Wild Christ & The Backalong
Parzival, (Part Three)
Hello friends, It’s been a grand week in Devon, a slowing of the wagon and stabling of the horse. Just losing myself in the various chores of keeping the home ticking over. It’s certainly spring now and I can feel the land readying itself for a big old burst of life. ‘The moors are preggers’ as the Bards would say. There’s a seagull balancing on the mossy cross in the churchyard and there’s an ocean-tang on the breeze.
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In literature it is only the wild that attracts us. Dullness is but another name for tameness. It is the uncivilised free and wild thinking in “Hamlet” and the “Iliad”, in all the Scriptures and Mythologies, not learned in the schools, that delights us.
Henry Thoreau
Places are going swiftly on The Skinboat & The Star now: I’m delighted to leave a short film here, Wild Christ created by Natasha Kozaily, who I’m collaborating with on a series of works. You’ll see her distinct talent and fresh weave of image and composition, threaded with the words. It captures the sense of excitement building for the programme, the sense of re-beholding an old, old story.
We talked about the Wild Christ phrase. There were a few caveats, but in the end it seemed to evoke a feeling encountered in many conversations in the last year, with all sorts of people. Not feral, not slovenly, but wild in the most elevated sense of the word. Something not easily domesticated, nor bent only to the civic. It is a wild, refreshing energy some of us are encountering. His compassion is unsettling, his miracles mind-boggling, his claims divisive. Since he’s occupied my home everything looks and feels different. There’s vines growing in through windows that never quite close.
A note for local folks. Backalong is an opportunity for me to try out new stories and ideas. Strange and beguiling scraps and dreams. A few disasters. It could be a Dartmoor tale, Inuit poetry, whatever is pushing my imagination along at that second. Unpolished, some told, some read, whatever emerges. Likely by the time you read this the tickets will be gone (it’s a diminutive tap room we’re squeezing into), but if there’s a good feeling I will likely do more, and probably find a bigger spot. I’ll record them, and if they have enough crackle I will leave them here exclusively for paid subscribers. Backalong is a Westcountry way of saying myth-time.
Anyhow, let’s find our way back to the journey of Parzival. For those of you finding this or my Inis Oirr essays heavy going don’t worry––this too will pass. I will strike some pithier notes soon enough. Further out and further in!
Shame’s Rough Music
Riding the energy of another man’s horse, Gurnemanz initially thinks that Parzival is Ithir, cloaked in his armor as he appears. The only clue is his badly slung shield. Gurnemanz willingly mentors the young man; helps temper his ferocity, gives shape to his ambitions. We should be so lucky to find such a man.