Stag Cults, Hidden Countries
New Book, Event & The Genius of Lorca
Friends, how did we get to July already? How did this happen? I’m just dimly aware I don’t need to light a fire every night and boom! we enter deep summer. Haven’t even had an ice cream. Devon is making a good fist of attempting a heatwave and I’m hiding out in the comparative cool of my bedroom, with piles upon piles upon piles of tottery books (a few names at the bottom of this post). I will risk mezcal and a cigar in the courtyard at dusk but that’s it.
I have a couple of announcements before we dig deeper in. Firstly that I’m very happy to say that great writer and old friend Paul Kingsnorth and I will be having a gathering at Benburb Priory in Ireland on Sat November 26th, The Hidden Country. We will be dream-thinking (I wonder if I just invented a word) our way into an exploration of a Christianity remembering its mythologies, our relationship to place, animals, mystery, weather and wonder. We will look at our complex involvement with technology and also bring in the work of the philosopher John Moriarty. We are new to this but seek a very old way of relating to such a possibility. We’re really looking forward to it, and meeting like-minded souls that are already beginning to surface from the bushes and furtively whispering, “I’ll be there.” It’s a day and evening event and wild things will surface.
More info and enrollment at:
You can subscribe to Paul’s mysterious Substack here:
I’m going back out into the deep woods for a Peregrini sit at the very end of summer: to take stock, listen and give thanks. Just that time when you start to get the perfume of autumn in early evening. Gorgeous. I would hope that’ll be part of what I can bring to the Irish gathering, some in-the-field report from the wild that I’ll also share here.
I have a tight little book out come September. I do like it I must say (from the British that qualifies as a screaming endorsement). The good people at Hazel Press are putting it out with all sorts of love and care, it’s called STAG CULT. The London Review of Books are taking pre-orders at the link below (pre-ordering is always a huge help both to publishers and writers).
Here’s a glimpse.
Synopsis:
All gnarled up inside us are people, animals and places. We peer into a bog cauldron (a name for the location of preserved bodies in peat) and witness a giant, and within him a young girl and within her a hare and within him a salmon. Through this scrying we locate secret histories.
***
Dessu-m -mi -iss Lugedessu-mi-is
Prepare/right I them Lugus
I am at Hart Fell and looking in my bog cauldron.
It is snowing, the kind of snow that hushes the world, that creates white tracks between the centuries. There is snow on the Douglas firs, the distant hills, even the lively Scottish streams are near freezing. It is an absolute primordial enchantment of a thing. It is the heavenly thrill of deep winter I am feeling, the most essential of all wonderments I groped for as a child.
Somewhere in the forest there is the clank of a midnight blacksmith forging horseshoes for the heavy beasts, the Percheron, the Gypsy Cob. Inside all of us is the secret forge and the smithy, hidden fires and flakes as large as berries. I found this layer of my cauldron when I was ten and I lived in a mad and dangerous house. The words of Susan Cooper let me slip out the door and make energetic contact with the Old Ones. Susan carefully laid snow on my prints so I could not be followed. I am still walking.
It is shrill cold, exultant, this Merlin haunt. This was the axis- mundi for his mad phase. Not even kings could rattle jewellery to dissuade from his forest perch. He could discern seventy languages: of a dromedary’s hooves and the secrets of wives, of the roar of the black sea and the death-groans of a feudal lord, of cowslip, foxglove and the ice sheets of the north. He who sees a roaming bear in the night sky throwing stars from his cart. There was no gallantry in those early days, no Grail, no Round Table, just some tangled, brilliant understory, the Matter of Britain. Half of the people at Arthur’s court were animals really.
Merlin is the spirit-man, the two-tongued gabbler of both wolf and court speech, the lightning flailed hoof prophet of the Matter of Britain. Copse dweller, the creepy lad, the son of an Incubus.
And he is looking wistfully down at his sister, Gwenddydd. She’s bent like a skald-crow down there. She inherited a lot of her brother’s light when he disappeared, that was right, he meant for it. And it’s not like she didn’t pay for it. Who made that vast house in the woods he lived in? Not him, the nutbucket. Took her organisational smarts. We look at her in the peat and her beak of a mouth opens up and she radiates something. Like a lighthouse in a storm. Women will squat by the bog cauldron and wipe the light round their teeth and lips like goose fat. Light can be moist as well as dry.
Merlin is trying to advise his sister on love matters, rather late in the game for big brother sagacity I suspect. He actually attempts a few lines of an old Irish lyric poem by a girl called Deirdre, remembering where she came to know love. Croon into the cauldron Merlin:
Glen of my body’s feeding:
crested breast of loveliest wheat,
glen of the thrusting long-horn cattle, firm among the trysting bees.
Wild with cuckoo, thrush and blackbird,
and the frisk hind below the oak-thick ridge.
Green roof that covered a thousand foxes,
glen of wild garlic and watercress, and scarlet-berried rowan.
And badgers, delirious with sleep, heaped fat in dens
next to their burrowed young.
Glen sentried with blue-eyed hawks, greenwood laced with sloe, apple, blackberry, tight-crammed amid ridge and pointed peaks. My glen of the star-tangled yews,
where hares would lope in the easy dew.
To remember is a ringing pain of brightness.
***
Onto the main dish.
Over the next few posts I want to celebrate Lorca a little, and then also bring in a mythological ancestor of his, Dionysus. So today we set the scene, and next time we’ll carry some Lorca-like associations back to the one they called The Great Loosener.