The House of Beasts & Vines

The House of Beasts & Vines

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The House of Beasts & Vines
The House of Beasts & Vines
Archaic Values

Archaic Values

The Terror of Historic Time

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Martin Shaw
Jul 06, 2025
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The House of Beasts & Vines
The House of Beasts & Vines
Archaic Values
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As a poet I hold the most archaic values on earth… the fertility of the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, the terrifying initiation and rebirth, the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe. I try to hold both history and the wilderness in mind, that my poems may approach the true measure of things and stand against the unbalance and ignorance of our times.

Gary Snyder

Ye Olde Devon Moor

It is midsummer and I am walking the Devon lanes in the evening. It’s been hot for days and every living thing seems to be giving off a scent. The hills surround me like dark loaves of bread, the occasional trees now stumps of broccoli on the horizon line. The River Ashburn is to my left and a steep bank of trees up to the nearby hamlet of Druid on my right. There’s an animal somewhere in the brush, roving about. I stop still for a minute. The sense of benign enclosure, the night-timey scents, the river gush, the moon. It’s like being in a Turner painting. Better even. I am tenderly returned to something. It’s a consciousness I first located as a child, something that remains a totemic event to this day. It is utterly, overwhelmingly sumptuous. Even as the world rages and bombs and betrays and subverts, this, also, is happening. Even as historic time and its terrors are upon us, this, also, has its hand raised to us, beckoning.

Mid-Seventies

One morning Dad wakes me before first light and says we are going on a walk to a special place. I tumble into jeans and my favourite wine-dark shirt with the bloody huge collars. Blink and stumble my way downstairs. As we turn the light on in the kitchen the glass of the back door is covered in wasps. The whole pane is just full of them. With our flask of tea we shuffle out the front door and into the still succulent air of pre-dawn, coal black night. This is next level. As we keep our pace he speaks a poem, Sohrab and Rustum, and I watch the dawning world respond to the recital. I see the now indigo night turn to flashes of magenta and pink, then a gold that crests our heads. Gradually the high blue stars fade. My walnut-sized consciousness sinks into deepness and imagines my father’s words had done that, achieved a magic, have literally courted the dawn.

We enter a large garden surrounding a manor house, Cockington Court. Invasion of colour, scent, wonder and bliss. Any invocation of paradise, this was it. Freshly cut grass, bushes filled with songbirds, such a swoon of beauty it almost knocked me over. All in this granular dance of night-light and day-light.

We sip tea and eat Mum’s sandwiches and I feel the happiness of my dad and know peace. Kids feel the anguish of their parents in the most animal of transmissions. But this morning the mood is gladness. I will carry this over the next fifty years. It will be a secret route I will walk over and over.

We mooch about in the dawning light then stroll home. But that isn’t what happened, not really. There’s a reason that Troubadours and Islamic poets alike compose verses to the dawn. I am experiencing the hinge: The earth changes its colouration, its dreaming moves to vision, slowly over several hours. Not with the clank of alarm clock but a release of one consciousness for another. An hour later every bugger will be up. It is a thing to sit in the tensions of both, feeling it all pass through me.

That didn’t feel like an experience of normal time to me, even as a nipper. That had some of Mircea Eliade’s eternal-return time to it. The shared ritual was the shared steps of the walk I took with my father, the stories came from the earth itself: the evolution of the plants, scents and sounds at that moment. Some hint of Eden. It was tremendously reassuring. I now knew a secret. I could lean back into the natural world and be held, even amongst the bustle and stress of my young life at school. There was this other, wonderful place.


When I get back from my evening walk (this is me as a grown-up), I can hear books moving around in the library, so I loyally pad the stairs and see what they have to say. Mircea is bouncing around on my desk impatiently, so I put on my reading glasses and have a little look. This brilliant, troubled man, who had by no stretch an easy life, has been waiting up for my return. As I wrote last week, parts of my library have decided to ‘do a Bagpuss’ and wake up. In the half dark I follow their lead and in the morning there’s poets, anthropologists, Rhineland mystics and such peering at me over the coffee grinder. They won’t let me go straight to the news on Iran, Ukraine or Gaza, but point me somewhere else.

Eliade says that when we don’t have eternal-return type time we develop a terror of historical time because we can’t escape from it. Earlier today at the seaside I sat on the same seaweedy old steps looking at the same seaweedy old view – identical – that I have looked upon since I was a child. But I am certainly not a child now. I am not an innocent. My body soberly marks my passage, it’s horribly truthful. There’s an appendix scar, a finger where a wedding ring used to fit, rather too much forehead where once was a lively mane of hair. The regiment is in mutiny of its captain.

Historical time is real, and no one can convince me that it’s not. But is it the only type of time?

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