sidles up to me and starts feeling my arse, and steals a kiss from me while I’m doing something else. I am very annoyed by this, especially as A is in the house, but I don’t say anything. We start chatting, and I ask him about his connection with M. I tell him I once analysed with M. Ah, he says, so you will have had conversations with him that no-one else is privy to. He seems more emotionally connected when discussing psychology, and starts to take an interest in me. He says he has a ‘couch’ technique which involves me lying on a ‘couch’, a sort of slender structure covered with black fabric, suspended about four or five feet in the air. The movements I make while ‘on the couch’ determine my true desires in life. I agree, and make some elegant dance moves, with my back supported by the ‘couch’ the whole time. He watches, but doesn’t say anything. After that, I watch him move around, and it seems that he is dancing, and that I have seen him dance before. He is standing on one leg, and I want to ask him if I really saw him dance before, on the Internet, or if I dreamed it. Also, there’s a woman with him now: his wife? I want to ask him if it’s the same woman who did the paintings for ‘Animal Dreams’, but I have a feeling it’s a new wife, as she’s quite young, so I keep my mouth shut. Soon after that, I wish they would leave, but they don’t, so I leave the house and go to ‘return home’. My route takes me through a seaside town which is ‘Cyprus’ but looks like England. I am in my old car. I am still trying to get home via a circuitous route when the dream ends.
I have been re-reading James Hillman’s book, The Dream and the Underworld, and it has been challenging for me as a pagan, because his underworld of the dream, and of the Greeks, isn’t quite the same as the underworld in a magickal, religious sense. It’s metaphorical and psychical. Hillman’s perspective is radically valuable in the context of psychology, but the dream has put me right on the complicated fault-lines between concept, belief, experience and metaphor.
In the world of paganism and magickal practice, magickal and spiritual entities are conceived of as otherworldly, but real. This is what psychologists mean when they talk about the parapsychological, as a place beyond what they think of as psychological, but which they can’t ignore because of certain experiences. Only the ones who have had such experiences tend to refer to parapsychological, or ‘psi’, phenomena at all. In pagan and magickal practices of various kinds, maps are often made, verbally or graphically, of planes, upper and lowerworlds, using spheres, or trees or axes, stories told of entities met there, and encounters had. Spells, or verbal formulas, may be exchanged. Entities are tested to see if they give the appropriate responses, thereby establishing identity according to collective criteria. In The Dream and the Underworld, Hilllman is very interested in topographical (and storied, formulaic, mythological) representations of psyche and the gods (entities), but he seems to take them as metaphorical. For a psychologist, this seems appropriate, after all. Magickal and pagan practices take them as representations of worlds that are invisible, or other, or interior, or hidden (occult). They are not metaphors for movements within the soul; rather they are landscapes through which the soul moves. One possible reason for this is that esoteric practice is a cultural practice, albeit a non-mainstream one, which doesn’t privilege self-reflection over other modes of being, as modern depth psychology does. For depth psychologists consider reflection to be one of the highest forms of psychic functioning of which we are capable. Pagan and occult practice privileges various other things, including good manners, aesthetics, contact with otherness, control over entities and energies, dialogues leading to more information, healing, greater wisdom, either about otherworlds or the material world. Some practices are more religious, in which the divine is served and honoured in various ways by humans: others are more magickal, in which otherness is manipulated or persuaded by humans who hope to achieve effects in ‘this’ world. One of the roots of this way of being may lie, says a psychological, reflective approach, in the roots of contemporary Western esotericism in a heroic, ego-driven way of approaching otherness. The idea that the Industrial Revolution and its machinery produced industrious magickal practitioners who applied the same methods of the age to its under-belly, the repressed feminine, returning as hysterical patients, ‘spirits’ and ‘psyche’.
There would be no need to put ‘psyche’ in quotation marks, were it not for ‘psi’ phenomena, about which there is little consensus; about which we ‘know’ little. The unifying factor in all these fault-lines–or, the place where Hillman dances–appears to be the unknown: the phenomena for which we have no near-unifying explanation. From the perspective of the unknown, all the other ‘things’ I have been talking about: ‘psyche’, ‘spirit’, ‘otherworlds’, ‘underworld’, are metaphors which carry in part the unknown, seen by means of one or another image. The image unifies, remains unknown, and we cannot know where it leads.
The beauty of ‘psyche’ as a perspective lies in its ability to take us back to the essences of things (ie, to ‘Hades’). But it is a perspective, and not a theory. It doesn’t explain why people dream each other’s secrets, more or less factually. It doesn’t explain why ‘spirits’ can tell you things about a person that your ego couldn’t have had access to, and quite possibly didn’t want access to. It makes no comment on our dayworld divisions and precisions, nor on ‘violations’ of them. Likewise, the unknown makes no comment on our various metaphors, including that of the soul and Hades.
I believe that a reflective capacity is only the best (most sensitively attuned, most differentiated) we can be when applied in the dark: when applied to that which we do not know; for which we do not have a solid metaphor which can carry meaning over to other spheres of life without losing its sense; which we cannot explain to others via the ego without the meaning losing its integrity in argument, denial, intellectual challenge or backlash suppression. That which we do not know is that which cannot be successfully brought into a strong-enough circle of consensus without losing its sense of itself. To ‘know’ something, is to have a lasting metaphor about that thing which is also useful to other people, ie, which isn’t so open that it can’t be communicated at all, and isn’t so closed that it is irrelevant to anyone else.
These are the conversations with M. to which others were not privy. They were conversations in which dreams did much of the talking, as this dream is capable of saying, or rather, being, far more than the essay which accompanies it can. Psi phenomena were also apparent. In part, our conversations were a re-enactment of an encounter, driven by desperate love, with the unknown that was a psychotic father. In part, they were much more than that, involving a deep encounter with the land, people who lived in the land, houses set out in gardens, forests and fields, and an ultimate sacrifice of the flowing energies of the dayworld quest to the land(lord) – giving rise to a lifetime’s work of reflection, integration and, of course, more dreams.
As for Hillman, I think I didn’t want him in the house because he barged in, with scant concern for dayworld proprieties. But also because he violated the sacred laws of hospitality, of Hestia. Hestia and Hermes are something of a continuum, perhaps, like wave-particle duality. When there is an emphasis on Hestia, then Hermes is repressed, and forces his way in. My objection to Hillman’s presence was the objection of the sacred laws of the hearth, of guest and host. What the dream ego seemed to forget, was that the waking ego had ushered him in already, as a living shade leaping once more, after many years, and after no time at all, from the pages of his own book.
This is cross-posted from The Spirit Mercurious.
