In the Labyrinth

The Skin and Blood of Art: Atwood and Lorca

I am in a frenzy, following up from a terrific exchange in the comments of the previous post on the art of Katherine Ace. We were writing about the surface of art in painting and oral narrative performance of well known fairy tales contrasted with the subtext of evocative imagery -- the tension between the encounters of the real and the fantastic -- experienced emotionally in the work. Story, like paintings, move across a calm surface from beginning to end, in an enclosed world of art. But within those boundaries, we are challenged by the emotions, more often deeply felt rather than understood, that are churned up by the metaphorical images.

As a writer, who began in academia studying oral narrative performance and stories, I was captivated first by the emotionally charged subtexts (and which of course I was required by the dictates of the class to eventually articulate into rationalized systems of information. The "this signifies that" format.) And yet, I felt more like the Xhosa story teller who when asked to explain the meaning of an image in the story she had just finished performing, responded, "To answer that, I will have to tell you the story again." And when I was writing my masters thesis (the first one) on African Oral Narratives,  I wound up writing a novel instead, preferring to feel and to show rather than to explain and to tell. And I had to wait twenty years until I could finally acquire a Masters Degree in the exact opposite corner of my psyche, Modern Literary Theory. But I have never strayed far from that first education, and the hardest part for me in writing any story, is the need to first feel the turbulence beneath the surface, to feel it rise hump-backed from the deep, filling me with excitement and seasickness all at once.

Mo Crow offered this yesterday to the conversation from Margaret Atwood's "The Page" (Murder in the Dark Coach, 1983):

"5. The question about the page is; what is beneath it? It seems to have two dimensions, you can pick it up and turn it over and the back is the same as the front. Nothing , you say, disappointed.
But you're looking in the wrong place, you were looking on the back instead of beneath. Beneath the page is another story. Beneath the page is everything that has ever happened, most of which you would rather not hear about.
The page is not a pool but a skin, a skin is there to hold in and it can feel you touching it. Did you really think it would just lie there and do nothing?
Touch the page at your peril: it is you who are blank and innocent, not the page. Nevertheless you want to know, nothing will stop you. You touch the page, it's as if you've drawn a knife across it, the page has been hurt now, a sinuous wound opens up, a thin incision. Darkness wells through."

And there it was, under the skin, fleshed to the bone of writing. And it sent me rushing for my copy of Federico Garcia Lorca's luminous and poetic Deep Song and Other Prose, and I couldn't decide between the essay on the duendes or on deep song, so here are moments from both offerings:

In "Deep Song," Lorca is contrasting what he considers the superficial flamenco songs of his day with the more ancient, mysterious, and mystical "deep song" that lingers in the Gypsy "siguirya," which he describes thus:

"The Gypsy siguiriya begins with a terrible scream that divides the landscape into ideal hemispheres. It is the scream of dead generations, a poignant elegy for the lost centuries, the pathetic evocation of love under other moons and other winds...the melodic phrase begins to pry open the mystery of the tones and remove the precious stone of the sob, a resonant tear in the river of the voice. No Andalusian can help but shudder on hearing that scream."

And this from the essay "Play and Theory of Duendes" which defies direct translation but in his essay is described as a force more powerful than the angel who gives lights, and the muse who gives form. It is a force that surges up from the earth, through the soles, into the body, and it strips away anything that is not authentic emotion. Here is the description he gives of a performance of famous Andalusian singer, Pastora Pavón Cruz, known also as La Niña de los Peines:

"As though crazy, torn like a medieval weeper, La Niña de los Peines got to her feet, tossed off a big glass of firewater and began to sing with a scorched throat, without voice, without breath or color, but with duende. She was able to kill all the scaffolding of the song and leave the way for a furious, enslaving duende, friend of sand winds, who made the listeners rip their clothes...La Niña de los Peines had to tear her voice because she knew she had an exquisite audience, one which demanded not forms but the marrow of forms, pure music with a body so lean it could stay in the air. She had to rob herself of skill and security, send away her muse and become helpless, that her duende might come and deign to fight hand and hand with her. And how she sang! Her voice was no longer playing, it was a jet of blood worthy of her pain and her sincerity, and it opened like a ten-fingered hand around the nailed but stormy feet of a Christ by Juan de Juni. "

And so I move from skin, to bone, to blood. Each time I sit down to write, it is a dare to touch the page, to open the incision; to send away the muse and the angel and invite my duende to force me to write from the soles up.

Art: "The Jungle" by Cuban Surrealist Wilfred Lam. 

Katherine Ace: The Open Ended Metaphor

The structure of fairy tales and traditional folklore rests on the use of repetition to pattern the images into metaphors providing an emotional experience of transformation for the audience in the oral traditions as well as for the reader following them in print. Story tellers use repetition to shape the story and for emphasis on important details in each section of the tale. It begins with an interdiction at the home of birth, a repeated request to do or not to do something which usually by the third time is ignored. The middle section is a stripping away of identity and connection to the human world, the protagonist becoming lost in the woods, the veld, the sky, the sea. Swallowed up and sometimes ingested by the elements of nature and the fantastic.

Repetition helps to parallel the experience of the two separate moments: the repeated interdiction of "don't " becomes a new list in the middle of what must be done to survive. Feed the cat, oil the gate, clean the eyes of an old woman. But a price is paid, sometimes even a temporary death, as the old identity is stripped, and a new one is reformed in the fantastic world.  And the last section, becomes the return home, often perilous, success dependent on how well nature has communicated the rules of survival and how well they are followed. If in accordance with nature, the protagonist returns, restored to a new identity, a new status, and new purpose.

Each section of the narrative -- separation, initiation, return-- is patterned in a parallel fashion to the other. As in metaphor, there is a delightful tension between where it begins, where it meets with the impossible, and where it sublates the changes to become something new and unique. The dialectical journey in rites of passage, the death of the old identity, the reforming and re-emergence of a new identity, are combined into a single metaphor of transformation, revealed through images from the human world, the fantastic world, and the cache of inherited cultural archetypes in the narrative performance. 

All this is to explain, why I am so taken by the fairy tale art of Katherine Ace, who expresses her work with fairy tales in a very similar fashion -- painting the narrative with a series of visual metaphors folding in on themselves to express the unstable identities of the tales. She says this in her artist's statement: 

"The intersection of contraries fascinates me: ecstasy and agony; humor and tragedy; natural and constructed realities; experience and news. I find that I'm curious about the struggles of diversity vs. unity in human, animal and plant societies. I am captivated by complex issues that we all face, and yet experience personally, intimately. I am interested in the role of dark feelings, thoughts and states of mind in the process of transformation, l am drawn to fire beneath reserve."

And again here when she considers the evocative imagery in fairy tales that fuels her ideas as an artist:

"I am interested in complex story telling using cultural myths and histories that reach back into our collective and personal pasts. Figures and still life figures evolve as open ended metaphors for concepts and environments that are themselves also metaphors, and therefore fold - like fabric, time, or paint - back in on themselves. Like a poem, a painting is a surface. The depth is in the surface (oddly). It sort of dawns on you - like the way one remembers a dream sometimes, in fragments that float up all through the day, assembling themselves oddly, disturbingly..."

I find this description compelling -- for it is in the story tellers performance, or the writer of fairy tales to create the same tension between the surface of the tale, and the dream-like, metaphorical journeys as real and fantastic collide in the stories, and that it is the experience itself -- dreamlike and disturbing that holds our fascination with the tales. 

 The paintings from top to bottom: "The Juniper Tree," "The Frog King," "The Handless Maiden,"  "Six Swans," and "Many Furs."  (All my favorite tales!) For more information on Katherine Ace please visit her website.

The Shaping of Story: Working Through Ideas

My notes on re-reading Harold Scheub's work on oral narrative structures, and performance. They have  shaped the way I think of the fantastic in narrative and how it functions, and by extension how those "electric moments" when the real and the fantastic push against each to create a charged metaphorical experience in the performance (and perhaps in my context as writer, in the creation of the text.) Scheub's voluminous writings on Story and Performance continue to challenge my thinking and my writing every time I go back and re-read his work. 

Notes from Harold Scheub's Story : a really clear and detailed understanding of how story in the oral traditions become a focal point for harmonizing the different, idiosyncratic experiences and histories of the members of an audience. These are performances, and the meanings of the tale, from didactic to metaphorical occur in the performance as a reaction to the images and the aesthetic patterning of the tale to create a surface narrative from conflict to resolution while meaning is generated in the layering of emotionally evocative and metaphorical imagery. Within the performance the audience has a personal encounter with what is both familiar in the narrative and what can be interpreted and reinterpreted throughout the listener's life. (c.f. the child who hears the story, the young woman engaged in puberty rights, the new mother, wife or co-wife, the older woman who is telling the story to audiences of mixed ages or just her peers.)

Story is a combination of image and emotions, narrative movement, of form or patterning, the layering of imagery that results in story. The images are pulled from the inherited cache of emotionally evocative images which are paired with contemporary, more realistic images and their interaction in the story create a flashpoint. It is not in the suspension of disbelief that enables meaning but in the moment of tension in the pairing ("electric opposition") of the contemporary realistic images with the fantastic, ancient images which contain the deepest dreams, hopes, fears, nightmares of a world experience.

The storyteller organizes the images and the narrative in a surface movement from conflict to resolution, while at the same time patterning the emotionally evocative images into tropes that allow the audience to discover the nature of the relationship and its significance and meaning. The principle objective of the fantastic imagery is a poetic reorganization of the real -- and by the contrast to provide a new layer of meaning in the real.

Fantastic images provide a world of connections, of transformations, of metaphorical relations between the real and marvelous, and because many are inherited from a shared historical past, they will also contain fragments of history, ancient traditions that are reconstituted in a new way for contemporary understanding. Supernatural villains & helpers become manifestations of the struggle occurring to the protagonist. The fantastic elements are not an end into themselves, but as a means to push the story towards the metaphorical. It becomes the engine of change bringing the audience out to where uncertainty exists and then back to the familiar. The power of the tale is not one that emerges with a glimmering metaphor -- the performance of tale itself is the experience of metaphor and that is its power. 

Fantasy tales are a form of reasoning, a way of looking at events in the context of emotion.The combination of the fantasy and the real in the stories provides a new measure of the real world. The blending of the two, not just fantasy alone is important because without the mooring of the real world, the fantasy would be dull -- fantasy breaks our world into artificial pieces and as the storyteller combines the images of reality with the introduction of fantasy, reality finds itself within a fantastic context, forcing our thinking about those matters into new modes. 

Monsters and Guillermo del Toro's The Shape of Water

After reading this WSJ review of Guillermo del Toro's new film, The Shape of Water, I can't wait to see it. There is no one who so well understands the translation of fairy tale to modern movies as well as Del Toro. The film is a story of two unlikely characters; Elisa, a mute cleaning lady in a government facility and a creature/monster held captive there. As always, Mr. del Toro's monster is complicated:  “I have made it my evangelical mission in life to believe that what we call ‘monsters’ in art are the embodiment of a beautiful imperfection....They are the embodiment of the ‘other,’ and I needed to do a fairy tale in which we talked about empathy and love and saw the ‘other’ in a different way.”

The setting is both modern, industrial, and yet also removed so as to allow the fantastic to dwell appropriately and powerfully within the film. Here's more from the review:  ".... Mr. del Toro based his movie’s aesthetic around the creature’s look, nature and color palate. The government facility is designed in Cold War-era grays and greens similar to the creature’s colors. Other fantastical elements are featured in the film to make a world in which the government is hiding a mysterious creature appear more believable. In one memorable scene involving an overflowing bathtub, Elisa’s apartment seems governed by its own law of physics....If you imagine this creature in a realistic-looking movie, it doesn’t work,” said Mr. del Toro. “You need to make it elevated so something that is not a real being can exist in it.” 

 

Two New Gorgeous Poems from Marly Youmans

I am so excited to share two new poems from author and poet Marly Youmans (whose previous work I have reviewed here and here). Recently, I realized that the Journal of Mythic Arts Poetry archives was incomplete without something from Marly, whose work in mythic and fairy tale poetry is really stunning. I asked, and she obliged by sending in these two exquisite poems: Night Journey from Kingfisher and Prothalamion for Linnet, part of a collection of poems inspired by the forms of oriki -- African praise poems. 

In "Prothalamion for Linnet," Marly offers a unique perspective on the Child Ballad "Tam Lin." She begins the poem on familiar ground, recounting in lush and sensual imagery the brief but fertile meeting between Janet and Tam Lin in the woods, and the subsequent violence of freeing him from his enchantment. But Marly provides the reader with a new point of view: Linnet, the now-grown child who before her birth was already a vital force in the story. She was "in the rose womb/ The pollen bed of Janet, her mother," and "there, rose-lit, unseen, under /The seeking, pilfering, fey-tinged/ Fingertips of Tam Lin." Later, when Janet returns to confront the Fairy Queen , heavily pregnant, Linnet is present at the confrontation with Fairy Queen and the transformations of Tam Lin, from beastly forms to man. As a young woman, returning with her parents to wild woods, Linnet is the intersection of human and fantastic, of the castle and the dark forest where "Girls cannot go," of the idea and its creation into story.

"At dawn, Linnet dreamed a stream,
A certain, sure stream,
A stream threading silver through the forest,
Silver bedded below leaves of Carterhaugh.
Girls must not go there, not even with a hand
Held by a mother on the right, not
Even with a hand held by a father at left.
Girls from the kitchen must not go there,
Girls from the castle laundry must not go there,
Girls from the village must not go there,
Even girls from the city must not go there,
Not even with needle and scissors for swords,
Not even with polished serving trays for shields.
But this very morning Linnet goes there.
Linnet the storyteller, Linnet the singer of tales."

 The poem is a sumptuous re-interpretation of a well-known ballad, that gives it a rich and unexpected "ever-after."

 

The second poem, "Journey from Kingfisher," is a song of praise for the poet who is "Not jailed princess but woman/" and who with "With a candle and a notebook, bends/Above the waves sloshing against the stones/ Above the paths sprawling, spraddling from shore" whose creative will flows out from the tower window, "Out for distance, for horizon/ Her hands twisting words into a distaff, a staff/ Pulling words like clay into a potter’s, a beggar’s bowl/Hammering them into the shape of a pail." Here, most wonderfully, stories and tales are lifted out of the elements and nature, "Tumbling, slipping, sailing/From the edge of a world made of words/ Trusting that the tingling soles, bare in summer/ Booted in winter, will find/ Ground, that gold/ Is meant to fill a pail..." There are so many wonderful fairy tale references re-configured to describe the tangible act of creating stories with the intangible nature of the creative process.  

 

Art: Henry John Stock, "Portrait of a Girl Surrounded by Ivy Leaves," and Odilion Redon, "Light and Shadow, 1900.