In the Labyrinth

Mountain Beauties

It is such a luxury to live along the Colorado Front Range, surrounded by beautiful high mountains, forests, rivers, and a wide diversity of flora and fauna. We had a great time at a recent family hike up Mt. Brainard, which tops out at a little above 10,000 feet. The forests were full of wild strawberries, and the small streams were full of flowing water. But the real discovery was the abundance of wild mushrooms and lichens we had never seen before.

                               

                         

The Language of Cairns

We hike a lot across the Colorado Front Range as it is something almost every one is compelled to do here; the chance to be so completely surrounded by a magnificent landscape that invites one to enter into its beauty. It doesn't really matter what season it is, we always find a trail and head for it. I have hiked in thigh deep snow in winter and dry, blue skies in the summer, where the summer flowers bloom in brilliant colors even as the grass fades beneath the sun. Higher up, the red tails drift on the winds, magpies, redwings, swallows, blue jays, and crows gather nosily in the trees. I love all of it. 

But this year I become enamored of the random cairns that appear in the fields and mountains -- some the product of nature, stones tumbled together from rain and erosion. Others, created by hand, an impulse when called by a certain stone to bend down and spontaneously make a tower of stones -- multicolored, reds and grays, glittering with mica, marbled with blue veins, and covered in lichens. I have been taking so many pictures of them lately, and when I can, adding a stone here and there. It is a communal offering, a delicate way of saying, I passed this way, I greet you. I never seem to hunt for a stone, one always seems to magically appear beneath my feet, calling to my hand. I receive it and then gift it. 

 

 

For more on my family and our life on the Front Range, visit here. The Nature of Family

On this All Saints and All Souls

It seems the right day to reread this story. I am writing in the near dark, just the illumination of candles and a friendly pair of glowing pumpkins looking over my shoulder.  Jack Straw was one of those rare stories that appear instantly and somehow hardwired in my brain. I wrote it all at once, and it was very satisfying. Hope you enjoy it. 

The Marginalia of Flowers

These lovely Medieval flowers are always swoon-worthy in the margins of various Book of Hours, sometimes in medical texts, sometimes in gardening books. I can never get enough of looking at these beautiful images and feeling inspired, mostly to embroider May Morris-style textiles. They are helpful when writing historical fiction, for they reveal the unique preoccupation with flowers, each of which has medical and social significance. It is just those small details that provide a certain weight and body to describe a place, an action taken, a letter written, or the evolution of a plot based on the underlying language of flowers.

Johnny Fahey and The King of Crows

Many years ago in a moment of inspiration, I wrote a little short story called "King of Crows." It is still one of my personal favorites as it has threaded throughout a song or a tune humming beneath the narrative. I am almost never without a song running in my head, singing to the dishes, or driving in traffic, or even when writing I will hear the song that evokes the feelings of the moment I am describing. "King of Crows" is a small tale of love found and lost, of the transformative power of song. And I'll admit, the moment the fiddler Johnny Fahey appeared in my imagination, I loved him.  An itinerant musician, traveling the Southwest, he stops to rest in a box canyon, only to discover it is home to the King of Crows and his court. And there is one who catches his eye...(Read the full story here.)

 Excerpt from "King of Crows." 

The crows parted at Johnny’s approach, some turning astonished faces at his unexpected presence, but never stopping in their cries. It wasn’t until Johnny stood before the girl with the white skin and the black hair that the violent arguments subsided into grumbles and then at last into an uneasy silence. The girl stared at him with curiosity, her head tilted to one side as the glittering eyes fastened on his face. A smile crooked the edges her mouth, and the arched brows drew together in a challenge.

“Who are you?” she asked, voice sharp as a scythe.

“No one as grand as you,” he answered softly.

She lifted her chin proudly, the sweep of black hair flowing over the curve of her back. Opals sparkled in her earlobes like tiny stars, and around her waist she wore a belt of turquoise and fresh water pearls.

“What are you?” she demanded, shoulders hunched and face thrust forward.

“A musician,” he said, arms resting at his sides.

The cloaks of the crows fluttered in the rising wind with a dry chaffing noise.

“Play for us,” she ordered.

“Rilka, we’ve no time for this!” a man barked. Johnny Fahey turned to the man, hearing immediately the authority in this voice. A singular voice after so much discord. The man was old, the plumage of his cloak speckled at the breast and dull and ragged along the hem. But circling his forehead was a narrow crown of silver, set with turquoise. There was still power in his carriage, the heavy body leaning over his hips, his shoulders arched back. In one hand he held a scepter made from a fresh stalk of corn that gleamed as bright as newly minted gold. Johnny had no doubt but this was the King of Crows. He looked back at the girl called Rilka, and the music in his heart stumbled as he realized that the girl with moon-white skin and black hair was the King’s daughter. No chance for you, the sad chords played, no chance this haughty creature could be charmed by the fiddle’s song.

“I want to hear it, Father,” the girl demanded, “if only to hear something other than their bickering,” and she tossed her head toward the line of men who stood glowering at the quiet figure of Johnny Fahey.

The King rolled his eyes to the blue bowl sky.

“Spoiled bitch,” came a nasty whisper followed by snickering.

“Play then!” the King roared, turning on the restless court to silence them.

Rilka lowered her face, the shadow of her hair on her cheek not quite hiding the angry blush. Johnny winced seeing how the insult cut her pride to the quick. But he took out his fiddle and tucked it under his chin. He rested the bow over the strings and waited a moment more to hear what the wind would bring him. A tune came from listening, knowing what was already playing in the hearts of those gathered. He thought he could well guess at the tunes a crow might wish — something wild, with the harsh rasps of the double-stops. Then Rilka lifted her face, and he saw in the dark eyes an unexpected hint of longing, of gentleness.

"The soft whisper of her sigh touched him, and without intending to, he lowered his fiddle again and began to sing slowly in a clear tenor voice.

I met a fairy woman
At the river’s eddy.
And I asked her
Would anything unlock love?
She said to me in whispered words,
When it enters the heart
It will never be released.

There followed a silence, filled only with the rise and hollow of the wind in the grass. Johnny Fahey heard the slow beat of his filled heart. Abruptly he put the fiddle beneath his chin again and played a reel as fast as his song had been slow. He might gain her, the notes sang, but how could he keep her? He might lose her now, but she would be forever in his thoughts. Amber rosin smoked over the strings and the white hairs of his bow broke like the strands of a clinging web. He drove the tune, as if to empty the sight of her face from his heart, and yet as he finished the last notes he looked up and her glittering eyes snared him.

The Skin and Blood of Art: Atwood and Lorca

 

 

 

I am in a frenzy, following up from a 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 "siguiriya," 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. 

How I See Myself In the Stones

Every morning we hike at sunrise to watch the sun lift in the east and light up the Flat Irons in the west. The path is full of river stones and rocks. And at this one, I stop and say hello -- for it seems to me a perfect description of my working life: weaving, writing, and knitting. And I think, yes, even broken into three fragments, it is still whole.

What Does A Hero Owe to the Fantastic?

Many years ago, I wrote the short story "Vivian" for Martin Greenberg's Robin Hood Anthology. My take on the well-known tale was to imagine the complications of a man trying to be heroic, but unable to do it alone. This is in the spirit of behind every good man there is someone else making him possible. So what does Robin owe to the fantastic? How does he manage between wanting to be that hero and knowing that when he does becomes successful, it comes at the price of another. My intention was not to dishonor the Robin Hood narrative, but to explore the possibility of a more complicated story beneath the surface of the legend.

"Give me my bent bow in my hand, And a broad arrow I'll let flee. And where this arrow is taken up, There shall my grave digge'd be."                                                                                             — From the "Song of Robin Hood" 

Robin gritted his teeth and raised the longbow. He nocked his arrow, the grey goose fletch drawn back beside his ear. His gaze followed the curve of the animal's chest, imagining the shaft penetrating to the heart. The doe snorted as a breeze stirred the branches of the tree above and water droplets sprinkled her head. She shook, startled and then caught Robin's scent. The two knuckles that held the bowstring back dug deeper into Robin's cheek as he willed himself to remain steady. The doe withdrew behind the bush, seeking cover. Robin stepped forward to keep his target in view. Beneath his foot a twig snapped a loud warning in the wood. Within a heartbeat the doe leapt from her hiding place and fled.

Cursing, Robin swerved his body, trying to track the rump of the fleeing doe as he let loose his arrow. The hopeful twang was silenced abruptly as the arrow thudded harmlessly into a tree.

Robin hung his head and groaned. Sweat chilled his temples, darkening the curly hair. Damn the greenwood! he swore in frustrated rage. It had turned against him, willing that he should starve from lack of game and freeze with the cold damp of a harsh winter. He looked up angrily and stared out at the black and grey trunks of the wintery trees. The leather-brown leaves of the oaks shivered dryly in response.

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