Below Us Is A Cave

Morning friends - I promised you something longer and here it is. I’m doing a lot of writing about earlier times in my life, simply because I’m starting to forget. You likely know the feeling.

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I am born quite poor. Just poor enough to know it. No phone in the house, no car, no television. This isn’t an attempt at an alternative lifestyle, we are just broke. Till I am sixteen I will carry a large yellow ticket in my pocket to school to get free meals. My face flushes the first few hundred times I produce it.

On my fiftieth birthday I find myself knocking on the door of the house, forty years after having left. An affable if bemused woman allows me to shuffle into her back garden. As I walk around the side of the house, I picture the Arcadia I am about to re-enter. To be blissfully invited back into the sweet long grasses and mysterious humps and tumps of my first hidden garden. It was vast, with the ruins of a castle at the end of it and occasional singing slipping in from the forest just over the wall.

I’d rescued my sister from any number of goblins that lingered in its shadows, I’d broken bread with Robin Hood and Maid Marion, heard the clip-clop, clip-clop of Arthur’s knights pass by, heard the jangle of their chain-mail, yelped and waved and pleaded for them to take me with them to Camelot. And here I am, half a century old, about to re-enter the great forge of my mythological conscience. My free-wheeling childhood adventures are about to gather me up and reclaim me. I can barely stand it.

What I find is a tiny triangle of dirt with a flank of weeds to the left and a large dustbin in the middle. The weeds I admit are in good health. There is a brick wall and some large bushes overhanging that could never, under any circumstances, be called trees. The ruins of the castle are nowhere to be seen. The whole place is drenched liberally in shadow from the houses piled up claustrophobically tight to the right hand side.

It hurts me to say it, but the place is dismal, a haunt where dreams go to die. Nothing to be gained here, Horseman, pass by! as Yeats has on his gravestone. It is tiny, sad, seemingly nothingy.

I learn an awful lot about myself that day, and the life that has followed.

But let me really tell you about my House of Origins. I just gave you the facts of the matter, but facts are sometimes a threadbare and miserly substitute for the truth of something.

I am a boy amok in stories. That is, I am a boy when I am not a Cossack, a shoal of pike, a blue-green Connemara mountain. I draw everything into myself. I am on the end of the bed in dusty light in my favourite wine-dark shirt with huge collars. I am drawing experience into me, hands waving around like a strange just-passed-toddler orchestra conductor. I am pulling the Rollright Stones into me, David and Goliath, the warp-spasm of Cuchulainn, Stig of the Dump. I eat and I eat and I never get full, never get queasy. I haven’t found yet a story that is poison. I will later. But not yet. I invite in Halloween and Easter and Christmas, I invite the majestic beech and clusters of blue-black berries and the last quiet Giant of the parish that I know hides out in the bush at the back of the estate whittling sticks.

There is a big earth out there, bigger than the stories I can tell of it at that age. Myths so intricate they tell-the-teller, that un-map the human, that disable conquest, that reveal patterns and inner-traditions we barely have the words for. Much later in life I will clear the decks entirely to give myself completely to them.

But for now, meet me. I am Martin. I am five. I am appetite.

Kids know stuff. It was kids that discovered the Lascaux caves, back in 1940. Simon, Marcel, George and Jim. On a walk through the hills and the green pines their little fox terrier disappears down a hole and they climb in after it.

It’s the horses they see first, a great herd of them.

Horses under the ground.

Their torch flickers and they see more. Bison, freakishly large cows, sorcerers that are more animal than human. Their lives change.

Below all of us is a cave just like that.

Somehow I found my cave very young. It’s why despite the first paragraph of this account, I can’t really claim to be poor.

It’s a religious house. On Sundays I am in the pew at the Baptist church, drifting in and out any number of imaginings. I hear about the snake and the apple, men of mud, women of rib, God resting, everything done in seven days. Sounds like poetry. But even then, I know it’s not the only story. There are books on the many shelves in my house that walk through other creation tales, other mythologies. I love them all. I am always dragging the books off to my small room and getting my head bent to their words. How did we get here, oh parchment? Reveal, reveal.

The Chinese say the universe was shaped pretty much like an egg, and inside the egg was something called no thing, which is the perfect place to breed some thing like the great creator Phan Ku. Phan Ku was a giant who lived for eighteen-thousand years, growing at a rate of ten foot a day.

He was one of those hairy men we hear about, horned like an animal, with woeful sharp tusks jutting out his gob as he chiselled shape to the world. He loved the deep, wet weight of the earth yin, and the vast, blue sky yang.

No, wait.

Nana Buluka, the Mother of all Mothers made the earth, then birthing twins, Mawu and Lisa, moon and sun. She was done after that. Then more twins came, some who ruled earth, some who presided over thunder and lightning, some who were the essence of iron, bringing tools and weapons. That’s what the Fon people of Abomey say.

No, wait.

There were two realms: Muspell in the south, ablaze with light and fire; Niflheim in the north, bleak with fog and ice. This was a kind of summer and winter and from the thaw between them grew a being, Imir. As he sweated through the night, a woman and man emerged from his armpit, a son from his leg. Imir was evil from the beginning, and he created the great frost giants. That’s what the Vikings say.

Beginnings have obviously made us thoughtful for a long, long time.

Pirates ruminate in Caribbean moonlight, just like we did on the plains of the Dordogne, fingering a bead between our fingers and gazing at a herd of deer. Consciousness.

Arriving into this life is one thing, but have we been truly welcomed?

Years and years later, life times later really, I sit with a Dagara elder, a shaman called Malidoma Some, and he tells me another story. We’ve been teaching for days in the Minnesota backwoods, and we have some rest time by the fire. He says this:

When a baby is coming in the village, everyone gathers round the hut for the first wild cry. From the oldest to the youngest, all are there. When it cries we don’t just hear an abstract yawp, we hear several questions:

Where am I? Am I safe? Do you claim me?

At that moment we respond with a roar so warm and sweet the child continues its transition from the spirit world to ours. We gather it in.

It makes me wonder what happens when a child is not claimed in such a way.

That they may spend thirty years awaiting the welcome they should have received within thirty seconds.

What does that do to the curvature of a life, that unfed and absolutely essential set of questions? Stories can do some of that claiming, mercifully at any age. If people tell you that’s not possible, stand up and walk away from them. Herods abound.

And in the making of me, I now need to tell you about the Claw.

This is something I have been forged in, like some kind of nautical apparition, a powerful initiatory device designed to create just the right kind of both awe and pressure in me. I will never be outside of the Claw. The House of Origins is squeezed in between this bold and ancient mechanism. It surrounds the town.

Outside Torbay, outside the white-washed hotels and endless coaches of geriatrics toddling around are two of the great, empirical teachers of my life. I doubt there’s a book I’ve written without some form of praise-making in their direction.

These are my Holy Hills of South Dakota, my Jerusalem’s wall, my Grand Canyon, my Taiga, my Tundra, my Sherwood. They are lightning conductors, and I rattle like a loose-limbed and happy bag of jumping seeds between them always. I never get used to them.

The two sides of the Claw are the moor and the sea. I will begin with the moor.

Three hundred and sixty five square miles of properly robust wilderness. At this I break the crust of the word Dartmoor and we gaze into some of its subdivisions:

Mewy country, Plymn country, Yealm country, solitary Erme country, Avon country, Swincombe country, Blacka Brook country, Cowsic country, West Dart country, East Dart country, Double Dart country, the South-East desolate, the Eastern Highlands, West Webburn country, East Webburn country, Ashburn country, Lemon country, Bovey country, South Teign country, North Teign country, Taw country, East Ockment country, West Ockment country, Lyd country, Tavy country, Waltham country, and the wildest, roughest-glory country of all: Metheral brook, Maish Hill brook, Great Mire stream, Cheriton Coombe water.

And threaded throughout are what some call volcanic granite eruptions from when the moor was the bottom of the sea, but we locals all know are large boulders (quoits) that Arthur of Britain lobbed at a local spirit when caught in some kind of mythological combat. In an old world manner, I cannot mention these quoits or boulders or tors without naming a few particularly extraordinary characters:

Gutter Tor, Rippon Tor, Thornworthy Tor, Great Kneeset Tor, Branscombe Loaf Tor, Leather Tor, Bagga Tor, Kitty Tor, Hunters Tor, Ingra Tor, Rattlebrook Tor, Sittaford Tor, Trowelsworthy Tor, Vixen Tor, Bearsdown Tor, Crockern Tor, Shavercombe Tor, Little Hound Tor, Laughter Tor, Honey Bag Tor, Gidleigh Tor.

I don’t know these titles at five years old, but I know I love the place. My aunt Mettie has a little cottage in the extremely rustic idyll of Ponsworthy, and sometimes we borrow my grandparents’ car and crawl our way up to visit and also generally take in the moor. I will dream later I am cosy in bed but also up on the moors in the moonlight. I tell my dad and he informs me that it was his dream as a child, so I may have inherited it in some odd and typically familish way.

Dartmoor is a great, unruly lump of undomestic wilderness. A jut of primeval wyrd, scored with pre-historic land divisions, and nomadic clusters of elegant little ponies, snorting and chomping the place up for thousands of years. It was there the fairy tales of my back garden erupted into the wider-scale mythologies of something profoundly old.

I lived on such a high hill in Torbay, my memory is that I could just about glimpse it. I longed for it. For its oxygen (stupendous air), its sheer bullish charisma, sudden mists and flat out sense of the ancient. I wanted to be like that. I wanted to be like Dartmoor. All I had was a bow and arrow and a large fur hat, but it was a start. It’s always good to view something from a distance for awhile. To long for it. Many years later I would make my home there, but not yet.

And now, to the sea. I am stamping my young foot on Dumnonian soil and naming shipwrecks:

The Llandarff, the Etna, the Hermes, the Marie Celine, the Vesper, the Nazarene, the Crystal Spring, the King Cadwallon, the Tehwija, the Hodborrow Minor, the Girl Annie, the Indefatigable, the Voluntaire, the Naiad, the Herzogin Cecilie, the Bessemer City, the Sand Runner, the Escurial, the Emerald Isles, the Tobacco, the Dasher, the Adele, the Spit Tooth, the Hero, the Lady Dufferin, the Knight Templar, the Dangerous George, the Torbay Lass, The Providence, the Maid of the Mist, the Valhalla, the Eliza Knick, the Bluejacket, the Badger.

Round our town are those ridged and purplish moors, but we face the sea, just a short stroll over hot concrete from the House of Origins. Bare feet, high spirits, kids heading in the same direction, seagulls, even foreign accents now and then. Arab kids, black kids, Danish, Swedes. Not a groundswell, but enough to know there is a life outside rural Devon. They rock up on exchange trips with European schools, or even further. This is a thrill, that dash of colour and sound. With exotic boats moored up in Torbay, there is a feeling that the doors to other realms can be at least glimpsed. I love that, the whole family does.

And I look out with my wondering, wandering eye and I imagine. Not of the steamers or cruise ships, but the older ships that must have passed through. Older even than the Pirate ships most beloved to me, but boats of animal hide, coracles, leathered sails. And with my rump on a towel and the sun overhead, I consume the visions like bread and beer, mentioning it to no one.

I have a brother and sister, both younger and filled with life, and cousins and grandparents dotted over the never-ending up-down hills of the bay. It is a life on foot, and every new route to a relative’s door opens up a capillary of knowledge in the endlessly scarified map of street and rural knowledge I am gathering.

One morning dad wakes me before first light and said we are going on a walk to a special place. I tumble into jeans and T shirt. Blink and stumble my way downstairs. As we turn the light on the glass of the back door is covered in wasps. 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. I know about the moon and the special feeling of the night-timey world, I’ve already touched that immensity, but here I am actually taking to the lanes, walking into it, hand reaching up to dad’s. As we keep our pace he speaks out loud a poem by Matthew Arnold - Sohrab & 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 burnished gold that crests our heads. Gradually the high blue stars fade. My small mind reaches into its fledgling deepness and surmises that dad’s words have done that, achieved a sympathetic magic, have literally courted the dawn.

We enter a large garden surrounding a manor house, Cockington Court. Cue catastrophic invasion of colour, scent, wonder and bliss. Any invocation of paradise, this is it. Freshly cut grass, bushes filled with songbirds, such a swoon of beauty it almost knocks me over. All occurring in this granular dance of night light and day light. Song of Songs, Piper at the Gates of Dawn, it’s all happening. We sip tea agog and eat mum’s sandwiches and I feel the happiness of my dad, not the darkness, and briefly know peace. Kids feel the anguish of their parents in the most animal of transmissions. The most visceral way. But this morning-has-broken morning the mood is of flat out rapture.

This will be a totemic event I will carry with me over the next twenty years. It will be a secret route I will walk over and over in my almost-asleep reverie most nights. And when things later became very terrible it will be the plank I will cling to as the boat goes down.

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Something coming up: I am talking live to Ian Mackenzie at his new online venture The School of Mythpoetics, May 18th 10am Pacific time on The Fall & the Underworld. Hopefully it’ll be rich conversation.

To register follow the below link:

https://schoolofmythopoetics.com/events/

My own beloved school, limbering up for its twentieth year is here:

www.schoolofmyth.com

Books and audio at:

www.cistamystica.com