Red Bead Speech
Seeking a Liturgy of the Wild, (Part Eleven)
Greetings friends, before diving into the main dish, this new piece released today may be of interest: Under a Thousand Stars – The great Dartmoor storyteller Martin Shaw delights in the mythic depths of the rebellion this weekend in Devon.
“Some little time ago I stood among immemorial English trees that seemed to take hold upon the stars like a brood of Yggdrasils.”
G. K. Chesterton
This delicious sentence is something I keep returning to. I feel like I’ve composed inferior versions, not knowing this beauty had already shown up in Chesterton’s In Defence of Skeletons essay way back in 1901. Anyone with experience of a rural British winter (especially strolling at night) should have an animal-warmth response to the words. When your breath takes frosty shape before you and the night-time branches above seem to be cradling pale white stars in their arms.
As I write to you a coat, sweater and boots are drying out in front of a Dartmoor fire. Inspired by Chesterton, I strode out into the thistle and bog of the moor to gulp down some sluicing wildness and, dear reader, such a wildness did indeed find me. Down came great zinging wallops of hail that had me sheltering under a Tor and whooping joyfully. I remembered some lines from a version of The Madness of Sweeney that I’d been working on:
At night I make myself strong by
Running to the peak of the mountain.
When I make my mountain leap,
Wherever I land there’s a small fox
Gnawing on bones in the moonlight.
Small fox gnawing bones under the moon. We’ll all get gnawed on soon enough. No how matter how many gym subscriptions and wild mountain leaps. Best lean into life while we have it. So I am a bit mad up here in the bush, my barbaric yawp bounding about in the shouty dark.
I look down from my bardic perch on the Under-Milk-Woodness of my little town, with its glittery lights and bakery, fish monger, butcher and brown-beered pub, and keep happily hooting into the sharp darkness. But at some point I – as we all must – will tumble down through the wet grasses and into the town and put a key in a lock. My shape will change a little, grow smaller, a little tamer, and I will kneel, dripping, striking matches and lighting the life-preserving fire. Soon it will be school runs and the tax man.
So I’m back from the forest to the village, and I’m thinking about a story I’ve loved for years an old Siberian tale that I call Red Bead Woman. Within it is that eternal theme of domesticity and the untrammelled vast.
A premise within the story is that the son of a khan falls in love with a girl from the fringes of the land. It is prophesied that at their wedding she will speak, and as she speaks, precious red beads will pour from her mouth. Her language is so deep it will become jewels. The sisters of the khan will gather the beads up and turn them into a necklace that is central to the ceremonial life of the village. Dances, rituals and stories will spring from it. In the doing of this, a fresh relationship is established between the settled and the wild. It signifies dynamic health.
Of course, it doesn’t roll out so simply.