We Need The Ancient Good

A Dream & A Mummers Play

Last night I dreamt it started to snow.

For a while it was charming, then it wouldn’t stop. The sky, when briefly it was light, was a strange yellow colour, with large flakes chucking down. Then the darkness and the night would come again. I found myself inside the door of my parents, with a massive line of folk needing to take shelter. For a while it was chaos, with a dangerous amount of snow being stomped in or billowing through the door, being constantly opened to let in more of the vulnerable. The snow would melt into great pools of water and there was a danger of flooding. The freeform chaos needed shape, and once there was reminding of the ancient etiquette of the home, everybody calmed and there was suddenly space. The home could accommodate all, but there was an archaic mode of entry that had to be surrendered to, otherwise the dwelling could no longer offer shelter. There were terms. Some turned away, back out into the swirling dark.

It woke me at 5 a.m., this dream, and I sit in the dark with a flask of tea, writing it up.

I don’t pin dreams on the rack of endless above-ground interpretation, but I do give them space and attention. Even in the dream I knew it was a Green Chapel door the folks were coming through. In this hazy-just-woken-space I can hear the village bell strike six, which means I must have drifted in and out for another hour.

I’m remembering a book from my childhood (along with Alan Garner), the most significant of my early years, Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising. In that there is a great peril when it starts to snow and won’t stop. The snow – something I mostly love – becomes an agent of forces that do not wish us well. Profound mythological energies are invoked to protect what needs protecting. Only the Ancient Good will do.

I was reading yesterday the story of the Son of the Sun, Samson. And a time when Israel has been under the heel of the Philistines for so long it no longer even particularly objects to it. It has so absorbed its influence, is so long-term compromised that it has forgotten itself. It takes the troubling and solitary figure of Samson to cause the break from this compliancy. I’ll come back to that story another day.

It chilled me though, that detail. The going-along-with-it of ancient Israel because it can barely remember different. The inculcation. I know I have been Philistined, here and there. Shaped, slow drip, by indulgence and influence. Like Psyche down in the Underworld, or Vasilisa in Baba Yaga’s hut, I have to separate out the grains of good and bad intention, the wheat and the chaff. I am still not quite my ‘original home’, though closer.

Psyche having a moment we can all relate to

Orthodoxy has clear, loving practices in this regard. Prayer, diet, exercise, restraint, silence, joy, song, mystery upon mystery. It’s a distinct flavour. These practices help us stay awake. I would add sitting by the sea, helping the beleaguered, learning some jokes. There is still so much grace on the earth I find it charmless to endlessly pedal the erotics of despair, but I also suspect I veer from distinct and unpalatable realities. There’s a weary degree of self preservation in that.

In myth, when you are facing a monster, look at its reflection on your shield, not the abyss of its face. That will quickly burn you to cinders. What is your shield? Well it’s something that shows you the general shape of your adversary but not to the degree it paralyses you. The shield has some artfulness to it, some protection, whilst also acknowledging the visceral contact and potential peril of life. My books have been shields sometimes, and I shudder at the thought of their not being there: I would have been flattened without them in younger days.

So, Is the Dark Rising?

Well, yes, it is. The Prince of this World is everywhere. And the Under-Milk-Woodian reality I get to live in most of the time does a good job of protecting me from that. And I limit my view if the darkness is so profound I lose energy and then are no good to anyone else. I tend to write about spiritual warfare in the micro rather than macro; in the daily scrum of our life and thought (recent posts on Passivity, Guilt, Envy) because there’s an immediate accountability that can be freeing. There’s something to be worked with. If it’s all state of the nation addresses there can be something so paralysing in its grip (war, AI, conspiracy theories) that we get reduced in usefulness, but oddly addicted to the daily doom.

But I’ve also been naive to quite how grim things can get. Wars happen in other countries and I can pay my bills. I haven’t lived in a bedsit on hand-outs for quite some time. Bly always said that thirties German furniture was so beautifully made it made it impossible to believe the camps were real until the evidence arrived.

I don’t go looking for scars at this age. But then a dream like this happens. And I think to myself:

The Light is Rising.