The Voice That Thunders, page 15
He would then make social contact with the peasant or farmer, occasionally firing into the air, for the benefit of the approaching Germans, tell the Russians what was happening, that he had to have some food to show for his efforts, and that they must hide. He would then go to every one of the family and say: “My name is Albin. Look at my face. Remember it. I shall be back.” Then he would empty his magazine, put on his helmet, and roar off back to the troop of artillery, a slaughterer of inferior beings and a member of the master race.
One Russian farmer made Albin strip while he killed and flayed a goat. He cut the hide into a continuous bandage, and wrapped it around Albin from his chest to his groin, then sewed him in. Albin wore that skin for two years without taking it off. If it had been discovered by the Germans, he would have been shot, because it was official truth that the German uniform was proof against all weathers. Albin says that, in the two winters he spent outside Stalingrad, it was all that saved his life.
Eventually, because the Germans were running out of ammunition, the order came to shoot at military targets only. Somehow, the Russian civilians got to hear, and there was an exodus. Albin was lying in a ditch beside the road, next to a fervent Nazi. A babushka came along, carrying her chattels, and, when she saw the men, she lifted her skirts and squatted above them. “I swear to you, Alan,” Albin told me, “what she did would not have disgraced a horse.” And the fervent Nazi groaned, and said, “We cannot win this war.”
When Hitler announced that the army at Stalingrad would not retreat, but must die for the glory of the Reich, Albin turned around and set off to walk home. He walked across Southern Russia, and not one peasant or farmer betrayed him and some shared even the last of their food with him, because they remembered.
Soon after crossing the border he was met by the Gestapo, and he expected to be shot for desertion. But things were not going too well in North Africa, so before long Albin found himself retreating up Italy. By this time he was in command of a troop of gunners who shared his views about Nazis and warfare. He was on one side of a hill, and the Americans were on the other. The hill had been hollowed out to make a monastery, and, through the mediation of the abbot, Albin got word to the Americans that there was a group of Germans who wanted to surrender, and so a monk led out these bedraggled men to be made prisoners.
After a thorough debriefing, Albin was recruited into the American army, first as an interpreter, then as an identifier of members of the SS. Since every barrack room in the German army had its SS spy, this was not a difficult task. But, after several months at the occupation, Albin felt sickened and complained that he was acting as the SS themselves had behaved. The Americans asked him what he wanted to do. Albin said that all this had started because he had gone home to die for Poland. No problem, said the Americans. But you’ll have to join the Free Polish Army, who are training in Scotland.
Albin took part in the D-Day landing and fought all the way into Germany until the end of the war. He was then told that he could go home. “But it is not now the Poland I would have died for,” said Albin. So they asked him what he wanted to do. “Well,” said Albin, “the only place where I’ve been happy since this started is Manchester, England.” No problem, said the Poles. But you’ll have to be discharged from the British army. So Albin joined the British army. And ever since he has lived in Manchester, painting, the holder of the Iron Cross, two Eastern Front Oak Wreaths, the American Africa medal, the Free Polish Army medal and the British Defence medal.
Now what can this have to do with mythology rather than black farce? The answer lies in the Russian winters. Albin was always in demand among his fellows, because of his drawing skills. At first he supplied the barracks with pin-ups. Then came the first winter, when the Germans were eating dogs, cats, rats and horses. Only one thing was required of Albin: explicit and detailed pornography. By the second winter, the Germans were reduced to boot leather and cannibalism. Yet Albin was still commanded to draw. He had to draw witches, trolls, tree-spirits, dwarfs, ogres, warlocks, goblins: all the creatures of folk-memory. The dying men were crying out for contact with the collective unconscious. They craved myth: the images of everlasting life. At the end, they wanted spiritual truth. What makes me think that this incident is of significance is that it is not the only time I have come across it.
When the British were deprived of their American Colonies, they were at a loss for a gulag in which to dump their political dissidents, especially the Irish, their petty thieves and social inadequates. Australia was a godsend, better even than America. It was as good as the other side of the moon.
The route from England was by Rio to the Cape and from there to Port Jackson, the future Sydney. The voyage took up to eight months, and all but a privileged few spent that time below decks, in irons and the dark. The shallow draught of the transport ships made seasickness almost perpetual. Though deaths were remarkably few, because the ship’s surgeon was paid a per capita bonus for every prisoner that was unloaded alive, it takes little to imagine the conditions, both physical and mental, under which the convicts suffered. Yet they survived. They survived, not by plotting escape, mutiny, sedition, the making of future plans for villainy or the remembering of old triumphs, but by telling fairy tales to each other, which developed into competitions, and even into academic disputes and seminars, to establish a definitive text for a given story. And these convicts were largely illiterate. They had no written texts to compare, even if there had been light to read them by. The detritus of Britain became folklorists. Little may have changed since.
And, although bizarre, I don’t think that it was his patent mental disturbance alone that led Rudolph Hess, during the Nuremberg trials, to ignore the court and to spend his time reading Grimms’ Fairy Tales.
Now I do not want to get bogged down over nice distinctions between myth, legend, folk tale and fairy tale. That is a different topic, and we are all near enough in agreement about what we mean, for the purpose of what I am talking about. We are here to discuss writing the world through myth, and there is something to be said that may not be immediately apparent.
I should like to define “myth” as the dream-thinking of the people. Dream. And thinking. The difficulty for us, I would suggest, is that the Western mind first meets myth in its written form. When we learn the word “myth”, in childhood, we tend also to link it to the word “Greek”. Unless we become specialists, all our experience of myth is through the written word; that is: after the myth has entered history, linear time, been written down in linear words, thought of in lines. That is only the latest form of its development.
As most of the world still knows, the Western mind is a very small representative of homo sapiens. The majority of humanity is concerned with time in its entirety. In its purest form, because geography has made it possible, the Australian Aborigine has developed, over some forty-thousand years, the subtlest and the most sophisticated philosophy I have met. It is the product of an empirical pragmatism reacting with a lethally hostile environment. If it did not work, there would be no survivors. At its most extreme, we have the Australian Dreaming, where there are nine temporal dimensions, which we may barely comprehend intellectually, but which the individual, initiated to the degree, can enter and manipulate at will.
Once you are involved with the culture of dreaming, then you are also involved with time. And that results, among the Australians (and probably among others, but it is the Australians that I know) in considering learning to be a process of remembering. It was the same for the Ancient Greeks, who as usual had a word for it: “anamnesis”.
Dreaming and thinking are uncomfortable bedfellows for our intellects, since our own experience of dreaming and myth is likely to be heavily defective because we are trapped in linear time. We know nothing about the real effects of myths, and we are not good at remembering dreams. Yet research tells us that most human beings dream each night, and lengthily. Westerners seem to have up to ten separate dreams a night, most of which they forget, or fail to bring into their consciousness on waking. That means that a considerable proportion of our total mental experience is undergone as dreaming and is largely devoid of waking logic. Australians who talk of the creative past as “The Dreaming”, who consider that that-that-was-and-is-and-will-be is the real world, are not incapable of distinguishing dreams from waking experience, but they are aware of the former as equally essential to them as the latter. For them, dreaming and thinking are parts of one, unbroken spectrum. Such people, who are, importantly, preliterate, depend heavily on dreams for the formation of their myths; whereas more materially developed cultures, being less skilled in remembering dreams, will depend upon them less.
We pay a price for our literacy. Duncan Williamson, the greatest living storyteller in Britain, who has three thousand stories in his head, was illiterate until his middle age. Recently he said to me that it had become harder to learn new stories since he had been able to read. I also know an old lady, who is losing her sight and can no longer read, who told me that it was not all loss because she was finding it easier to remember the detail of what was important.
So seamless is the division among preliterate cultures, that they do not differentiate between dream, thought and myth. All are the repository of precept, wisdom, and what I have to call history, since we have no analogue for the word they use. Because the division is seamless, it is traditional to indicate to the audience that, in the telling of a special truth, we are entering a different time, a different space, an eternity that, by the telling, is perpetually being created here and now. The clock may still be ticking, but we, while listening to the story, are in sacred time. Hence the many “Once upon a time” formulae, with one of which I began today. They indicate by their ritualistic absurdities, their temporal and spatial word-play, not triviality but that eternity. All cultures have them, and Russian is particularly rich in this area.
“Long, long ago, when the earth had only just been made and the blue sky was being put over it, and it was all set about with wooden boards, in a place where met the longest rivers, there was once a man . . .”
“Ask; only it isn’t every question that brings good. Once there lived an old woman in a house thatched with pancakes . . .”
“The roads are open to the wise, and they are not closed to the foolish, and once, or twice, there lived a man . . .”
“Once upon a time, when I was young and handsome, which was not so long ago, as you may see . . .”
“Once, long ago, in the golden holiness of a night, that never was, and never will come back . . .”
After the revelation of a truth in a dimension of timelessness, the hearers have to be returned safely to everyday living. Just as the start of the myth is delineated, so is the release from eternity, by a formal conclusion that is an act of play, no matter how serious the story has been.
“So Jack and his two brothers put the pot on the fire. And when the porridge is cooked, we’ll go on with the tale. But, just for now, we’ll let it simmer.”
“They lived in friendship and in peace, they lived happily and they lived long, and, if they are not dead, they are alive now, and they feed the hens with stars.”
“I once stayed in his palace, and there was much that I saw and much that I had to eat and drink, but it all ran down my beard, and not a drop got into my mouth and I rode home on a gingerbread horse.”
“There are good people in the world, and some who are not so good; but he who listened to my tale is my own true friend. Now drink kvass, and go to bed. The morning is wiser than the evening.”
“The owl flew and flew, perched on a tree, wagged her tail, rolled her eyes and flew off again. She flew and flew to the end of the world and the back of the sky. I’ve been clearing my throat to tell you a tale. The tale itself has not begun.”
By reciting a myth, the storyteller remembers a creation, and, by remembering, is a part of that creating. It is best understood in that dreadful solecism “walkabout”. In walking, the Australians speak the land. Their feet make it new, now, and in its beginning. And the land speaks them now, anew, and in their beginning, by step and breath that meet in its dance, so that land and people sing as one. It is a symbiosis of multiple time. They pity our ignorance in these matters. For the initiated Australians, the white Caucasian has, they say, “one sense less and one skin more.”
In all societies, including our own, learning is a structured process. We do not try to teach a six-month-old child the Special Theory of Relativity. Similarly, in societies where dream and thought and myth are integral, there are versions of every myth for every level of initiation; and the final initiation is death. This means that a myth exists on a primary, secular level, which may be told to the whole community and to outsiders, and moves, by degrees, onto higher religious and philosophical planes, while remaining recognisably the first easy story, so that the individual, right up to the rank of shaman, is always aware of continuity and growth, of the simple coexistent with the complex and the esoteric. It is akin to learning, eventually, that “Jack and the Beanstalk” contains a Beatitude. How much simpler and more beautiful would Biblical criticism be if that were true for civilised, literate us.
Such a structured process is possible only so long as the form remains preliterate; that is, non-linear. Which means that the myths we have from history, and the myths that field-workers bring home, are the secular versions, even though scholarship may correctly detect, elements of the religious. But they are not survivals, they are pre-echoes. The people, however, in their varying degrees of initiation, or education, have the totality. In a few, rare cases, an outsider has been able to obtain, and to publish, a myth at both the exoteric and at an esoteric level.
An instance is Paul Radin, who collected the Trickster myth of the Winnebago Sioux in 1908 despite the warning contained in the esoteric version:
This, too, remember. Never tell anyone about this rite. Keep it guarded secret. If you tell it, the world will come to an end. We shall all die. Into the bowels of our grandmother, Earth, we must send these words, so that by no possible chance can it ever come into daylight. So secret must this be kept. For ever must this be done.
Radin’s expressed reason for publishing was that, if he had not, the material would have been lost, since he claimed to have gathered it from the last surviving shaman of the Winnebago. If he was writing honestly, then he exposed his unawareness of the relationship between the shamanic and Time.
It is my personal view that the material should not have been recorded. Only in linear time would it have been lost. The myth did not depend on Radin for its survival. Exposed to an unprepared world, his published text cannot be interpreted aright. It becomes offal and garbage: pabulum for such as the New Age mystics, who act as though knowledge does not have to be won but can be scavenged. It is a degradation of the myth as lowering as the demeaning of religion by the obtaining of a theological degree for cash. Ignorance is decked out as wisdom, and its adherents are led into darkness, as the myth warned.
The future holder of the story, of the myth, has to be conducted into the mystery in stages, to hear the truth from an adept. Every would-be Dante, who, in Dante’s own words, wishes to “put into verse things difficult to think”, must have his Vergil, or he is lost; and, even so, there is no avoiding the terror of the moment when Vergil steps aside, and Dante must go on, alone, with the image of Beatrice, in order to become Dante.
John Maruskin, in his essay, “Listening to the Printed Word”, says it at its most haunting: “It is in the speech of carters and housewives, in the speech of blacksmiths and old women, that one discovers the magic that sings the claim of the voice in the shadow, or that chants the rhyme of the fish in the well.”
Are we, then, lost: condemned to feed our imaginations with only the most secular level of myth, nailed to linearity? We are not. Can we write the world? We can; if we are willing to pay. The problem with learning to read and being subject to the writing, is that it ends up by being our only way into constructive dreaming. But certain people have innate skills, and they are the visionaries, the poets, those who use language that is the great constrictor when it is on the page. They release it into the subconscious by providing us, not with factual information of history, but with ambivalence and the paradox that enables us to interpret what is being said, and what we read, just as we would if we were dreaming. That is the way, via the poet, to the myth, to the truth.
The trap of the linear word and the thoughts that it produces is overcome for us by those people who can enter into the written language and extract from it this dream, this paradox, this ambiguity, which forces us to interpret. It is what I would call the “preliterate writing” that provokes response, and, in its provocation, awakes, differently, for every one of us, the dream.
For the Western mind myth is further removed from us by the failure of its providers to recognise the need for the material to be entrusted to the visionaries and the poets alone. The providers are, of course book publishers, and they do not know what they are handling.
Myth has been further diminished for us by its being out of copyright. With a few exceptions, this has resulted in the already weakened being reduced to a pap, because publishers have commissioned yet another gutless volume of “retellings”.
Contrast this with traditional societies, where it is common for a storyteller to be forbidden to perform in public until an apprenticeship of twenty to twenty-five years has been served. Only then is it considered that the skill has been honed to the point where the individual may be trusted with the material and given the authority to improvise within it. And there has, throughout, been a master, both teaching and disciplining the novice. The master is all important, yet is unrecognised by the publisher today, and so the poetry is given to the unschooled, and the myth is degraded to garish drivel for infants.
