While I’m away from my desk for the summer, I’m taking the chance to share some older essays – and this is the second part of a mini-series picking up on R. G. Miga’s notes on ‘Phasmatopian’ writing.
You've inspired me to re-read Alan Garner! I remember my dad giving me some to read years ago, and enjoying them. And it is a good time to now share them with my kids
Another marvelous read that, sauna-like, opens my psychic pores leaving me soaking in a marinade of recognition and that connective withinness that animates so much of your writing. I only knew Alan Garner's name, but despite having traveled by different paths, stood on different hilltops, been lost in different thickets, I've been prowling the same geographies. Thank you for introducing me to a fellow traveler whose books will be joining my library.
I'm also chuckling at how, for my final semester at Syracuse in 1973, an impulse that had led me to take classes in the Paleolithic and European Neolithic, ended with the only course on the British Neolithic being taught at an American university that year continues to echo through my life. Six months later, I had landed in Findhorn (happily before the books and tourists) where Stonehenge and Callanish were ports on a psychic network of ley lines along with Iona and Glastonbury.
Ley lines vanished from my rearview mirror long ago, but the perspectives those classes opened up are always at the edges of my awareness. So to read of you flintknapping and learn of Blackden... Well, I've often thought that when we've all finally dug down through all our incarnations we'll discover that we're akin to the Tralfamadorians in Slaugherthouse Five.
Thanks for this rich response, Gordon! I first encountered leylines in The Moon of Gomrath. That sent me looking for a copy of The Old Straight Track in the stacks of the public library. I don't think I got very far with it, aged twelve or whatever I was, and these things do vanish in the rearview mirror, yet they leave poetic echoes and traces and lead us who-knows-where... Glad to have brought AG's work to your attention!
Thank you. I remember reading Alan Garner as a child and the magical residue it left with me.
I’m taking the phrase ‘the hills will outlast the walls’ to hold and ponder.
I have just finished writing a book about what the UK would be like if you peeled off the nation state and were left with the land. Maybe the reason I was called to do that was because the magical river of Garner’s writing passed through me at the right time.
I will never forget being forced to read The Owl Service for GCSE English.
"By! There's axiomatic!" declares the farmer of Garner's bucolic valleys.
To a 14 year old - and myself a cuckoo hippy child in rural Mid Wales - the ideology of cultural colonisation was undeniable.
Having returned to learn the language of silence spoken so eloquently by those who farm in real life, I myself aim to find words to write about it now. "It’s a language in which words are the flowering tips of metres-deep tap roots. Maybe not a language of words at all, but of intent.”
Well, this sparked all kinds of thoughts, even before I followed the link and found myself wandering your goat paths.
First, then, ayyyy.... the wrecking effect of being *forced* to read anything, often by teachers who have or had some love for literature themselves. I heard an Oxford Eng Lit professor say the arguments for abolishing English A-level outweighed the arguments for keeping it, and this is part of what he was getting at, I reckon.
Then there's another memory, of quite what it can stir to find literature trespassing onto your home turf, when you're growing up somewhere where all the institutions of Culture conspire to remind you of your marginal, provincial status. At best, there's a subversive excitement - when I discovered Aidan Chambers' novels in my mid-teens and realised, though it's never named, that the characters (at least in the first two) lived in Darlington, the excitement was electric, and the books passed between me and my friends as some kind of samizdat.
But your experience of enforced reading of the Owl Service in mid-Wales sounds more like James Rebank's description of the teacher in the Cumbrian comprehensive, preaching the wonder of the Lake poets to an assembly full of kids whose entire experience of schooling is of systematic and unreflective contempt for the farming life of their families in the landscapes Wordsworth and co were Romanticising. Grim.
In fairness to AG, the line you quote is put in the mouth of a young man who's on the receiving end of a grammar school education in Aber. Like the author, he belongs to that window in the mid-20th century when bright working class kids, rural (like AG) as well as urban, got picked up and thrown into a rigorous classical education of a kind that no longer exists, at the state's expense, but also at the cost of becoming incomprehensible to their own families. Gwyn is a self-portrait, with moments of self-satire, as much as Tom in Red Shift. Garner walked away from Oxford at twenty to find a way home, to put his education in service of the culture he came out of. It took him twenty years to write something his dad could read, he got there with the Stone Book, but the Owl Service is half way on that journey.
Thank you for this thoughtful and insightful response. I know little about Garner, so this is helpful - though it's a painful story. The British class system manifests itself in many ugly structures, but one instituting itself within the family stands as a particularly inhumane relic.
I have enjoyed your essays and reading about your efforts with Dark Mountain struck a chord. I ran a festival for some years and joked that I lost five years of life with every outing. Though subsistence farming does not mark a break in this trajectory, it has to be said. I loved particularly reading about your shared kitchen table; your feelings about hosting. I wondered if you had come across Leon Kass' "The Hungry Soul." He is an interesting character within the firmament I'm scoping - he chaired Bush's council of Bioethics - but his philosophy of appetite contains many gems. It's a shame he spent far too little time with animals; these truths would have informed his work a great deal, but there is still a lot to be said for the book.
In any case, I'm very glad to make your acquaintance, and thank you for your work in creating things within the world that are worth believing in, and racking our souls and bodies for. What else, after all, should life achieve? Apart from an excellent dinner afterwards perhaps.
"A first-rate academic education often resembles a half-complete shamanic initiation..." I've remained fundamentally uneducated throughout my life (or perhaps "uneducable," or maybe "incorrigible") and this makes me feel better about my condition. maybe an unsuccessful academic initiation is better than a half-finished deprogramming? seems to have landed me in good company, at any rate.
here's to cryptic refugia. what a beautiful image. and thank you, truly, for yet another author to add to the already-teetering pile on my nightstand.
You've inspired me to re-read Alan Garner! I remember my dad giving me some to read years ago, and enjoying them. And it is a good time to now share them with my kids
Oh good! I hope you all enjoy them. This makes me think that it will be time to introduce Alfie to the Weirdstone soon, too.
Another marvelous read that, sauna-like, opens my psychic pores leaving me soaking in a marinade of recognition and that connective withinness that animates so much of your writing. I only knew Alan Garner's name, but despite having traveled by different paths, stood on different hilltops, been lost in different thickets, I've been prowling the same geographies. Thank you for introducing me to a fellow traveler whose books will be joining my library.
I'm also chuckling at how, for my final semester at Syracuse in 1973, an impulse that had led me to take classes in the Paleolithic and European Neolithic, ended with the only course on the British Neolithic being taught at an American university that year continues to echo through my life. Six months later, I had landed in Findhorn (happily before the books and tourists) where Stonehenge and Callanish were ports on a psychic network of ley lines along with Iona and Glastonbury.
Ley lines vanished from my rearview mirror long ago, but the perspectives those classes opened up are always at the edges of my awareness. So to read of you flintknapping and learn of Blackden... Well, I've often thought that when we've all finally dug down through all our incarnations we'll discover that we're akin to the Tralfamadorians in Slaugherthouse Five.
Thanks for this rich response, Gordon! I first encountered leylines in The Moon of Gomrath. That sent me looking for a copy of The Old Straight Track in the stacks of the public library. I don't think I got very far with it, aged twelve or whatever I was, and these things do vanish in the rearview mirror, yet they leave poetic echoes and traces and lead us who-knows-where... Glad to have brought AG's work to your attention!
I really enjoyed this, Dougald - thank you. (& will forward to a friend you may already know? - Mat Osmond - I know he'll love it.)
Ah, thanks Satya! And great to know that you and Mat are friends.
Thank you. I remember reading Alan Garner as a child and the magical residue it left with me.
I’m taking the phrase ‘the hills will outlast the walls’ to hold and ponder.
I have just finished writing a book about what the UK would be like if you peeled off the nation state and were left with the land. Maybe the reason I was called to do that was because the magical river of Garner’s writing passed through me at the right time.
I will never forget being forced to read The Owl Service for GCSE English.
"By! There's axiomatic!" declares the farmer of Garner's bucolic valleys.
To a 14 year old - and myself a cuckoo hippy child in rural Mid Wales - the ideology of cultural colonisation was undeniable.
Having returned to learn the language of silence spoken so eloquently by those who farm in real life, I myself aim to find words to write about it now. "It’s a language in which words are the flowering tips of metres-deep tap roots. Maybe not a language of words at all, but of intent.”
https://walkingwithgoats.substack.com/p/part-two
We would all do well to listen to the meaning of real farmers' silence.
Well, this sparked all kinds of thoughts, even before I followed the link and found myself wandering your goat paths.
First, then, ayyyy.... the wrecking effect of being *forced* to read anything, often by teachers who have or had some love for literature themselves. I heard an Oxford Eng Lit professor say the arguments for abolishing English A-level outweighed the arguments for keeping it, and this is part of what he was getting at, I reckon.
Then there's another memory, of quite what it can stir to find literature trespassing onto your home turf, when you're growing up somewhere where all the institutions of Culture conspire to remind you of your marginal, provincial status. At best, there's a subversive excitement - when I discovered Aidan Chambers' novels in my mid-teens and realised, though it's never named, that the characters (at least in the first two) lived in Darlington, the excitement was electric, and the books passed between me and my friends as some kind of samizdat.
But your experience of enforced reading of the Owl Service in mid-Wales sounds more like James Rebank's description of the teacher in the Cumbrian comprehensive, preaching the wonder of the Lake poets to an assembly full of kids whose entire experience of schooling is of systematic and unreflective contempt for the farming life of their families in the landscapes Wordsworth and co were Romanticising. Grim.
In fairness to AG, the line you quote is put in the mouth of a young man who's on the receiving end of a grammar school education in Aber. Like the author, he belongs to that window in the mid-20th century when bright working class kids, rural (like AG) as well as urban, got picked up and thrown into a rigorous classical education of a kind that no longer exists, at the state's expense, but also at the cost of becoming incomprehensible to their own families. Gwyn is a self-portrait, with moments of self-satire, as much as Tom in Red Shift. Garner walked away from Oxford at twenty to find a way home, to put his education in service of the culture he came out of. It took him twenty years to write something his dad could read, he got there with the Stone Book, but the Owl Service is half way on that journey.
Thank you for this thoughtful and insightful response. I know little about Garner, so this is helpful - though it's a painful story. The British class system manifests itself in many ugly structures, but one instituting itself within the family stands as a particularly inhumane relic.
I have enjoyed your essays and reading about your efforts with Dark Mountain struck a chord. I ran a festival for some years and joked that I lost five years of life with every outing. Though subsistence farming does not mark a break in this trajectory, it has to be said. I loved particularly reading about your shared kitchen table; your feelings about hosting. I wondered if you had come across Leon Kass' "The Hungry Soul." He is an interesting character within the firmament I'm scoping - he chaired Bush's council of Bioethics - but his philosophy of appetite contains many gems. It's a shame he spent far too little time with animals; these truths would have informed his work a great deal, but there is still a lot to be said for the book.
In any case, I'm very glad to make your acquaintance, and thank you for your work in creating things within the world that are worth believing in, and racking our souls and bodies for. What else, after all, should life achieve? Apart from an excellent dinner afterwards perhaps.
"A first-rate academic education often resembles a half-complete shamanic initiation..." I've remained fundamentally uneducated throughout my life (or perhaps "uneducable," or maybe "incorrigible") and this makes me feel better about my condition. maybe an unsuccessful academic initiation is better than a half-finished deprogramming? seems to have landed me in good company, at any rate.
here's to cryptic refugia. what a beautiful image. and thank you, truly, for yet another author to add to the already-teetering pile on my nightstand.