"Transitions" Pavement Pounders' journal

Buy Pavement Pounder Publications Online

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 29 Jan 2014 13:16:00 +0000

Pavement Pounders CIC Publications

Our journal Transitions

Transitions is a journal of crossings. It explores in prose and poetry, journeying whether real or imaginary, through myth, psychology or personal account. The first issue was launched during the 2011 Folkestone Book Festival. Transitions 2 and Transitions 3 appeared during the 2012 and 2013 Festivals.

The Boots to Books Project sets out to record and expand on our guided walks in written form. We plan several booklets, based on the many local walks we have devised and delivered since we set up in 2010. The first booklet “Explore Folkestone Artworks with Pavement Pounders “ appeared in May 2013 to tie in with the Creative Foundation’s launch of the Folkestone Artworks.

All of these publications are now available to buy online

Transitions 1,2,3

Price £7.00 each

Folkestone Artworks

Price £7.00 each

Free delivery in Folkestone 0r £2.50 for UK Postage & Packing

Write Details in the box below

CONTACT 07505813297 pavementpounders@gmail.com

Buy Transitions 3

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 06 Nov 2013 11:06:00 +0000

Transitions 3

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 10 Oct 2013 10:20:00 +0000

Exciting news about Transitions 3 jointly published by Pavement Pounders CIC and The Mental Fight Club

We have finally got the manuscript to the printers. We shall be ready for the launch during The Folkestone Book Festival. More news nearer the time.

Edited by Maryanne Traylen. Contributors mostly Folkestonians and Mental Fight Club members. With a poem by Ben Okri . Illustrations by Rosemary Clunie. Cover image by David Lay.

Retailing at £7.00 For Advance orders e-mail Pavement Pounders@gmail.com or phone 0750-581-3297

Transitions 3

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 29 Jul 2013 16:45:00 +0000

Pavement Pounders Publications

Coming Soon Transitions 3

The third issue of our journal

A co production with Sarah Wheeler and the Mental Fight Club

Edited and published by Pavement Pounders Community Interest Company

Boots to Books. A new publishing venture

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 03 Jul 2013 11:48:00 +0000

The Boots to Books Project

The Boots to Books Project sets out to record and expand on our guided walks in written form. Over the next three years we plan several booklets, based on the many local walks we have devised and delivered since we set up in 2010. The first booklet in the series: “Explore Folkestone Artworks with Pavement Pounders “ appeared in May 2013 to tie in with the Creative Foundation’s launch of the Folkestone Artworks.

Other titles will include: St Eanswithe And The Churches Of Folkestone, The Building Of Folkestone and Literary Folkestone

Thank you to Folkestone Town council for providing funding to get this project started

Readings from Transitions at The Dragon Café

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 12:40:00 +0000

Audio Clip featuring an interview with David, Maryanne and Maiuko about our readings and music from Pavement Pounders journal "Transitions 2" Clip ends with Maiuko singing

http://dragoncafe.co.uk/dragon-radio/

Dragon Radio 2 | dragoncafe.co.uk

dragoncafe.co.uk

dragoncafe.co.uk -

Transitions 1 and 2 can be bought from Pavement Pounders £10 each or £15 for one each of issue 1 and 2

01303 227150

Be at the Dragon Café

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 15:49:00 +0000

An Exciting 'Must See & Must Hear'! 6.30 - 8.30 next Monday 18th Feb
@ The Dragon Cafe.

FREE Event.

Maiuko & Friends, celebrate with jazz, poetry and prose the theme of personal journeys, transitions &

transformations.- launching a Mental Fight Club partnership edition of the Transitions Journal -Published and edited by Pavement Pounders CIC

to which you might like to contribute some writing?

Readings from Transitions 2 and music from Maiuko at The Dragon Café

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 09 Feb 2013 17:56:00 +0000

Readings from Transitions 2 and music from

Maiuko at The Dragon Café

02/09/2013

0 Comments

The Dragon Café is Mental Fight Club’s latest creative project:
a relaxing café and imaginative space, open to all, located in the
Crypt of St George the Martyr Church, opposite Borough tube
station. The creative director of Mental Fight Club is Sarah Wheeler ,
one of the contributors to Transitions 2 which was launched at the
Folkestone Book Festival in November 2012.
To launch the search for contributors to Transitions 3 which we intend
to publish in May 2013. We are staging readings from Transitions 2 with
music from the Afro-jazz singerMaiuko a contributor to both Transitions 1
and 2.
Transitions 3 invites people to write about their journey into mental illness
and their recovery from it. By turning back to myth perhaps we can look
forward to a greater story of which we are part, and by understanding
the universal aspect
of our own personal experience be freed from its constraints.
Our theme will be Ascent. Recovery.
Transformation. Reintegration.

‘So much good writing is in itself a form of health’

Reading and Music

From Pavement Pounders Publication;

Transitions 2 at the Dragon Café,

The crypt of St George the Martyr opposite

Borough Tube.

7 p.m Monday 18th February 2013

Entrance Free

Links

http://pavementpounderscic.weebly.com/index.html

http://dragoncafe.co.uk/

Funding for a third Issue

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 20:46:00 +0000

We now have funding for a third edition of Transitions

We are delighted to announce that issue 3 will be published jointly by Pavement Pounders CIC and "The Mental Fight Club"

Transitions, a journal of crossings, is a forum for ideas celebrating crossings whether they be universal or personal, real or imaginary, in story, article or poem. It invites a personal take in other words of the universal themes of transition and transformation.

Transitions 1 was launched in September 2011 during the Folkestone Triennial to reflect the mythological concepts of migration, home and otherworldliness

Transitions 2 again addressed transitions and transformations but with the ‘liminal’ and the ‘fountain’ as its particular themes

Transitions 3 invites people to write about their journey into mental illness and their recovery from it. By turning back to myth – even that of Orpheus’ or Demeter’s descent - perhaps we can look forward to a greater story of which we are part, and by understanding the universal aspect of our own personal experience be freed from its constraints.

Our theme will be Ascent. Recovery. Transformation. Reintegration.

‘So much good writing is in itself a form of health’

Links

http://mentalfightclub.com/

http://pavementpounderscic.weebly.com/index.html

Article from Transitions One

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 01 Dec 2012 11:28:00 +0000

A Million Miles and Back Again

Gillian White

Most decisions I have made in my life have been dictated by circumstances rather than any burning ambition to radically transform it. It is only now that I can see that a pattern has emerged and maybe I have reached my destination after all. My stopping off points always lasted longer than I had intended and two of them have consisted of living by water: Bodensee in Germany and Lake Como in Italy. However there has been a constant in my life and that’s been brief visits to Folkestone.

I was born in Ashford, Kent, then a small market town, when the most exciting thing to do was witness the Golden Arrow going through the station on its way to the continent, or follow the cattle being driven down Bank Street to the market. In the late 1950’s I spent summers in Sandgate with my friend and her widowed mother. I remember them as times of complete freedom when at the outdoor lido on the seafront in Folkestone we swam all day in freezing water, lost our pocket money in the Rotunda and cycled down Sandgate Hill praying our brakes wouldn’t fail. As long as we were home for tea no one worried about us.

I had always been interested in the arts which had begun perhaps with my education at Ashford School for Girls, and my spare time was spent simply enjoying the act of creation. At school we had intense needlework lessons where we learnt to make our own clothes and embroider. Our teacher wouldn’t tolerate mistakes. Everything had to be unpicked if it wasn’t up to scratch. My father always said that the soundtrack of my teenage years was one of the clank of the ironing board opening in order to press seams, my running footsteps up the stairs to sew on my machine and my exasperated shout when I realised I’d stitched a cuff to the sleeves the wrong way round. I taught myself to knit and weave on a small loom much to the amazement of my mother who had no interest in making anything. My father had made a theatre for my string puppets and I would write epic plays, make scenery and send visiting relatives to sleep as they sat through a three hour production which only ended when all my characters had died. After leaving home any spare time was spent teaching myself the techniques of lino printing, crewel embroidery and designing my own patterned knitwear.

To this day I still experience the same excitement when I purchase new materials to work with and plan how to use them. The colours and textures trigger ideas. Then I can’t wait to begin and feel bereft when I have to put them to one side and get back to everyday tasks.

In the early 1960’s there wasn’t much for young people to do in Ashford, so my friends and I would visit Bobby’s, the department store in Folkestone, ostensibly to have afternoon tea and listen to the pianist, but really to meet our boyfriends away from parental supervision. Yet Folkestone, via my parents, inspired my love of classical music at a young age. My obsession with opera began when they took me – crouching low in the car to avoid being spotted by my younger brother who would have caused a scene - to concerts at the Leas Cliff Hall. Here I saw Yehudi Menuhin, Vladimir Ashkenazy, John Barbirolli, a concert of Rigoletto, the Halle Orchestra and the London Philharmonic Orchestra as well as other big London orchestras. I also remember the magic of the moment when the curtain went up on the pantomime at the Pleasure Gardens in Folkestone and triggered a life-long love of theatre.

In the early 1970’s my grandfather, like many retired people came to the South Coast to spend his remaining years, but at the Four Square Hotel, Sandgate Road where he was staying, he met his second wife and moved into a flat in Castle Hill Avenue aged 79. On a trip back from Italy I travelled to Folkestone to visit him and introduced him to his great-granddaughter just before he died.

Encouraged to be independent and travel at a young age I can remember sitting on my suitcase one January on the outside deck of a ferry from Folkestone, hoping I wouldn’t be blown overboard or be sea-sick. In those days, unlike today’s luxury car ferries, there was very little indoor cabin space and no facilities at all. My youth seemed to have been spent in a state of excitement or fear that I would get on the wrong train to Southern Germany or lose my luggage. During the first visit to my exchange family I never quite knew whether we were going shopping, visiting historic sites or sailing on Bodensee. I would even misunderstand the time and turn up an hour late. This enabled me to learn German very quickly.

When my parents moved to Hythe in the mid 70’s, Folkestone Central again became an arrival point for my children and I visiting once a year. I would take them to the Folkestone Rock shop where they would stand for hours watching the rock being made or spend their pocket money in the joke shop.

My long transition period began when I got divorced and having to find a new career stumbled into Retail Management which came to an abrupt end in 1995 when the business I was working for went under. My health also suffered and I seemed to have reached a dead end with no desire to be continuously beating last year’s figures. It was more than time to consider my options. Unbeknown to me my real journey was beginning.

I was offered a place in a small community arts group run by Canterbury Social Services that was so successful it was extended to one day a week. At last I would be able to realize the act of creation that I had so much enjoyed from a young age. First it was simply a matter of finding the confidence to express myself through experimenting with different materials. Then I began to believe I could think about further education. Three of us gained places on the Access Course for Fine Art and soon I found myself fully engaged, drawing trees in the college grounds, having tutorials, writing essays and turning into a completely different person. Never believing I had the capability to go for prolonged study - after leaving school in the 60’s I’d rushed up to London to enjoy the excitement of the King’s Road - I was amazed to be offered a place on the part-time Fine Art Degree Course. With my theatre lodgers and a small mortgage I could just about finance it. This decision transformed my life and without knowing it I was approaching my destination. Folkestone.

After so many years spent in a restrictive working environment, this course, encouraging me to be adventurous, debate ideas and be part of the contemporary art scene, was to become the most influential experience in my life. I made many friends at university - we’ve just celebrated ten years since we graduated - but we couldn’t be students forever and I begun my career as a practicing artist. I started work on my house in Canterbury to turn it into an artwork and open it to the public. I exhibited all over Kent in group shows and came down to Folkestone on two occasions to show my work in Georges House Gallery. Many of my theatre lodgers purchased pieces of my work during their stay with me. They had lived in my house for a week surrounded by my work so how could they not leave without taking something with them! One friend practicing around Canterbury was involved with Strange Cargo’s first giant, Torrent of Littlebourne, in their Giants project. I helped by waving Torrent’s left arm for the 2006 Charivari in Folkestone and after the parade spent a blissful day on The Leas, enjoying the stunning views of the Channel and the wonderful community atmosphere. I began to think I could live in Folkestone. In fact I nearly returned again that day as I fell asleep on the bus to Canterbury and if I hadn’t been woken up by the driver, would have ended up back in Folkestone Bus Station.

At last I had to make a decision about the outcome of my journey and as Folkestone’s art scene was beginning to thrive it seemed the logical place. The road I lived in had become so over-run with student housing it had lost that cohesive, peaceful community of the last twenty years. It was time to sell up and move. For six years running after graduating, I had opened my house to the public for the Artists Open Houses event during the Canterbury Festival. My farewell exhibition took place at the same time I was showing prospective buyers around my house. One Saturday morning, twenty five viewers for the exhibition were dashing about the house and garden and the front door bell was ringing continuously when the estate agent rang to say she was bringing a client round. Denim skyscrapers on my dining room wall complete with sound recordings of New York streets, a giant scrabble board in the living room, carved wooden feet in the bath, a mural of Lake Como on the back of the house and an installation about life on tour in the bedroom where my Marlowe Theatre lodgers slept, filled my tiny house. I’m not sure the estate agent had ever conducted a viewing like this. When her client was asked about the art work she had to reply that she was here to buy the house. Yet she made an offer to buy there and then! So much for having to clear away clutter, maximize space and have coffee brewing to give the right atmosphere in order to sell a house.

In the afternoon I was talking to a regular visitor about going to Folkestone and he said he had a house there to rent which I could move to when I was ready. I was astounded. I had sold my house in the morning and found somewhere else to live in the afternoon without so much as stepping outside my home. Yet it was an emotional day. I was faced with parting with a much loved home and, as a city girl, moving to a small seaside town which was beginning to reinvent itself.

I could say I arrived in Folkestone with a bang. I had barely settled in when on 28th April, 2007, Folkestone had an earthquake. Fortunately the house I was renting was only slightly damaged and, standing in the street wearing pyjamas, was a way to get to meet the new neighbours. Though I was a little anxious, having dramatically uprooted myself after so many years in Canterbury, Folkestone’s regeneration was well under way and I had the first Triennial of 2008 to look forward to.

One morning I gave up unpacking boxes and went for a long walk through the Coastal Park and beyond. I found a semi-circular bench below the amphitheatre surrounded by shrubbery on the bank behind that made me invisible to anyone passing until the last minute. Though it was only April, the sun was very hot. As I sat in this secluded spot the only sound I could hear was the sea. Above the hedge opposite I could catch a glimpse of the most incredible blue and turquoise patch. The sky was so clear and the light so bright, I had to shut my eyes for a few moments. I could have been in the South of France or on a Greek Island. I could look out to sea and be happy just to be still. This, I thought, was why I came to Folkestone: all this on my doorstep and only having to walk to it.

It is 2011 now, I have a beautiful flat in the Creative Quarter with stunning views from the viaduct to the harbour and on clear days a glimpse of France. Early in the morning I can stand on my terrace, drink a cup of coffee and smell the sea. I can see ships in the Channel balancing on the horizon, looking as if they’ll topple over the edge.

Last summer my childhood friend came to visit and we stood together where the Lido had been and reminisced on our happy days of complete freedom in Folkestone. That freedom has changed into something else. With art and a new home merging to become more than a stopping off point my transformation feels well near complete. I began my journey with no timetable and no direction but my transition periods were building experiences for my homeward destination. An Odysseus returning to Ithaca it has taken a long time for me to arrive in Folkestone.

Folkestone too is on a journey. Like me it has had some very low periods and struggled to thrive. New generations will need other reasons apart from revisiting childhood memories to come. The ferries have gone and the Channel Tunnel speeds people past Folkestone. The new High Speed train taking less than an hour from London has brought more people, but it’s still a town of enormous economic divides and social problems. The Leas and the west end retain their architectural elegance and wide tree lined streets but seem almost separate from the east. I have watched as crumbling properties in The Old High Street have been refurbished or rebuilt through the generosity of Roger DeHaan and his vision to bring a thriving community to this end of Folkestone, despite the time it takes to regenerate a town, especially during a recession. Although after many years of struggling, I am now for the first time in my life, financially stable, I look around and see other people struggling.

As I walk up and down hill, from East to West Folkestone I absorb Folkestone’s history. A young girl sitting on a ferry, I had no idea that in 1914 young men had left from Folkestone harbour to fight in the trenches, never to return. Now, I can see the changes taking place. The Creative Foundation have a mission to put Folkestone on the map again as a national and international centre for the arts, improving access to education and promoting arts festivals. I hope that the visitors to this year’s Triennial will see Folkestone as a place which is on its own long journey to prosperity. I have found a safe harbour to stay. Though I am still building my life in Folkestone and on some days look out to sea and wonder if I should journey again, low tide prevents me leaving this particular harbour. Besides which I have no desire to travel further. My transformation can continue on dry land as a part also of Folkestone‘s regeneration.

So yes in a sense I have arrived in Folkestone. But in another, and if arrival is to do with creation, I never left. This drive to be creative, which I never question, has been with me for ever, as if the creative process itself were an ongoing epiphany. I embark on long complicated projects, forget to eat or sleep and before I have finished one piece, am thinking about the next. If you give me pencil and paper, I will have to reshape the pencil and sculpt the paper. I see the shape of mundane objects and want to give them a new identity, and then if people smile and reach out to touch them, I feel my idea has worked. At times, I want to be both architect and entertainer and feel the word artist is too restrictive for my practice. As a child, my mother told me I had too much imagination which I now realise was never a curse but something to celebrate. Having only snatched moments to be creative in isolation the freedom of expression I found at university meant that at last I could show my work and perhaps inspire others to realise it is never too late to transform one's life.

Transitions 1 & 2

Transitions 1 & 2 are published by Pavement Pounders CIC in the Creative Quarter Folkestone with contributions from mainly local authors,

Contributors to Transitions Two

Anon, Georgina Baker, James Bennett, Ray Duff, Maiuko Fi, Jim Fitzgerald, Maggie Harris, Paul Harris, David Lay, Trevor Minter, Mike Sanders, Maryanne Grant Traylen, Annie Webb and Stephen Welch.

Here is a link to images of the launch of Transitions at Googies Art Cafe

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=488901747810005&set=a.488899347810245.120460.196290897071093&type=1&theater

Music provided by Maiuko Fi Afro jazz singer accompanied by --Jus-i pianist and Scott Willey double bass

Link to article in local press by contributor Ray Duff

http://www.localrags.co.uk/index.php/News/2012/11/11/transitions-2-launched-at-folkestone-book-festival/

launch-of-our-journal-transitions-in-folkestone-tonight-7th-november-2012.html

http://www.flickr.com/photos/61446490@N07/sets/72157632010292160/

http://flic.kr/s/aHsjCQxJwU

Copies can be had Priced £10 each from us phone 01303 227150. Mob 0750-5813297

Published by Pavement Pounders

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 17:38:00 +0000

TRANSITIONS, A JOURNAL OF CROSSING

Transitions is published and edited by Pavement Pounders Community Interest Company who are based in Folkestone's Creative Quarter.It comprises articles by mostly local authors.

Transitions One

The First edition, Transitions One was published during the Folkestone Triennial in September 2011. Transitions One is edited by Maryanne Grant Traylen, PhD, and illustrated with drawings and other artwork by artist David Lay - a journal of crossings from the edge, Folkestone itself. It explores the archetype of journeying whether real or imaginary, through myth, psychology, personal account, story or poem, and is divided into three sometimes overlapping sections: Ships and Arks, Sea Crossings and Descents and Exiles and Epiphanies.

Contributors to Transitions One

James Bennett, Julie Crick, Jim Fitzgerald, Maryanne Grant Traylen, Maggie Harris, Shaukat Khan, Nikolaj B. S. Larsen, David Lay, Maiuko Fi, Sonia Overall, Sunjeev Sahota, Annie Webb and Gillian White

Transitions Two

Transitions Two was launched during the Folkestone Book Festival in November 2012.Again edited by Maryanne Grant Traylen with illustrations by Paul Harris, Anne Wimsett, Michael Sanders, David Lay and Maryanne Grant Traylen.with articles from Anon, Georgina Baker, James Bennett, Ray Duff, Maiuko Fi, Jim Fitzgerald, Maggie Harris, Paul Harris, David Lay, Trevor Minter, Mike Sanders, Maryanne Grant Traylen, Annie Webb and Stephen Welch.

Images of the Launch of Transitions Two at Googies Cafe

This Blog

This blog exists to provide information about the publishing arm of Pavement Pounders CIC. Here you will find Extracts from Transitions one, Information about Transitions Two, launched during the Folkestone Book Festival in early November 2012,.news of future issues, and most importantly tells you where you can buy a copy

We currently have no public funding so rely solely on sales

Help us to make Transitions Three possible. Transitions One and`Transitions Two
£10 per copy from us order by e mail pavementpounders@gmail.com or phone 01303 227150
or through Paypal most credit cards accepted

Special Offer buy a copy of both issue one and two for £15.00 the pair.

Postage and packing Free until Christmas (U.K only)

"Transitions 2" is Launched at Folkestone Book Festival

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 18:59:00 +0000

"Transitions 2" is Launched at Folkestone Book Festival

David Lay director of Pavement Pounders CIC who both
publish and edit Transitions introduces the readers

Transitions 2 is published by Pavement Pounders CIC in the Creative Quarter Folkestone with contributions from the following mainly local authors, Anon, Georgina Baker, James Bennett, Ray Duff, Maiuko Fi, Jim Fitzgerald, Maggie Harris, Paul Harris, David Lay, Trevor Minter, Mike Sanders, Maryanne Grant Traylen, Annie Webb and Stephen Welch. Copies can be had priced £10 each from us phone 01303 227150. Mob 0750-5813297

It was launched at Googies` Art Cafe, Rendezvous St., Folkestone as part of The Folkestone Book Festival 2012

Here is a link to images of the event at Googies

Images of Transition Two launch

There were readings from several contributors.

Music provided by Maiuko Fi Afro jazz singer accompanied by --Jus-i pianist and Scott Willey double bass

Link to article by Ray Duff in the Hawkinge Gazette

http://www.localrags.co.uk/index.php/News/2012/11/11/transitions-2-launched-at-folkestone-book-festival/

Ours Are the Streets Sunjeev Sahota

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 14:59:00 +0000

More from Transitions one

Out of Tune’ A V Dolven

Exile

In the Descent myths Demeter is separated from Eurydice, Isis from Osiris and Orpheus from Eurydice. The story of Cupid and Psyche is also a tale of separation and sometimes of unity. It warns of the analytical frame of mind that destroys synthesis - analysis kills and synthesis brings to life - that Psyche uses when she looks at her lover through the outward rather than inward eye. Analysis breeding paralysis we might say. This understanding of the myth illustrates Cartesian dualism of eighteenth century’s so called Enlightenment that separated mind from body, subject from object, consciousness from unconscious, humanity from the divine, heart from head - splitting human beings down the middle.

Yet this psychological characteristic of twenty first century mind is not as immediately apparent as the plight of an immigrant cut off from much he loves and knows. Where Nikolaj Larsen’s film shows the hope of migrants for the Promised Land, Sanjeev Sahota in novel Ours Are the Streets shows disillusion and despair of a second generation immigrant’s uncertainty with identity and belonging. Yet he takes us under his protagonist’s skin teasing us with an empathy we feel for this outsider - split down the middle, caught in a kind of limbo-land between much he loves and despises - whose action we can’t condone.

In Ours Are the Streets the feeling of longing and loss, though never self-pitying, is painfully acute. It speaks of an exile more enormous than that from countries or being sandwiched between cultures. The compulsive beauty of Sahota’s flowing prose where the ordinary is bold and highlighted by something extra, but ultimately disappoints, because of the protagonist’s own cultural isolation, is raw reminder that it doesn’t matter how far we’ve travelled. The amount of loneliness or un-belonging we can unburden doesn’t equal the miles.

This is brought home in the film Welcome about a Kurdish boy who has travelled four thousand miles and now wants to swim the Channel, like Leander, to reach his girlfriend who is betrothed to another. And yet, remarks his trainer, he himself cannot even cross the road to reach his estranged wife.

What follows are extracts from Sanjeev Sahota’s haunting novel Ours Are the Streets published this year by Picador.

Extracts from

Ours Are the Streets

Sunjeev Sahota

Picador, 2011.

Second generation immigrant in two worlds.

We were meant to become part of these streets. They were meant to be ours as much as anyone’s. That’s what you said you worked for, came for. Were it worth it, Abba? Because I sure as hell don’t know. I used to just slam the door and stand with my back to it, wondering, What end? Whose end? When is this fucking end? Because what’s the point, man? What’s the point in dragging your life across entire continents if by the time it’s worth it you’re already at the end? Ameen. (p 70)

‘Honestly, Tauji. We don’t really know what we’re about, I guess. Who we are, what we’re here for’. But that weren’t nothing like what I wanted to say. Even to me it just sounded like the usual crap I’d been hearing for years. I wanted to talk about why I felt fine rooting for Liverpool, in a quiet way, but not England. I wanted to talk about why I found myself defending Muslims against white and whites against Muslims. About why I loved Abba but had still wished him dead. But I couldn’t think of how to say anything I wanted. ‘I mean, we’re the ones stuck in the middle of everything. Like we’re not sure whose side we’re meant to be on, you know?’

(p137)

Acceptance.

A boy in long blue robes were looking at me. He were crouched down at the side of the road, cleaning his teeth with a stick and spitting into the sand. I were expecting him to come begging, but he didn’t. He just spat again into the small frothy puddle of dirt he’d made, then got up and walked off. I think that were the first time I’d been on a busy street and no one had hassled me for money. Maybe it were my own robes and loose turban, my beard and way of standing, but whatever it were no one sempt to take me for a valetiya. I’d changed. (p192)

Isolation and connection.

The nights would feel so cold over there, like the cold wanted to settle in my bones and make me its home. It’s funny, it might’ve been the most isolated place I’ve ever been, but I don’t think I’ve ever felt more connected to the world. Not in the packed streets of Sheff or at uni, not in England really, where I always felt that even though there were all the rush and noise you could want, I weren’t actually ever bumping up against life, instead just constantly moving out of its way. (p202)

People don’t even think about that, do they? That there are different types of soldiers. That Faisal were different to Aaqil. But Faisal understood. He knew about love for his people and he knew that were the best thing in the world to feel because then their pain becomes as real to you as yours, and for the first time you realise you’re not on your own. (p236)

Heartbreak.

‘I need to wash, don’t I? The sun’s gonna be up soon.’

‘Right. Well, in that case,’ she went on, putting on a happy voice, ‘shall we pray together? I don’t think I’ve done the early prayer once since Noor was born.’

‘We can’t. Men and women can’t pray together. You just go back to sleep.’

‘That hasn’t stopped us before.’

‘This isn’t before. Didn’t you hear me? Just go back to bed.’ (p286)

Land-a-Hoe Short Story by Annie Webb from Transitions One

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 28 Oct 2012 16:41:00 +0000

Land-a-Hoe

A Short Story by Annie Webb

Born on a tiny island at Europe’s most southerly tip where the silhouette of a lighthouse stood darkly against two glassy seas, one tide-driven and the other tideless mingling at an indistinguishable confluence that linked Africa to Europe, the sun - as antidote to a dream that troubled Conchita where a witch pointed a glittery finger and turned her into stone - touched a point equidistant between east and west, sunrise and sunset, in a glorious blaze of light.

The mythical story of Eurydice’s double whammy – first to have been bitten by snakes, then, when Orpheus had descended into the underworld and disobediently turned round to look at her, been turned to stone – could like any story her mother taught her, be rewritten.

They lived in a wooden house so small they called it their hut, and Conchita’s father washed up on the island by a storm had made a harbour of her mother but left at the next high tide. On her fourth birthday he made the mistake of bringing a present to her nursery - a jig-saw puzzle with huge wooden pieces suitable for her child’s clumsy fingers, of an spreading olive tree abundant with fruit - only to be escorted out by a carer who said this wasn’t the place for estranged fathers. Conchita’d wondered if estranged was a word for good-looking, but her mother had said sharply before bursting into tears that there was nothing good about her father, he was probably trying to kidnap her. And though the memory of him faded an imprint of his handsome, already gnarled face stayed always in her mind.

To have been born on this island, a mid-point so to speak on a whirlpool that stirred the Atlantic into the Mediterranean in a solar blaze reflecting off ripples of light, was proof to her that some but not all seas, lands, lives and bloodlines dip and re co-mingle in areas mapped as fixed.

And the places that weren’t fixed changed according to light. According to Heraclitus who saw all things in flux presided over by one underlying logos. If you stepped several times into a river at the same spot it would always be the same river but its waters different. When Conchita came to live in La Villa she didn’t abandon that belief altogether but found that some things had to be fixed if fixed was a word for Doing. The plight of the olive industry and Michel would demand that. And the unpredictable, unfixed play of light and shadow so bright and stark on a windy day it could challenge your equilibrium, making an enemy by imbalance of what you needed to find.

The twin peaked mountain of Las Grajas, ornate jackdaw, and Tajo Lagarin, rose like the ears of a Siamese cat, the double sides of a coin or personality, from the plain stretching from one side of La Villa to Zahara. Conchita had come to live in a house beside Michel in La Villa for the olive-picking season. Through eucalyptus trees on the plain glistened a turquoise lake, once a river crossing a valley before it was damned, said to contain the purest waters that flowed from the heights of these sierras.

Though she didn’t know it then mill-owner Alberto lived on the opposite side of the plain at the summit of Zahara in a mill under patchy outcrops of rock where mules had once dragged axles on conical stones over olives. His twin brother Albert, manager of workers constructing the Channel Tunnel, lived at the edge of the Saxon shoreline in southern England. Alberto loved to read his brother’s letters about the Channel’s story fraught with danger and difficulty triumphing in the end. A tale with a beginning, a middle and an end.

The danger with the ‘beginning’ lay a Bay of Biscay away from the island Conchita had hailed from, in the twenty-two mile crossing that brought two fully tided seas in the Dover Straight’s La Manche together at its narrowest and most treacherous. Strong tides churned the waves that mixed with brisk winds and heavy fogs buffeted against Shakespeare Cliffs making sea-farers sick if they weren’t already blind like Gloucester. Once when fog had hung heavy and wind-swept over rollicking waters, the Paracas, ignoring the shipping lanes, had brought down the Texaco Caribbean. Its wreck had brought down the Brandenburg. Then later the Nikki - leaving no survivors.

The difficulty with the ‘middle’ had existed since mid-eighteenth century when Desmaret’s, Mathie’s and Mottray’s ideas for crossing the narrow rabid waters had come to nothing. Supposing Napoleon had invaded with fleets of balloons or rafts powered by windmills or paddle-wheels? Supposing he’d already dug out a secret tunnel? But before an attempt was made on Napoleon’s life Queen Victoria had told Gamond, who’d spent years on the Channel’s bottom, that he’d have the blessings of all the ladies who ever suffered sea-sickness, and twice in 1882 and 1975, a tunnel had been bored, even champagne drunk, but abandoned first because of the Great Anti-Tunneller’s objections and next because of a fuel crisis.

After the danger and the difficulty of the ‘beginning’ and the ‘middle’ Alberto wasn’t entirely satisfied with the ‘conclusion’. The signing of the Treaty of Canterbury in 1986 agreeing to a fixed link between enemies and leading to a plan to construct the channel-to-trick-the-treacherous-waters was, of course, triumphant. Land at last would meet through land, earth not water the medium for unity via a tunnel boring into it, linking one solid thing that was already linked, to another. But for Alberto the triumph –which should soar like Bleriot through the skies - was tinged with regret. Why not build a graceful bridge to span La Manche supported by islands and towers towering like gothic cathedrals visible to all, he wondered before answering his own question. A bridge, like our imaginations or even our feats of engineering, was too filigree frail to combat or ‘overcome’ wrathful storms. Narrow waters too wide. Feat enough to have joined two lands or two people, an effort of the enquiring mind which had in the first place created the dualism it now sought to snuff-out.

Conchita was Alberto’s other fascination. Not in the sense he wanted to ‘have’ her as he’d had the others but as she appeared in the gilt-framed photo taken by Michel that towered as high on his wall as his wish of using her as an ‘icon’. Her dark hair resembling the sinuous curves of the olive branch she leant on, fell in long waves down her back, and her form tumbled like a cascade of water in contrast against the rigid, clawed and clambering olive branch. She smiled, and the crowd-attracting happiness and command in this smile, like the triumph of one who’d knocked over a last skittle - triumphs after all were conclusions to a story Alberto felt he didn’t have - could be used as a trick to convey the power of personal fulfilment rather than the success of his impersonal profit.

If Alberto gloated at her ‘moment’ four workers from the cuadilla in the background watched with leering smiles as she leaned far out with her stick to knock a stubborn olive on to the manta, the net burgeoning with ripe fruits, and while others beat back branches with sticks, grovelled to pick windfalls from circular grassless spaces under trees smoothed over by tremulous rakes, she the perfect role model, reached out the farthest to shake every last olive from the branch.

At first Alberto didn’t notice how she smiled and performed only for Michel who she called Orpheus, father of songs, because he sang for her with honeyed voice, humming like the wind while he worked. Nor did he know that after work Michel crossed over from his house to hers bearing gifts as luscious as his songs and as wild and as full with movement as the brushstrokes he used to abstract paintings he’d painted from photos. Nor that she’d told Michel she never wanted to be a Eurydice who’d been bitten by snakes then turned to stone.

But Alberto saw her as his property, and not liking it when he recognised the photographer’s love for his subject, decided to ‘let Michel go’, take back his house - he’d get the sack for being clumsy with the olives, squashing, missing or letting them skip off down the hill like dancing monkeys. And Conchita’d receive her first snake-strike too.

After dealing his blow Alberto did a strange thing and went to England’s south coast to visit his brother where other workers, unlike his, dug deep into the sea-bed through porous layers of clay, reaching to the chalk underneath, wading deeper than gravel, sand or flint to assault then reinforce the soft but waterproof marl. Alongside Albert Alberto seemed to wash his hands of his own workers and watched these instead following the boring machine secured against the walls of the cavern, saw the cutter heads holding the auger against the chalk face whirling on wheels, biting through clay, and marvelled as the men lifted the concrete semi-circular lining segments, one by one, laying them around the soft clay circumference of the tunnel.

As they followed the ‘mole' they might be moles themselves he thought trying to ignore an image of twitching burrowing noses forging passage for the ‘human creature’ in underwater land, with this mole bigger, spanning the length of two football fields and giving existence to dark tunnels, places that those from the olive groves he assumed, couldn’t negotiate.

With each segment they extended the march of the hole underground, further toward France, ‘overcoming’ the storm by ‘undercoming’ it as it were, low in the bowels of the earth secure from ruthless lashings between the tided seas. And the tunnel, once hollowed out would become the little island’s new limb, reaching across in subterranean darkness to touch a bigger land as if they’d never been joined in the first place before the splitting into continents.

When he saw one of the workers slip as they often did, he thought of Michel, then Conchita. But did he have an inkling then that she'd slipped too, or a six-sense of how more would all slip, as if the rug had been pulled from under their feet, in order to be found?

It was winter two thousand feet up above sea level in the muddy olive groves when Conchita learnt Michel had lost his sanity, and as the foreman waved to tell her, fell like the underground workers into a nest of metaphorical vipers whose outer semblance, as she worked from dawn to three wading and sliding knee deep in rain sodden raw earth, was the high gale that tore at branches and riffled the already sifted earth into circles with its whirlwinds.

In the Zahara hospital she found Michel cowering in the corner of a room muttering ‘this cannot be'. A marred light streamed unsteadily through the window, a striped orange curtain twitched uneasily in a wind that blew over dry uncut grass from outside, wheedling its way through a small opening in the metal frame, festering with odours from an old plastic mattress that leant against a wall bulging with Polyfilla-filled holes. No-one knew why Michel was so stricken, as if derangement was a chemical imbalance you could catch like a virus or a horror-movie, or, as his consultant un-technically advised - he was suffering from a combination of what he was powerless to control and what he wasn’t.

When Conchita tried to imagine what Bedlam looked like in Michel’s mind all she could see was a loop that wasn’t a link and couldn’t be punctured, and feeling so alone she might as well have been turned to stone cried out in frustration to the loop that prevented passage and forbad Michel’s answering, “Why did you have to be dragged down, unwilling, wrecked hero – a blinded Paracas, Texaco Caribbean, Brandenburg or Nikki - of the underworld? Till now I was no Eurydice needing rescue from Hades”.

A brooding cloud had invaded all their blues. The ‘ornate bird’ from the mountain terrace plateau-ed now not peaked, and as the bird was flat, the firebird dead, Conchita turned her eyes away from the mountains and lake that’d once contained something in a nutshell. The hills planted with olive trees (because the ‘olive fever’ demanded ever more virgin olive oil) had replaced the ancient almonds and the lines of olives marching in strict linear formation made the hills’ surface look like stitches in an old leather belt, goose-pimples on skin or stubble on an unshaven chin which, she decided, belonged to the land-owner she'd never met: the boss who made the rest of them seem like paltry baskers basking in a crepuscular light or in the dawdling emotion that light evokes in the small person’s ever wanting-to-relish but drained-of-power soul, living in a twilight world which savours the taste of a fermented grape or a marinade olive, but doesn’t profit from it.

So when summoned by Alberto she made her way in fury from La Villa to Zahara, ready to remind him that although olives needed to be gathered before they fermented to acerbity, whereas grapes needed to be left to erupt and slowly ferment, the purpose in preparing both - to achieve the highest quality of oil or wine - was always the same.

And that of the three substances which could be squeezed from the olive, the oil, the fibrous orujo and the bitter black briny film, the alpechin that floated to the surface of alpechineras ponds, only alpechin couldn’t be used for anything, not even recycling.

And she wouldn’t stop there. She’d point out that this filthy alpechin could never resemble the black nigredo or prima materia of the alchemists, the starting material of the personality, the soul that might be re-worked, modelled as it grew. And the result couldn’t be the gold of individuation, the person who got well, perfect and whole. Alpechin, she’d tell him, was an evil by-product that would not be regenerated. A substance like states of mind that aren’t part of us. A waste resistant to degradation.

And she’d tell him how alpechin had surfaced, so to speak, in one of his worker’s minds. Black scum rising. Unwashed and unshaven, Michel’s degradation not degradable. And softening as she’d have to, she’d ask him, would he, if he could, help her stop his madness? Short circuit the ever increasing loop?

As it turned out neither telling nor asking were necessary. Thrown off course by seeing a picture of herself on the walls as she walked down the corridor, reaching for olives, and then by a wooden jig-saw olive tree on Alberto’s desk identical to the one she still had given to her by her father long ago, she felt herself looking at his gnarled face in astonishment. Alberto, too pleased to see her likeness to his photo didn’t notice her expression at first. But as she picked up the wooden olive tree, slowly fingering and separating its huge parts, and he said he’d another he’d given to his daughter once, they both fell very silent as shock and truth dawned on them simultaneously. By the time Conchita left three hours later there was no doubt Alberto, her father, would help her in whatever way he could. He had a brother, her uncle, in England.

Beyond the help of medication or negotiation, Michel looked near to death. As there was only one thing that might save his life the consultant said, there was nothing to lose. So Alberto used his influence to get the controversial treatment, and despite everyone’s horror, Conchita’s shame in agreeing, Michel got the deep dark shock that stopped him from turning to acid on a hard, stony ground. Leads got strapped to his head. The switch flicked on. And after the lightening through his brain had saved him Michel vanished from the mountains along with the father Conchita had just found - was he Charon or Hades or just plain Alberto – and her.

Before closing his mill behind them she noticed Alberto’s olive tree jig-saw still standing on his desk, and on top of his reading material about the tunnel a book on Jungian psychology: Finding Lost Treasures of the Deep opened at the chapter, Freeing blockages, beginning “What goes up must come down….”. But Michel’s transformation seemed unrelated to psychology. The book was about Bleriot or plumbing her father said both grateful for the catharsis of black humour to expel the blackness of alpechin. Before Jung and the defining of the unconscious and before flight, Heraclitus had said that what went up and what came down were one and the same thing.

Conchita went with Michel where he could convalesce to an outhouse of Albert’s perched high at the edge of the Saxon shoreline, Conchita’s mother, reluctant at first, persuaded to join them in Albert’s main house where Alberto was staying. In her version of the Orpheus myth, Conchita recalled, Eurydice had descended to rescue Orpheus so he couldn’t turn her to stone. After a few weeks her mother tending the garden full with yellow irises as bright as blazes of sunshine at midpoints, was joined by her father. At the garden’s edge roots of tamarisk, its fruits the manna from heaven, clawed the soil of the sea-banks to keep them stable. They wondered what the marshy flats below looked like when they were sea and remembered a harbour.

On a dull day along the coast the bobbing grey sea, monotone and simple, became a mantra humming under a mist of more grey, a light drizzle of rain on the skyline, and the whiteness of a domed gazebo (I will gaze) picked out by a single ray from an otherwise hidden sun, dazzled: a full-stop setting the limit of sea-horses and long-shore drifts alike. Brandished like these white domes on green-grey seas, as green as Conchita, not grey, and as smooth as satin unfurling, she was, Michel said as she walked on the beach in her emerald green skirt and olive jacket, his gazebo, setting his gaze anew. When she put out her foot to trip him they tumbled together on to the pebbles.

Mickey Man Friday, as Albert’s new hard worker had been nicknamed, said quietly to Albert in his strong accent so his mates couldn’t hear to take the mick, that he’d had a dream of forging new passageways as if dreams like cross-pollination were as easy as enemies becoming friends, then gone underground at the point where the seas were at their narrowest and most powerful, down where it was deep, dark, damp and dirty and there was no-sense-of-water nor solar blazes at midpoints above. An older man who looked like Albert the foreman, the workers said, dug beside him.

Two years later, 1990, Christmas approaching, Mickey/Michel was deep underground when the English and French came together under La Manche, Cozette and Fagg popping their heads through to where lazar and radar waves had guided the ‘moles’ that then got buried. He heard the crowds roar and saw photographers’ flash-lights bounce off the sides of the tunnel along with his own. His was the only picture Conchita saw that captured this ‘moment’. He kept it just for her.

When disaster came to the tunnel as irony would have it, it came from fire not flood, but Mickey/Michel couldn’t have been that disgruntled worker who’d set fire to concrete linings which, like a micro waved potato or repressed psyche, had exploded because there was no means of letting vapour escape.

For the Channel of communication, whether it linked lover to lover, father to daughter, head to heart or England to France, had been prized open. During the tunnel’s construction from 1987 the Wall had come down, Mandela been released from prison and Communism in the Soviet Union looked set to collapse. The high speed train rushed and sighed with relief.

Twenty years later, one hundred and one years after Bleriot’s flight Michel and Conchita still walk on what Michel and Alberto helped form from over four-million-cubic-metres of slippery chalk marl, alchemical clay dug out, loaded on to conveyor belts, amassed, spread out, dropped into lagoons, formed into mounds, smoothed down then grassed over with paths for them to walk on, inside and outside the mind. Not as big as the island Conchita’d hailed from, this mound, Kent’s newest land still made Britain bigger by sixty-eight football fields and three Cheops pyramids.

As if progress had made way for one more Heraclitean pebble of change to be thrown into the one underlying, riverine, cosmos, Samphire Hoe, below the cliff where Gloucester never fell, was solid, underfoot now not underground or in the sky. More solid than the point where light had danced on invisibly mixing seas, this Hoe or grass-covered land, monument to and of earth extracted with huge effort to allow passage and communion between two lands and people, made way for the change-without-fear that levelled nightmares, moving like that train or river, stopping us from turning into stone.

Maiuko's article from Transitions One

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 21 Oct 2012 16:05:00 +0000

Fire in the Tunnel

Maiuko

I was born in Mozambique in 1962. From my native land to England via sojourns in Swaziland and Portugal, I have so far lived a life full of experiences and all sorts of transitions, many of these naturally expected, progress following a smooth process of development. Others were not so obvious and of course the “unexpected” brought about anxiety and on occasions panic before I could move on to reflection or denial as part of the self-coping-mechanism.

I would like to share with you a moment of clarity I experienced during one transition under the waters of the Channel:

I was on my way to France with my partner for a romantic weekend in Paris, when instead I found myself trapped within a horror of darkness, smoke billowing all around me. Ours had been the first car inside the Channel Tunnel and we were told to return to it and wind up the windows. After grasping the situation I deduced these were probably my last hours and with no expectation of getting out alive began what felt like a regressive never-ending journey through my own life’s story.

That was the first time I found myself reflecting on my life as if that person from the past was someone else, looked at by me. I struggled initially to find order in this process but soon it became very clear. In the beginning I saw myself as a happy child nurtured by love in a family environment, but soon felt sorry for that same child who became a soldier in a civil war of grown-ups‘ politics. I felt empathy every time she moved to a new school or country and had to make sense of self-worth in environments of all sorts of discrimination and non inclusion. I respected the teenager that survived the first stages of self-development every time they were interrupted by unexpected changes, then avoided thinking about all the mistakes that the young lady made every time she “knew best“. I remembered with a smile and a tear when she fell in love for the first time, and felt overwhelmed by concern remembering when later she left her family home, “in search of self“.

Before I had the chance to go through my experiences after I‘d left home, I came to and realised that I’d been trapped for three hours. The officers informed everyone that the incident had been caused by a passenger who’d found it hard to wait seventeen minutes for a cigarette and attempting to smoke it inside his car had accidentally dropped it under the seat where it caught fire. The rescue team moved all the cars out of the tunnel until the smoke was completely cleared. After a long while, I found myself reversed to where I started; outside the tunnel inside which I had rewound time.

Later, when the rescue team started re-loading, most of the traumatised passengers had given up the idea of travelling under the water. I asked myself should I still get in the Tunnel and go to Paris for my romantic weekend? Would I do it all again? A moment of clarity confirmed it. Of course I would. It would be worse to be stuck in a tunnel empty of experiences because I’d deprived myself of a second chance or feared moving on into the unknown. Life is for living and I shall continue to embrace all transitions as they arise.

Pavement Pounders and the Folkestone Book Festival

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 16:47:00 +0000

Pavement Pounders and the Folkestone Book Festival

The Folkestone Book Festival have again asked Pavement Pounders, a local community interest company to devise and lead a guided walk. This year the walk will be loosely based on the theme of innovation – scientific, artistic, metaphorical and concrete – both past and present. From the coming of the railways 150 years ago to the making of The Creative Quarter, innovation has been central to the story of Folkestone.

Explore with us this heritage on our doorstep.

Sunday 4th November and Thursday 8th November

On both dates; meet at The Quarterhouse, Tontine St. 11.30am

£6.50 / £5.50 friends / £4.50 conc.

Booking and Information 01303 858500, Book Festival Website

On Wednesday 7^th November Pavement Pounders will launch Transitions 2

A journal of crossings , our second edition at Googies café, Rendezvous Street, Folkestone.

Stories, articles or poems concerned with the personal experience of universal themes of crossings, transitions and transformations.

Hear the amazing voice of Afro-jazz singer Maiuko and listen to other contributors to the journal, including author Maggie Harris, Sarah Wheeler, Paul Harris and Gillian White read from their pieces.

ENTRANCE FREE but please buy a copy of the journal!

Drinks and food will be available to buy

Wednesday 7th November Googies café, Rendezvous St. Folkestone 7.00 pm
Booking required

Booking and information 01303 858500 http://folkestonebookfest.com/2012/09/wednesday-7th-7-00pm/

Pavement Pounders Community Interest Company have since they were founded in 2010 always integrated their events with local festivals. They have been leading guided walks for the book festival for three years and devised and led both walks and drawing workshops for last year’s Folkestone Triennial and its fringe. The first edition of their journal “Transitions” was launched during the Triennial. Next year, they will be organizing events for the Folkestone Festival and the Airshow.

Pavement Pounders Contacts

David & Maryanne

01303 227150 * Mob. 0750-5813297 * pavementpounders@gmail.com

Website and Blog FACEBOOK

Readings at Dragon Cafe

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 10:21:00 +0000

Transitions 2; Our Journal

10/16/2012

0 Comments

Spent yesterday, 15th October at The Dragon Cafe, Borough High Street, home of the Mental Fight Club for readings from our fresh from the printers journal Transitions 2.
http://mentalfightclub.com/
Readings from Sarah Wheeler and Annie Webb
Official launch of Transitions 2 at The Folkestone Book Festival 2-10th November http://folkestonebookfest.com/category/wednesday-7/

Photo shows Ben Okri patron of Mental Fight Club reading at the Dragon Cafe

Coral Bay by Annie Webb from Transitions One

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 09:58:00 +0000

Coral Bay

Short Story

They say Coral Bay is named after pink coral pulverized into tiny particles of sand. But to begin with when I looked down into the footprints made by my feet I saw no pink. Then when I looked up through my silhouetted palms spread open against the ether, the cove and headland jutting out into the sea and sky had merged into a single vermilion, an enormous frayed-with-scarlet-on-the-edges salmon pink. This repetitive but fleeting daily light made it hard but not impossible to see the smaller particles. My mistake was not to try, not to try to find this permanent rosy minutiae camouflaged within the ephemeral, not to see that the magnitude that hid it also revealed it: detail the consequence of action.

I, Inanna, Queen of Heaven, had not seen how every fibre of my life would be wrenched first because I had to go underground, second because of my love for you, my spouse, whose expulsion would become irreversible. Yet now the pink that was too much about me, still is, but to better avail.

Gale was spoilt for choice. She had too many consorts. She was always in the pink the people said, and though they weren’t entirely right nor were they altogether wrong.

Gale who dreamt in disaster-movie proportions of the earth opening and floods of mud like volcanic lava opening up the land, asked Denis to cut a water-melon into edible, seedless pieces. Instead he cut a tiny piece of himself off the side of his hand, and was lucky not to loose it altogether. “Where is the pink coral pulverised into tiny particles of sand?” he asked in order to change the subject.

Deciding to abandon heaven and descend into the underworld I instructed Ninshubur, my female companion to alert the father-gods if I’d not returned in three days. Ripping my most trusted consort, Tammuz, from my side I wandered through a forest so dense I had to part its branches with my hands, until I came to a trap door beneath which lay a deep hole that fell underground further than anyone could see.

Gale had seven children. The oldest and the youngest were boys. The middle was also a boy. Like many mothers Gale sought to please. If others weren’t happy nor was she and if she wasn’t happy nor were they, so she spread a ribbon of congeniality that looped from one person to another and pulled the ribbon tight into a double knot with a pert little bow at the centre. It didn’t always suit her. Gradually the knot began to loosen as knots do till her auburn-rich hair tumbled out of its fastenings on to shoulders unable to shoulder. Then she cut the ribbon altogether and was left without a husband to help her with the seven children.

Her second child helped instead. She worked for a women-only taxi firm, innovative for this seaside town, driving women carefully from one destination to another. She was also high-flying student of classics and feminine mythology who’d never had to tie her hair with ribbons and could give her mother advice, ‘To liaise with the potency of the underworld’ she said ‘involves a break-up with the old pattern, a break away from being agreeable and kind and good’. ‘Like Aidan?’ her mother joked.

Aidan, her middle child, had found a magnifying glass. With it he’d stood back from a piece of grass that enlarged became a huge reed. When the detail swelled he used this glass to set fire to a beetle struggling through huge reed grasses that swayed in the dead stillness of the midday sun.

Later he’d crashed his friend’s bike into a tight copse of olive trees on the edge of a stubbly field. The friend’s father, the villagers said, was very angry.

Gale had been dreaming at the time. Some way inland from the waves that rolled into Coral Bay she’d walked down a street in a hill village that glowed with crepuscular gold. A woman on a wooden chair sitting at a wooden table outside the stucco wall of her house was leafing through some black and white photographs. Surprisingly some were of her middle child taken when he was a baby with tyre-like thighs, lying on sheepskin or sitting in a brown plastic bucket with a bracken leaf over his head. The woman led Gale inside the stucco house where she came to sit at her mother-in-law’s feet. She was sorting through dusty baskets of needle and thread. Cotton reels rolled on the floor. There was a strong stagnant smell about her mother-in-law who had spent her life in denial. Gale thought she could hear her father-in-law, whose bisexual nature it was that her mother-in-law had spent all her life denying, say ‘Good work Gale’ between rasping end-of-life breaths that echoed the shore rolling waves of Coral Bay.

After crashing the bike Aidan’s face was held in a plinth with strange squares in tiers like Mondrian scaffolding. Rods were inserted close to his flesh. ‘You must walk through the streets with us’ Gale insisted ‘even though the rods in your body are causing you pain. You will walk and you will talk’, she said even though she felt a silence as incisive as an outline of stairs built for us to reach each other that we never take. Only walking will cure you the doctor said. But those who saw him limp said how cruel his mother was. He would get better and stop his recklessness she said. He would reach nineteen.

Ereshkigal, Queen of the Great Below, was holding a funeral for her husband in her lapi lazuli palace. Determined to witness it I declared myself at the first of the seven gates. Ereshkigal who wasn’t pleased said I must come ‘naked and bowed low’. A judge sat at each of the seven gates. At each one a piece of my regalia, mostly in hues of anticipatory green threaded through with gold, was removed.

In their three-verandered, white arched house at Coral Bay, Denis, not her husband, hit the top of the triangle between Gale’s legs with his un-metaphorical sword. She’d first come across it in a wood where a profusion of double-winged dragonflies of shot silk sapphire had played in dappled woods and over falls plunging to eddies and roars of churning rivers. “How it glints in the sunlight”, she’d laughed, “How it sees into the riverbed of me, clanking against sunken pebbles and slashing through the tangle of green hair-like weed”.

Suddenly the door to their bedroom creaked open by half an inch. Gale only imagined her mother, dead now for ten months, standing before them as they made love. An eerie but promising light streamed in as the door seemed to burst stretching further open into their room from the landing, ‘within the Scilly Isles is Ben Alligin. Within the south west is the north. Within sun-attracting flat-land islands are mountains which cast shadow’, Gale thought she heard her say. Hers too was a wall that burst open, but Gale, like many daughters would never know exactly which way or how.

In a dream again her father, dead ten years, appeared. ‘I’ve not seen you for precisely one year’ he said and Gale cried bitter tears, for he’d had a stroke and didn’t know who she was. Nor could he remember her child, his granddaughter for whom he’d lavished dollops of vanilla ice-cream on strawberries piled thick in a bowl of cherries standing too high on a table for the child to reach.

When the skies were jay-blue Gale dipped her feet into the azure waters of Coral Bay. They were cool but only just like the dragonflies of shot silk, and their tickling was washed away by hosts of butterflies. Whites turning into horses hooves pummelling the contours of her perishable body. Headfirst she plunged into the foaming waves, headfirst into Uranus’s spume. Her son was not Chronos, nor was she Gaia, and though young lovers stood fondling neck high in the waves they were not immortal either, and knew little of the passion in age. Zeus did not rally with her, but here in Uranus’ water Gale’s splash was subsumed and Aphrodite rose for all. It occurred to her – as if it were surprising others also made love - that everyone bathing except young ones, had given or received the fertile foam from or into their bodies. Strange tokens harvested in private.

But where was the pink coral, her children asked in unison, that was pulverised into tiny particles of sand? Its whereabouts they said was known by the father of the boy whose bike Aidan had smashed through lack of care.

By then Gale had been bought by a piece of kitsch on a market stall. By the sun and the pounding waves on her battered body. By the crunching of dry sun-kissed seed pods under her feet. By goat-bells and bleating kids running sideways on sheer rock. By dragon-iguanas scurrying under rocks. By almond and apricot trees and tree-shrews running sideways along eucalyptus branches like squirrels.

Why had Gale, irrespective of ants and cockroaches in their Coral Bay kitchen, cut the ribbon she’d so carefully threaded? A long line of tiny ants bore down on the drop of water-melon juice that fell from the fruit Denis had tried to cut, and huge ones on the marbled terrace devoured the insides of a cockroach squashed by his sandaled sole. Matter submits to the given Gale saw with horror and if it is not devoured it rots, ferments or decays.

Ereshkigal’s rage could not be assuaged. She killed me slowly piercing my dead body with needles, hanging my corpse on a peg till it turned to a slab of rotting meat.

‘Why did she leave us?’ my stewards and stewardesses had asked Ninshubur as they crowded round the trap door where I’d descended. Ninshubur answered, “To change the house and roads we’ve built with our own blood is comparable to tearing ourselves to pieces. Evil is resistance to the life-urge. If Inanna had submitted to this principle of evil she wouldn’t be Queen of Heaven. She would have let us down. Remember. She would not have approached such dismemberment unless her pain was already severe”.

When Gale’s husband, knocked off balance by a taxi roaring round a corner, had dropped the simple white lace blouse he’d bought her into the gutter, it’d been trammelled under crunchy dry seed-pods by his recovering feet. They bore down on the pristine gift, grinding more dirt and seed-dust into the lovely, love-longing threads of lace. From the window Gale’s heart had missed a beat. She would have smoothed his knotted thread-forged brow more entwined than lace, and rubbed balm into the heart of his sleeplessness. But it was too late. “You’re spoilt for choice” people said to her, and though she could hear his voice, ‘I’ll not fight for you” through a yawn, “nor will I laugh for you”, through a half-sardonic sneer he tried to hide, she saw herself as a bereaved woman, lost, whose husband had drowned at sea while the oblivious sky deepened with setting and swallowed up snippets she’d have told him about her day.

When I hadn’t returned after three days Ninshubur tried to set in motion my instruction to rouse the gods. The stewardesses put on their grass skirts and painted their faces orange like flames. The stewards put on their loin clothes and painted their faces brown like logs, and with loud wails drummed a slow lament round a huge crackling fire. First Ninshubur went to Enlil, the highest god of the sky and the earth, then to Nanna, my father the moon god. Both shook their heads and said they would not meddle in the ways of the underworld. Not until the underworld had become a way in their mythology.

Gale had looked after her seven children seven days a week while her husband made pots. She’d tried not to bother him even if she was tired because he was busy turning pots and painting the ones that weren’t plain terra cotta and the more she did things alone the less she needed him. When she’d told him that, climbing out of the marital bed, he’d smashed a pot, pieces of the baked earth flying forcefully against the white wall leaving sandy red indents.

Only Enki, the god of waters, heard Ninshubur’s plea and the drumming of her companions. He took two little mourners who would save me from the dirt under his fingernails and put them on the table in front of him. “When we offer what we hold dear, what we’ve paid much to gain” he said “we don’t know at first that our loss will be exchanged for what we desire”.

The same group of village men who brushed off the red-brown dust and repainted Gale’s walls stood by her in the kitchen when her husband left. The mortar like loving care that had filled the spaces between each member of the family, wrapping them in safe arms at night, fell out for good.

From some dark tunnel far away Ninshubur heard my voice, ‘Even in this depressed place where I have felt inertia in the heart of matter, a small shoot unfurls. The state of ‘not caring’ is the strongest of all. In it I can receive and accept anything, even pain’.

Gale wished she was a goddess. Then she could have descended to the place where there was no feeling. But unlike Inanna she couldn’t not care. Not at first did the hollow appear, but then sure as a meteor-made cavity one fact would not go away. Gale’s family of nine was eight, the sickening thud of this fact getting louder not quieter as time went by, the idea of returning to how things were popping up over and over again as if ‘how things were’ had been as they should be, and could be reached by taking a single step backwards, though that single tiny step now was wider than the Wide Sargasso Sea.

The two little mourners set out to save me, taking with them the malt bread, the melon, mango and water, the sustenance of life, that Enki had given them. When they found Ereshkigal groaning, they commiserated with her over the pain of childbirth and the death of living things. So grateful was she for their empathy she handed over my corpse almost with regret.

Luckily Gale didn’t need to pack the hollow with shot-silk creatures. They were there already flashing their azure and sapphire on fibrillating double wings as they gravitated upwards out of the yawning chasm.

As I couldn’t be restored to life for nothing a price would have to be paid and a sacrifice made. I had to offer what I held dear, what I’d paid so much to gain. Tammuz was my most beloved consort. He had extolled my body as if it was the earth he walked on. We had been inseparable. Sometimes I couldn’t respect him for losing himself in me, but that wasn’t why he had to go, and as Ereshkigal had looked on me with the eyes of death, so I now on him. Dreaming of his downfall the unsuspecting Tammuz beheld demons with menacing lion’s paws like talons glinting in the sun. They saw where my eyes fell and pounced on him. Still he wouldn’t believe it.

On the mottled surface of Gale’s marbled terrace the battle was always on against ants and the indefatigable sun, and though weathered the body was as relentless as the sun that sought to crush it like juice from out an orange. Her son was running with his friends again. Denis’ hand had healed and she spun as the universe itself on his sword that rent the veil across the dragonflies that danced through turquoise and robin-egg blue.

Tammuz sister interpreted his dream and saw it was impossible to flee. She volunteered to sacrifice herself in his place, but I decreed instead they should each spend half the year in the underworld. Enlil and Nanna pleased that a path had been forged as a way in their own overground mythology clapped their hands with Enki.

It was now early evening and the sun was going down behind a headland that jutted out across the Bay. Gale could see it over the trees as she had on the night of the scarlet sunset when Denis had cut himself; when no one could see the particles of pink sand nor the cuts both smaller and greater than desire that pierce the wall between us and the flying creatures of azure. And does not grow over like the wound.

Further along the road Gale found a new path surrounded by flowerless gorse and grass-hoppers jumping from one pebble to another that led down to the Bay. Here, where it was possible to believe past and present could occur simultaneously with only a fine wall between them, it was possible also to feel a presence. Of the goddess herself.

Suddenly the detail of simple familiarity seemed superfluous as an assurance of security. Deviations have already been carved out, beckoning like dragonflies disappearing from an imprint made on solid air deeper and denser than Persian blue from the other side of a fragile membrance. Beckoning like myths that change us forever.

I, Inanna, reinstated to my rightful position, never need descend again. Order is restored. My diamond tiara set with a single central sapphire looks fiery, bright. Ironically it is cold. Some diamonds are formed when meteorites crash to the ground, others when stars have died and pepper our solar system as star-dust, too tiny for us to see, but the one that sparkles above my forehead, three million years old, was mined from the deepest centre of the earth and born in crushing heat. As of diamonds fraught with impurity prone to absorb and reflect light, this one glints the best with colour.

The strata round this coast Gale learnt were formed in flow-bashed rock, solidified glass once stretched out by lava-flow. In pink-white granite, large crystals formed by slow-cooling magma had shrunk and fractured in searing heat. The forces which compressed the earth’s surface and pushed up mountain ranges through fine folded bands of light and dark rock had split the coarse-grained granite with huge magnesium insertions, ‘impregnating matter’, Gale’s daughter would have said. These were the forces of the powerfully dark but not dolorous dolerites of which one determining one caused others to pale in significance.

Gale once ‘spoilt for choice’ still had it all but not all ways. Why was the clear and forceful surge still an impasse against the vermilion sky? Because in its blurring of past and present into an indefinite future, losing yesterday, the sun that set was as painful as the similed sun that didn’t rise.

Casting her eyes over and away from the azure waters that had turned metallic scarlet and away from the salmon vermilion Gale bent down to take a closer look at a smaller flash of colour that had appeared beside some grey. They were right she saw when they said Coral Bay was named after coral pulverized into tiny particles. Stretching seaward between pebbles, prawn-coloured sand formed distinct lines with grey, simultaneously separate and inseparable, rippling down to the welcome and endless opening of a sour salt sea. The sunset tinted cyclamen all it touched, bending any alternative colour to itself. When her children finally saw the coral they said it was orange not pink.

Though I, the Queen of Heaven, was afraid, I can no longer smoothe over differences as if they did not exist to render them indistinct. No longer can I blur over edges of colours which are definite or keep up the pretence of blissful blendedness.

The lines between the two tone sand moving with flourish would not merge, blur or even overlap. Cutting and sharp, closed to compromise and non-malleable, they told of the discovery of what we desire through what it is painful to do. The white blouse had been sullied. Though the detail had been found, Gale had gone down like Inanna, or at least as closely as any mortal could, to destroy the losing of it again.

Behind her suddenly sprang the man, the geological expert, whose son needed a new bike. As he advanced Gale slipped on seaward grazing her thigh, shocked to see him brandishing a rusty knife. When he saw her trembling he stopped but only just. His dagger wasn’t the dolerite that’s the strong side of the two-edged sword we walk, the bursting One. She’d already got the bike fixed she told him. Mumbling he turned to leave. When he’d gone she was still shaking, this stark reality, this show of violence, her own descent. In rejecting so called goodness to find it again comfort was turned to unease. The father of her children, her only ally, to foe.

Yet when she looked back at the rippling lines of variegated sand between the pebbles there was no sign of cruelty in the impeccably separate curves flowing seawards. Only an outward show that that which has been pulverised, that which has delved, dissected, even damaged and destroyed, also delivered.

On his way up the path Gale’s would-be attacker held out his hand to another man who was walking down. But it was Denis and he didn’t claim the hand for shaking. Instead, whether Denis bumped into him or pushed him, the man had fallen and Gale saw him crumpled up on the rocky ground. Denis didn’t wait. He was striding across the beach towards her and she, grateful, pleased and emboldened all at once was thinking, her descent hadn’t been courageous at all.

Yet if she could find her voice she’d make up for that and tell her daughter (the taxi driver and espouser of break-ups of congenial patterns) that as she was slight she’d been testing for arms strong enough to hold.

“Because I am no Persian, Roman or Greek goddess, and because a beautiful but indeterminate light touches space too lightly, a sharp and sinuous line must carefully be drawn. Vermillion shoots across the sky with the pain of dead things that cannot die. They could for Inanna. The delicate double-winged shot silk dragonflies fluttering between joy and confusion fight, like us, to rise. They are the minutiae, the particular, in a greater scheme where I cannot cruise self-made in the rose-tinted, sunsetted harmony of sky without the cutting curve of enfolding arms continually expanding”.

Gale was spoilt for choice. She had too many consorts. She was always in the pink the people said, and though they weren’t entirely right nor were they altogether wrong.

Later he’d crashed his friend’s bike into a tight copse of olive trees on the edge of a stubbly field. The friend’s father, the villagers said, was very angry.

Ereshkigal’s rage could not be assuaged. She killed me slowly piercing my dead body with needles, hanging my corpse on a peg till it turned to a slab of rotting meat.

The Earth's Dark Underbelly from Transitions One

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 14 Oct 2012 15:40:00 +0000

Chapter19

The Earth's Dark Underbelly

The Archetypal Underworld and the Psychogeography of Descent

James Bennett

As Above, So Below.

from The Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus ¹

‘Let me take you down, 'cos I'm going’ ....’

John Lennon

A surprisingly large number of people in the United States of America believe in the literal existence of Hell - 60% according to a Gallup Poll taken in the 1990's,rising to 69% in the most recent poll (May 2007). Of these, only 6% believed in a 2004 Poll that they were likely to go there, while 77% thought they had a good or excellent chance of going to Heaven. If they are right there’s still plenty of room below and Heaven will soon be bursting at the seams!^2. Those of a scientific/materialist persuasion can put the persistence of these beliefs down to childish superstition and bewail the fact that such primitive ideas still hold sway in the 21st century. Or if we are of a spiritual bent, but drawn to less fundamentalist versions of spirituality, we can comfort ourselves with the notion that we have developed a more evolved cosmology that doesn't require a concept of Hell to understand our place in the universe.³ Either way, we can avoid looking down, wondering about the pull such beliefs exert on us, about the deep soul need people seem to have to sense themselves as existing in a mythological universe. But the findings of the Gallup Poll suggest that there is a psycho mythological need for a ' down there', that people want to locate themselves in relation to, even if the presence of such a location is negative. As we shall see, this need has a long history of expression, dating back to the dawn of humankind: the traditional Christian myth of Hell as a place of punishment and demonic persecution being a much later and one-sided development of an imagery that may be fundamental to the structure of consciousness.

The etymological roots of the English word 'Hell' - which help convey its present meaning - can be found in heel (as in that part of the foot hidden from above),⁴ hill, hole, whole, heal, hall, hull (as of a nut), hollow, holt (as in a low hill covered by trees), and hold (as in a ship ). They are all rooted in the Anglo-Saxon 'helan': to cover or hide.⁵ In The Dream and the Underworld,⁶ James Hillman points out that the Latin 'cella' (subterranean storeroom) is etymologically related to the old Irish 'cuile' (cellar) and 'cel' (death), which in turn relate to our word 'Hell'. The 'cel' is also present in the words celestial and ceiling, adding an intriguing heavenly dimension to a mythological territory otherwise associated with a downwards direction. Hidden within this verbal landscape we have here a whole imaginary world: that of a hidden place beneath the earth, connected with death which is a storehouse as well as a realm of wholeness and healing. But it is also related to the heavenly sphere. A holy hole! It is a realm resonant with 'imprisonment' (as in our word 'cell') as well as with 'secrets' (as in word ('occult'). It is worth noting that Hel or Hela, daughter of the Trickster Loki - a god whose eventual fate was imprisonment - was the Norse goddess of the Underworld, the equivalent of the Greek Persephone, the Sumerian Ereshkigal and the Black Madonna of the Christian tradition. ⁷ Words become keys that can unlock mysteries and point to forgotten realms of correspondence.

In traditions that predate the arrival of Christianity, this forgotten and devalued realm was known as the Underworld, abode of the ancestors and the spirits of the dead, and its mythological roots appear to travel back deeply into the mists of time. In a remarkable book, The Strong Eye of Shamanism, ⁸Robert Ryan convincingly argues for the existence of initiatory rituals of descent involving early peoples' caves such as those in Lascaux, Les Trois Freres and Pech-Merle in France and the startlingly beautiful paintings that still survive there. Ryan suggests that the caves were in essence the first temples,⁹ which were simultaneously incubation chambers, places where initiates could experience visions in trance and undergo initiatory death and rebirth in the sacred body of the earth goddess. Alain Danielou, in a comment that links the imagery of descent into Hell with what we are referring to here, writes: "The myth of the descent into Hell also evokes a return

o the womb of Mother Earth”.¹⁰ Here womb and tomb are conceived of as being the same place. Sometimes the artist/shamans would literally have to put life and limb on the line, as there are paintings that could only have been completed at great personal risk. At the very least, the journey into the heart of the cave was arduous, involving squeezing through a narrow passage or opening. The caves are places that evoke altered states of consciousness in those who entered (an experience of what we would call ego death in psychological language) and thus moved the initiates closer to the sacred. We can imagine that they would have emerged cleansed, rejuvenated and reborn.

That this universal and archetypal journey of descent is largely hidden, due to ignorance as well as its own essential nature, does not mean it will disappear altogether. A theme common in literature and Jungian psychology^ll alike, many references are made to it in myth and in fairy tale or in dreams and fantasies of modem people. Among some of the heroes and heroines, goddesses and gods most notably connected with the journey to the Underworld are Persephone, Inanna, Hermes, Dionysus, Orpheus, Odysseus, Aeneas, Gilgamesh, Hercules and Jesus. In people's dreams, as in fairy stories, the archetype shows up in images of passing beneath the earth, sea, lakes, wells or ponds. ¹² Sometimes there is fire down there, sometimes ice,¹³sometimes mists and shadows or sometimes even another world that seems to mirror this one. Cellars, basements, caves and crypts, or images of being swallowed by monsters, dragons or fierce beasts feature prominently, as do earthquakes or the collapse of buildings, images of dismemberment and death or dark alleys where unsavoury characters lurk. Sometimes beings or people who live beneath the earth are encountered, like the fairy folk of old, who were linked with the mounds and barrows (chambered tombs) of ancient Europe.¹⁴ As we shall see, it can be argued that the nightly process of dreaming is a trip we all take to the 'land below', willingly or not. From this perspective, 'psyche' is Underworld.¹⁵Despite the persistence of this imagery and theme, modern Western culture doesn't hold with the notion of an Underworld anymore - at least not consciously. The tradition persists largely in the Christian imagination of Hell, and has also found a revival in followers of neo-pagan spirituality, though this can hardly be claimed to be a

mainstream cultural phenomenon. When the sacred is acknowledged in the West, it is more often associated with a movement upwards into the airy, heavenly realms 'above'. Our culture is obsessed with stories about angels and space aliens, with a fixation on spiritual practices which help us rise above our earthly limitations and purify our base concerns. Focus on the light, we are encouraged, and reject the dark, the depths.¹⁶Indeed, it can be argued that in our driven approach to life, in our restless search for novel highs or medications to fix our boredom and emotional lows, or in our hunt for the latest self-help facelift, we are primarily an 'ascensionist' culture. Perhaps, paradoxically, this is precisely why the stubborn belief in a 'down there' persists, since heaven and hell are inextricably linked archetypally and are indissoluble mirror images of each other, the Upperworld and Underworld of ancient shamanic tradition. ¹⁷ Or is it, to quote Hillman, that "The upward-downward polarity as conceptualised in the matter-spirit opposition seems to be an archetypal schema basic to the psyche"? In our time, earth is no longer approached as a sacred being and her psychic depths, her dark underbelly, ¹⁸ have long since been demonised and have come to represent all that is despised and rejected.

This rejection of the hidden, invisible realm beneath our feet can, among other ways, be traced back to a split that occurred many years ago between the gods and goddesses of the sky and earth. We can see this in the Greek myth of the battle between the Titans led by Cronus (Saturn) and the Olympians led by his son Zeus (Jupiter), after which the former were banished and imprisoned in the realm of Tartaros (the lower depths) - that part of the Greek Underworld (Hades) that was reserved for punishment. After this, Zeus reigned supreme and is depicted mainly as a god of the sky (although his sexual exploits with humans, often disguising himself in animal forms in order to achieve them, keep him in touch with the earthly dimension). ¹⁹ The myth of the Olympians has sometimes been interpreted, from a historical perspective, as the story of the struggle between the religion of the earth goddess and the followers of Indo-European sky-god cults. In the Norse pantheon, the same battle is depicted in the story of the struggle between the Aesir and the Vanir.²⁰ From an entirely different perspective, we could imagine it describing the conflict between the ancient structures of the brain and the more recently developed cerebral ones.

Fascinatingly, when you begin to look at all of this a little closer and delve beneath the surface of the Greek stories, you discover that the figure of Zeus and the figure of Hades, his brother and the Greek god of the Underworld (to confuse us god and place carry the same name meaning 'unseen' or 'invisible'), were originally one person, or two aspects of one god. Hades is sometimes referred to as 'Zeus Cthonios' (Zeus of the depths), just as Zeus has an aspect known as 'Zeus Sabazius'. Sabazius is a barley god who appears to be an early version of the Greek god Dionysus and the Roman god Bacchus, and is described by Clement of Alexandria as being an orgiastic Zeus in the form of a serpent. Dionysus is openly acknowledged as being the same figure as Hades, in a more youthful aspect, both of whom were central players in the Mysteries celebrated at Eleusis in Greece for over two thousand years.²¹

What little we know of the Eleusian Mysteries appear too to have involved an initiatory immersion in the mysteries of the dark, perhaps involving a sacred, hallucinogenic potion,²²during which the initiates confronted annihilation in the form of Persephone,²³ the dark lady of the Underworld, and thereafter so we are told, lost their fear of death. The connection with Zeus is confirmed in an early Orphic version of the myth, in which Persephone is seduced by her father Zeus, in his subterranean aspect in the form of a snake. The later myth depicts Hades as the abductor and rapist. Early portrayals of Persephone display her as a snake goddess. More on snakes later.

One of the few things we do know about the initiatory details of these Mysteries is that at the climax of their experience, the initiates were granted a vision of the light, associated with the light of the sun.²⁴ I mention this because of an old tradition that refers to the light born in darkness, the initiatory descent as paradoxically a source of illumination and healing. R. J. Stewart refers to this tradition and the teaching that there is light in the darkness below, that if you go far enough into the depths you emerge among the stars.²⁵ Or put another way, the stars are within the earth. He says that this theme can be found preserved in folktales, songs and ballads. Robert Ryan, in referring to the cave journey, writes that "the dark cave is paradoxically a source of illumination because it opens inwardly people's innate relationship with the source of their own experience and of the cosmos." He also mentions that this is reflected in the cave's luminescence and quotes Mircea Eliade: "Its [the cave's] celestial character is clearly emphasised by the luminosity of the initiation cave ... the cave is bright because it is covered with quartz crystals, that is, it ultimately partakes of the mystical nature of the sky.”²⁶

In his electrifying book In the Dark Places of Wisdom,²⁷ Peter Kingsley writes of the Greek god Apollo, lord of illumination, the bright and golden god of the sun, from a different angle to the one we're accustomed to.²⁸ According to Kingsley, there are ancient traditions that connect Apollo with caves, dark places and initiatory incubations. He claims Apollo was always associated with darkness and night, with the Underworld and death.

This tradition, which links the light of the sun with the Underworld, springs in part from the notion that in its daily passage through the sky (from the vantage point of Earth) the sun appears to pass beneath the earth at sunset, only to be born anew at the dawning of the day. In imagery portrayed in other mythologies, the sun is carried through the Underworld on a barge or ship, just as the soul travels in a boat to reach the Underworld. We may remember here that the word 'helan' is the etymological root of the word 'hold' - as of a ship. A painting on the ceiling of King Rameses VI's (circa 1130BC) tomb shows the night voyage of the sun through the Underworld²⁹ as the journey of the ram-headed sun god Ra standing in a long snake boat. According to this myth, the sun god had to battle with his arch-enemy, the snake Apep, throughout the night. In the last hours he enters the great snake- - from which he emerges rejuvenated and reborn at dawn. The same tradition can be discerned in the sol invictus (unconquered sun) of Mithraism, the sol niger (black sun) of the alchemists and the midnight sun of the Mysteries. In esoteric tantrism, a correspondence is drawn between midnight and the ‘condition of absolute repose in a state of beatitude’. Rene Guenon comments that this is because the spiritual sun is at its zenith at midnight, while the material sun is at its nadir. Initiation into the Mysteries was linked to the midnight sun. ³⁰

From the perspective of this dark light or black sun, Apollo's Underworld connection can be understood as representing the spilt-off part of the archetype: the ' death/rebirth' aspect of a god who has come to be identified purely with his heroic, light-bringing, rational consciousness-affirming aspect, made, we might say, in the image of ego. But as the old song says: ' you can't have one without the other, or as Jung expressed it, the archetypes contain their own opposites. And so, at the Anatolian town of Hieropolis we are told, Apollo's temple was right above the cave believed to lead down to the Underworld.

Apollo's temples, like the one at Delphi³¹, were places of divination and healing, where postulants would go for the answer to questions from the source of Wisdom herself, the depths beneath. The priestess with the sacred snakes known as the Pythoness, after the serpent Python, was representative of these depths where Apollo reportedly killed the snake . In trance, the Pythoness would respond to questions brought to her, her oracle with its omphalos (navel stone) was considered to be the navel of the world.³² Incubatory temples named after Apollo's son Asclepius, the god of healing, were sanctuaries where people would go for healing which in this case occurred through the medium of sleep and dreams. Those seeking regeneration would lie in the darkness awaiting the presence of the god who would arrive in their dream taking the form of a snake³³ if healing occurred. In fact, there seems to be a universal association of the journey into the Underworld involving an encounter with snakes.³⁴ Chevalier and Gheerbrant write of the serpent who "is one of the most important archetypes of the human soul, ³⁵ that he is an 'old god', "the first god to be found at the start of all cosmogenesis, before religions of the spirit dethroned him. He created life and sustained it. On a human level he is the dual symbol of soul and libido." In the Christian tradition, the angel called Lucifer, meaning ' light-bearer', becomes 'that old serpent' Satan, who is ' cast out into the earth' by God and banished from the throne of heaven into the depths of Hell.

Peter Kingsley describes how the ancient Greek accounts of incubation mention certain signs that mark the entry point into another world. One of these is a whistling, hissing sound that initiates of India associate with the awakening of kundalini energy, the serpent power, pictured lying coiled at the base of the human spine in the root chakra (muladhara, associated with the earth element). It is sometimes imaged as two snakes, one male, the other female, intertwining up the spine. This is similar to the Caduceus, the wand that belonged to Hermes and was carried by Asclepius, an image which remains, to this day, the emblem of healing and the sign by which the medical profession is recognised. Perhaps because of the shedding of its skin and its love for dark places, the snake is an archetype of death, rebirth and healing - the bringer of Wisdom from the depths.³⁶Speaking of the Hindu god Shiva, Alain Danielou writes, "it is the Nagas (snake gods) who preserve the wonderful knowledge of the ancient sages and the secrets of magical power". ³⁷

The nightly ritual of dreaming, Hillman notes, is one of the few processes left that honours this archaic wisdom, the dream being viewed from this perspective as a nightly initiation into the mysteries of the Underworld, a dissolving of our dayworld ego into the imaginal, primordial waters of the dreamworld, a nightly dying to the image we have of ourselves, "The dream takes us downwards".³⁸Sometimes we might be awash with shocking and disturbing images that shatter our composure, but these are necessary to remake us in the image of the psyche. The journey into the Underworld is not a comfortable process: during her descent through seven portals the Sumerian goddess Inanna is forced to shed an item of clothing or jewellery at each stop. Naked and furious, having been stripped of all the insignia of her status (her identity), she finally confronts her dark sister Ereshkigal, goddess of the depths, only to be hung on a stake for three days before being allowed to return to the upperworld to work something out. Canny goddess that she is she manages to negotiate spending only half a year down there, sending her lover Dumuzi for the other six months.³⁹

For us moderns, the decision to face the 'Great Below', as it's called in the Inanna story, is seldom one we entertain voluntarily (even Inanna doesn't realise what the cost is going to be). We ignore our dreams. More often, like Persephone in her Kore (maiden) aspect, we are grabbed by the hand of the underworld from below when we least expect it, through the traumas, depressions and addictions life throws in our path. There are no longer initiatory structures to mediate the

journey, like the Mysteries at Eleusius which honoured the dark. When archetypes are repressed, negative manifestations are more likely, both personally and socio-culturally. The journey to the Underworld, often encountered at midlife, is a confrontation with our impermanence, our mortality, a 'facing of loss.⁴⁰ It is often a meeting with the Jungian ‘shadow', where resources often of great personal and cultural value, have, Jung has taught, been relegated. The Roman name for the god of the Underworld, Hades, is Pluto - from the Greek 'Plouton' (the Rich One) and aptly, the Christian mystic, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, writes "The Holy Spirit draws the soul into the cellar to take stock of its riches".⁴¹ It often takes hindsight to realise this!

So what of the magical snake energy, whether masculine or feminine, imprisoned in the cellar, in the caves and crypts of our imagination?⁴²How is it we have become so alienated from the depths of the primordial mind, that we can only seem to view it as a landscape of terror with its ancient divinity as our chief enemy and tormentor, rather than as a source of wisdom and healing? Are we that at war with our own reptilian roots, our instinctual heritage, are we so identified with masculine, heroic sun-first consciousness as a culture, that we must fight and fear anything that would loosen its hold on us, and lead us through a dying to ourselves to riches within? Is it a necessary alienation from the ground of being built into the structure of consciousness itself, part of the legacy of having developed a cortex, of being 'smart apes'? Are the images of devils and demons,⁴³ the equivalent of what in the Tibetan tradition are called ' wrathful deities', the guardians of the threshold of the Western Mystery tradition, whose job it is to halt us from entering the realm of wholeness before we are ready? Are they the real healers, the purgers of guilt and shame? In our private 'nekyias' (descents) are we being broken by the imaginal world, dismembered psychically, so that what Buddhist scholar Tulstrim Allione calls "gaps in the fantasies of dualistic fiction”⁴⁴ are created in us to help us see through our literal mindedness and systems of identification?

We human beings are so terrified of our archetypal dimensions, of our emptiness and the death of who we think we are and what we think a confrontation with our cosmic roots entails, that we demonise the very thing that is a manifestation of our primordial belonging - our embeddedness in matter - and the coiled energy that lies at its heart: the immanent divine.⁴⁵ We remain in deep conflict about our material substance, our essential psychological androgyny, and the impermanence of our current identity that this reflects.

Nevertheless it can be argued that we dwell in the Underworld all the time. If the outer person represents the surface of existence, the inner you and me represents the depths which incorporate us, whether we know it or not. From this perspective, there is only an apparent descent that needs to take place, a reflection of our identification with the surface of things. We are only apparently separate from the place of our radical wholeness.⁴⁶ Although we take our egos as real, it is paradoxically in non-existence that we are most real, with the Underworld journey as a descent through the levels of being into a reality Jung called the objective psyche', a journey into the ' interiority of things' .⁴⁷

By looking and venturing down, I suggest, by following the pathways of our dreams and the labyrinths of our imaginings, by opening ourselves to the creative uncertainty that's involved in stepping into the unknown, we will recover the sacredness of matter and the healing that comes from below. We will be initiated into the unseen, realm of the Black Goddess.⁴⁸We will restore to the world and to the arena of soul, that sense of presence and of our place in the scheme of things which is so often sadly lacking in this speed driven, earth-denying, manic information-age, recovering that ' loss of soul' Jung has addressed in his own initiatory descent. ⁴⁹

Notes

1. According to legend, The Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus, which became an important foundation for the development of Hermetic Philosophy in the 15th and 16th centuries, was discovered by Apollonius of Tyana, in the 1st century AD. He entered a hidden cave and took the tablet from the hands of dead Hermes himself. See Matthews, Caitlin and Matthews, John (1986). The Western Way: A Practical Guide to the Western Mystery Tradition. Arkana.

2. Study quoted in Turner, Alice K. (1995). The History of Hell. Harvest, and in online Gallup Poll results(2004 and May 10th-13th 2007).

3. See Hillman, James (1975). Re-Visioning Psychology. Harper Perennial, p. 154, Psyche and Myths on the inevitability of 'mythologizing'.

4. The Semang people believe that at death the soul leaves the body through the heel. The Greek hero Achilles was only vulnerable to death through his heel. See Chevalier, Jean & Gheerbrant, Alain (1994). The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols. Penguin.

5. Quoted in J. W. Hanson (1888). The Bible Hel. Universalist Publishing House.

6. Hillman, James (1979). The Dream and The Underworld. Perennial.

7. The black madonnas and virgins of medieval Europe, still found in Christian churches to this day, are associated with crypts and often considered to represent a connection to a much older figure, both the great goddess Cybele, whose name is etymologically linked to the words for crypt and cave and was originally worshipped in the form of a black stone, and Isis, the Egyptian goddess, who is portrayed with dark skin and is associated with a ship festival held every year in the spring. The black virgin can be viewed as the Underworld aspect of the Great Goddess in her many forms (including the Virgin Mary in her Queen of Heaven aspect). Cybele is akin to Kali (Hindu), Hecate (Greek) and Cerridwen (Celtic) among others. According to Alan Bleakley the Black Goddess governs our night-time, our dreamworld, and our undiscovered potentials. For further reading see Begg, Ean (1985). The Cult of the Black Virgin. Arkana; Bleakley, Alan (1989). Earth's Embrace, Archetypal Psychology's Challenge to the Growth Movement. Gateway; Woodman, Marion & Dickson, Elinor (1996). Dancing in the Flames, The Dark Goddess and the Transformation of Consciousness. Shambhala; Whitmont, Edward C. (1984). Return of the Goddess. Crossroad. Bennett, James (1999). 'Beings From Outer Space'. Spring: A Journal of Archetype and Culture, No. 65, Lost Souls, Spring and Summer 1999.

8. Ryan, Robert (1999). The Strong Eye of Shamanism. Inner Traditions.

9. Compare Willetts: "The Cretan archaeological record confirms the Greek tradition that caves were ... the earliest shrines .... " Willetts, R. F. (1962). Cretan Cults and Festivals. New York. An examination of Mithraism, 'a religion of the crypt', is fascinating in terms of the notion of caves as places of worship. See Turcan, Robert (1996). The Cults of the Roman Empire. Blackwell.

10 .Danielou, Alain (1984). Gods of Love and Ecstasy - The Traditions of Shiva and Dionysus. Inner Traditions.

11.In literature, among other references, we think of Dante's Inferno, Lewis's Alice in Wonderland and her trip down the Rabbit Hole, Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and Doris Lessing's Briefing for a Descent into Hell. We may also think of the Bible tale of Jonah's sojourn in the belly of the whale. Jung's autobiographical account in Memories, Dreams and Reflections (Vintage, 1989), p. 158, of his 'big' dream of descent, on which he founded his theory of the Collective Unconscious is relevant. Among many fairy tales that deal with the theme are Sinbad the Sailor, Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp, King Kojata, The Nixie and the Pond and Mother Holle.

12. In The Dream and the Underworld, Hillman argues that the Night Sea-Journey and the Underworld Journey are essentially different in kind (see p. 168 on Ice and p.110, Hercules in the House of Hades). While agreeing with the importance of the distinction he makes between a downward journey made to initiate the traveller into the mysteries of death, in order to learn from the Underworld, and a journey made in order to bolster up the ego for more effective functioning in the dayworld, (which Hillman refers to Hercules and to what he calls the heroic ego), it seems that his distinction rests almost entirely on the example of Hercules and his dishonourable actions in the realm of Hades (which Hillman uses to illustrate the cultural and psychological denial of psychic depth). As Hillman himself acknowledges, he was the only one of the Greek heroes to behave so badly there, and certainly from a cross-cultural perspective, most participants, unlike Hercules, are transformed through their contact with the realm below. Whatever the entry point through which the traveller embarks on the journey down, and it seems there are different entrances and a variety of different regions once you arrive there, and therefore different initiations (perhaps one for each of the four elements), the hallmark of the journey is a radical transformation of the person involved, an emptying of the self (a death), and a 'return' as a changed being. Hillman argues that with the true Underworld journey there is no return, that the 'nekyia' (descent) takes the soul down for its own sake. This is consistent with the intent of his book which is I think, to perform an alchemical dissolution on dayworld consciousness. In my re-imagining of the Underworld, the journey is about going there and coming back (sometimes), albeit with an altered perspective that has nothing to do with ego. Perhaps the Sufi teaching 'Be in the world, but not of it' is helpful here.

13. With regard to Hillman's assertion that the Night Sea Journey connects only to a building of interior heat as opposed to a journey down into the icy zones beneath, (the building of internal fire as a defense against the icy depths), there are differing perspectives through the ages as to which of the four elements is fundamental to the realm of Hades (See Kingsley, Peter (1996). Ancient Philosophy - Mystery and Magic. Oxford University Press). It seems to me that the outcome of a fire initiation depends on the intention of the person undergoing the process. The Night Sea Journey doesn't have to be about strengthening the heroic ego. Perhaps it is significant that Hercules' final fate was to be consumed by fire and in many traditions fire has been conceived as an agent of purification and transformation (hellfire and the fires of Divine Love are sometimes seen as the same experience from a different point of view!). In the Hindu tradition, the fire element is associated with the 3rd chakra (manipura at the solar plexus), which has to do with dominance/submission and the use and abuse of power (the burning heat of the battle frenzy?). A transformation of our relationship to the warrior archetype whether in the form of the Herculean ego, or that of the military/industrial complex, is a major issue for our time. (see Von Franz, Marie-Louise (1986). The Transformed Berserk, her essay in Human Survival and Consciousness Evolution. SUNY).

14. See Chapter VI, Devereux, Paul (1992). Symbolic Landcapes - The Dreamtime Earth and Avebury's Open Secrets. Gothic Image. See also Miller, Hamish & Broadhurst, Paul (1989). The Sun and the Serpent. Pendragon Press, which is an exploration of 'the Serpent Power', associated with sites like barrows and stone circles.

15. This is a central theme of Hillman's groundbreaking book The Dream and the Underworld (Perennial, 1979).

16. "As our ideals fly higher into the sky, our reality is faced with a deeper abyss in the earth". Woodman, Marion & Dickson, Elinor (1996). Dancing in the Flames. Shambhala, p. 60.

17. See Eliade, Mircea (1972). Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. Princeton. The worldview generally described in shamanism consists of three levels. Human beings live on the earth in a middle world, between an upperworld and lowerworld (associated with the sky and the Underworld respectively). These are linked by a vertical axis, sometimes referred to as the Axis Mundi (World Axis).

l8. In using the word 'her', I am not excluding the possibility that earth can be imagined as having masculine being in addition. For example see Geb and Nut in the Egyptian pantheon, an Earth god and Sky goddess respectively.

19. See Graves, Robert (1992). The Greek Myths. Penguin.

20. See Metzner, Ralph (1999). Green Psychology. Park Street Press. Especially Chapter VIII, 'Sky Gods and Earth Deities'.

21. See Kerenyi, Karl (1976). Dionysus - Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life. Princeton/Bollingen. See also Chapter VII of Turcan, Robert (1996). Cults of the Roman Empire and Graves, Robert (1966). The White Goddess. Noonday, p. 335. On the Eleusinian Mysteries see Kerenyi, Karl (1967). Eleusis: Archetypal Image of Mother and Daughter. Princeton/Bollingen.

22. See Wasson, Gordon, Hofmann, Albert & Ruck, Carl (1978). The Road to Eleusis. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

23. The name Persephone literally means 'Bringer of Destruction' .

24. Karl Kerenyi comments "No distinction was made between the light of the Mysteries and the light of the Sun." (Kerenyi, Karl (1967). Eleusis: Archetypal Image of Mother and Daughter, p. 98). In many traditions the light that springs from darkness is imaged as a Divine Boy Child. At Eleusis the Child was named Brimus or Iacchus or Ploutos, and was the son of Persephone and Hades (perhaps the result of a sacred marriage consummated during the ritual). The initiates cried out 'The lady bore a holy boy-child'. Dionysus was a Divine Child born in a cave. In Shivaism, Shiva, who shares many of the attributes of Dionysius has a son Skanda: god of Beauty. In Hinduism, he is called Kumara (The Boy). In the Celtic tradition he is known as Mabon, son of Modron, sometimes called Maponus, who is identified with Apollo. The Christ Child, born in a stable, sometimes called a cave, is in the same body of imagery.

25. See Stewart, R. J. (1985). The Underworld Initiation. Aquarian Press, 1985 and Stewart, R. J. (1992). The Power Within the Land. Element, 1992.

26. Ryan, Robert E. (1999). The Strong Eye of Shamanism. Inner Traditions.

27. Kingsley, Peter. In The Dark Places of Wisdom (Golden Sufi Center, 1999).

28. It is more usual to associate the Moon (Feminine) with the realm of darkness, dreams and death, and the Sun (Masculine) with consciousness and reason. While perfectly valid, these conventional associations tend to be one-sided and therefore lose some richness and relevance as a result.

29. See Willis, Roy (ed.), (1993). World Mythology. Henry Holt, p. 47, 'The Sun God, His Night Voyage and The Stars'.

30. Quoted in entry under 'midday/midnight' in Chevalier, Jean & Gheerbrant, Alain (1996). Penguin Dictionary of Symbols. Penguin. See also Marlan, Stanton (2005). The Black Sun: The Alchemy and Art of Darkness, Texas A & M, for a masterful exploration of the ‘sol niger’ and many of the other themes touched on in this article.

31. Delphi, from the Greek 'delphys' , means 'womb'.

32. See Willis, Roy (ed.), (1993). World Mythology. Henry Holt, p. 138, 'Delphi - The Centre of the World'. See also Graves, Robert (1992). The Greek Myths. Penguin, p. 76, 'Apollo's Nature and Deeds'.

33 .0n Asclepius and Incubation see Kingsley, Peter (1999). In The Dark Places of Wisdom. Golden Sufi Center.

34.See entries under Snake Myths in Willis, Roy (ed.), (1993). World Mythology. Henry Holt.

35.See Chevalier, 1. & Gheerbrant, A. (1996). Penguin Dictionary of Symbols. Penguin.

36.See Henderson, Joseph L. & Oakes, Maud (1990). The Wisdom of the Serpent - The Myths of Death, Rebirth and Resurrection. Princeton. See Section IV, 'Personal Encounter: The Wisdom of the Serpent'.

37.Danielou, Alain. Gods of Love and Ecstasy - The Traditions of Shiva and Dionysus. Inner Traditions.

38.Hillman, James (1979). The Dream and the Underworld. Perennial.

39.See Brinton Perera, Sylvia (1981). Descent to the Goddess - A Way of Initiation for Women. Inner City Books.

40.See Stein, Murray (1983). In Midlife. Spring.

41.Quoted in entry under 'cellar' in Chevalier, 1. & Gheerbrant, A. (1996). Penguin Dictionary of Symbols. Penguin.

42.The snake is one of the central images in alchemy (the great work of turning lead into gold), usually depicted in the form of the ouroboros, or snake biting its own tail. For the alchemists, this image expressed both the prima materia (the original matter) of the alchemical process, which the alchemists imaged as dark and chaotic, and the process itself, which Jung saw as a metaphor for the journey into wholeness (Jung called the ouroboros a basic mandala of alchemy). The salient point for our theme is that the gold is to be found in the muck, in the direction of what is generally thought to be beneath us! The ouroboros was also associated with Mercurius (Mercury), the guardian of the Work, who was simultaneously substance (quicksilver), process and goal, and thus represented both the beginning and end of the journey. Bachelard wrote of the ouroboros that it is "the material dialectic of life and death, death springing from life and life from death." The ouroboros is also associated with Cronus (Saturn) in alchemy, the god who was Zeus' father and was imprisoned in the depths along with the other Titans. Cronus is both Time and the principle of Eternal Return in this context. For further reading on alchemy, see Jung, C. G. (1944). Collected Works, Psychology and Alchemy. Princeton/Bollingen. Gilchrist, Cherry (1964). Alchemy - The Great Work. Aquarian Press. Ponce, Chales (1983). Alchemy - Papers Towards A Radical Metaphysics. North Atlantic Books. Roob, Alexander (1997). Alchemy and Mysticism. Taschen.

43.Our word 'demon' comes from the Greek 'daimon', as Hillman has pointed out in numerous places. They were considered to be divine or godlike figures with their own special powers and were seen as intermediaries between the world of the gods and humankind. A person's daimon was also identified with Divine will, and therefore with the fate of that person. Later the word was used for minor gods, and finally with the spread of Christianity, became synonymous with evil spirits. They have also been viewed as the souls of the dead. Each person had their own genius or guardian angel, who acted as a secret advisor, through giving the person intuitions and inspiration. See Hillman, James (1996). The Soul's Code. Random House, pp. 8-11. In some ways the whole book is a meditation on the image of daimons.

44.Allione, Tsultrim (1984). Women of Wisdom. Routledge and Kegan Paul, quoted in Marion Woodman, Marion & Dickson, Elinor (1996). Dancing in the Flames. Shambhala.

45.See Woodman, M. & Dickson, E. (1996). Dancing in the Flames.

46.By using the term 'radical wholeness' here I am, following Hillman, attempting to re-imagine wholeness as a quality that remains open to the notion of our ultimate emptiness, of each of us being made up of and dwelled in, by many different persons, which, paradoxically is what gives us our individuality. By moving to accept the multiplicity of our selves, we are taking a journey towards psyche (the images in the dreamworld), and therefore towards the Underworld, an emptying of our self-identification. In his book Imaginal Body (University Press of America, 1962), Roberts Avens writes of death as being "precisely that which constitutes the background and reality of our experience." Death and life cannot be separated without diminishing each and it is death that gives life its fullness. Hillman in Suicide and the Soul (Spring 1965), writes “Health, like wholeness, is completion in individuality and to this belongs the dark side of life as well: symptoms, suffering, tragedy and death. Wholeness and health therefore, do not exclude these ‘negative phenomena; they are requisite for health.”

47. Quote from Bleakley, Alan (1989). Earth’s Embrace. Gateway Books.

48. See Woodman, Marion & Dickson, Elinor (1996). Dancing in the Flames, Chapter 1, ‘The Fierce and Loving Goddess’.

49. Jung, C.G. (1933). Modern Man in Search of a Soul. Harcourt Brace. Murray Stein in Jung’s Map of the Soul (Open Court, 1998), refers loss of soul to the modern belief in ego-consciousness as the only reality – an inflation of self. There is an enormous hunger for soul in the world now, due to the loss of meaning and aridity that ensue from this attitude.

Descent Myths from Transitions one

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 10:38:00 +0000

Descent Myths

Demeter and Persephone

In Greek mythology Demeter, the goddess of the harvest (Ceres her Roman equivalent) who presided over grains, fertility, the cycle of life and death and the seasons, and her daughter Persephone, were the central figures in the Eleusian descent Mysteries.

Hades, god of the underworld, fell in love with Persephone and tricked her into his realm by opening the earth under her as she plucked a flower, and made her his queen. Demeter blamed the earth for the loss of Persephone and refused to nourish it. The earth began to die.

During her quest for her stolen child she met a boy, Triptolemus or in another version Demophoon with whom she was so taken that she tried to render him immortal by placing him in flames but was prevented by his mother. She asked help of the sea god Poseidon but was raped by him disguised as a stallion and gave birth to twin horses.

Still mourning the loss of her daughter Demeter blamed the earth as Hades was out of her reach. But the fountain Arethusa said she shouldn’t blame the earth for it had opened to the underworld unwillingly. Zeus sent Mercury to demand Hades should release Persephone.

Hades agreed on the condition that Persephone suffered as much as her mother and not have anything to eat or drink. But Persephone had already eaten the pomegranate seeds which he had given her. A compromise had to be met. Persephone should spend a half (or two thirds) of the year with her mother, restoring nourishment to the earth, the rest as Queen of the Underworld.

Isis and Osiris

King Osiris was killed by the jealous Set who tricked him into a coffin which fitted only him. The coffin was thrown into the Nile. Isis, wife and sister of Osiris, found the coffin but Set stole it and cut the corpse into 14 parts one part for each of the year’s full moons. These were scattered all over Egypt to prevent Osiris from being honoured even in death. Set’s wife, Nephthys helped Isis recover the body parts. Only the penis was lost, eaten by fish. Nephthys made a gold phallus to complete Osiris who could now die decorously to became Lord of the Dead and the afterlife.

Orpheus and Eurydice

Orpheus was a great musician and poet who charmed all who heard him On their wedding day, Orpheus’ wife Eurydice was fatally bitten by a snake. The sad music Orpheus played made the very gods weep. They advised him to play for Hades and Persephone, Monarchs of the Underworld. Hades was so moved he allowed Eurydice to return to life with Orpheus but, on one condition: he must walk in front of his wife and not look back until they both reached the upper world. Inevitably

Orpheus did look back. Eurydice vanished forever, or in other versions was turned to stone. Later Orpheus was killed by women who couldn’t hear his divine music.

This is the story from Virgil’s time. Other writers (according to Phaedrus in Plato’s Symposium) suggested that Eurydice was an apparition and Ovid that her death was caused by dancing with naiads on her wedding day.

Instead of dying for love to be with the one he loved was Orpheus mocking the gods by trying to get her back alive from Hades? Was his love untrue? Perhaps the gods only gave him the apparition of his former wife in the underworld, and mocked him further when he was killed by women who could not hear his divine music.

Orpheus’ descent to underworld paralleled in:

Sumerian myth of Inanna’s Descent to the Underworld which tells of Inanna, the goddess of the sky abandoning heaven and earth to descend to the Great Below

Japanese myth of Izanagi and Ixaname

Mayan myth of Ix Chel and Itzamna

North American Nez Perce tribe’s trickster, Coyote.

Biblical story of Lot’s wife when escaping from Sodom

The warning of not looking back found in the Grimms' folk tale Hansel and Gretel

Chapter 18 From Transitions one Descent

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 11:21:00 +0000

Chapter 18

Descent

Descent to the Underworld as a theme in mythology shows the hero or deity journeying into the underworld, the land of the dead and returning with a loved one or something worth talking about or expressing, heightened knowledge. The ability to do this while still alive proves him or her to be more than mortal.

Even in Genesis of the Old Testament relief from the long line of double-crossings, wrong-doings and violence, comes after Joseph’s descent into the pit. The conflict between Cain and Abel, the myopia of Noah, the shame of Lot, the double crossing of Essau and Isaac by Jacob, the double crossing of Jacob by Leah and then .…. for Joseph the pit and the double crossing of Jacob in turn by his sons’ reports of Joseph’s death … after which, the restoration by Judah!

However the real point of this section, connected with Blake and other accounts of descent, is about the psychogeography of descent, expounded by James Bennett. For the salient point of our theme is that the gold be found in the depths, or at least in the direction of what we’ve sometimes considered to be beneath us.

Blake and Descent

Blake’s painting of The Sea of Time and Space in Arlington Court represents the soul’s descent and return. It depicts Blake’s most profoundly considered representation of the essential belief of Neo Platonism: namely that when we are born our souls descend into matter and our lives are the story of its crossing over the material sea of Time and Space.

In this allegory figures descend through cliff hung caverns to a dark tumultuous sea and re-ascend into a distant celestial world where radiant beings surround the sun’s chariot. In this energetic cyclic movement the red clad man crouching on the edge of the sea is Odysseus. the majestic woman standing behind him pointing upwards to the shining world, Athene, looking a little like Beatrice in Dante’s Divine Comedy that Blake had been illustrating. Here she resembles the figure of Divine Wisdom rather than the warrior.

The painting is based on Porphyry’s treatise on Homer’s Cave of the Nymphs to which Blake added details from the story of Odysseus. Here he is shown landed on Ithaca’s seashore in the cove of Phorcys, close to the cave of the nymphs. His house with its classical pillars sheltered by trees can be seen in the distance.

Odysseus kneels against the sea which has for so long held him captive. He is throwing back to Ino or Leucothea the sea girdle that she leant him to help him return safely to the shore (in Blake’s story not Ithaca but the Phaeacian shore). The scarf-like wreath spirals upwards disappearing into a radiant cloud.

Descent of Blake’s Los, Intuition, as Soul

The Eleusian Mysteries were initiation ceremonies held every year for the cult of Demeter and Persephone in Eleusis in Ancient Greece. They represented the myth of the abduction of Persephone from her mother Demeter by Hades, the king of the underworld. A cycle with three phases, descent (loss), search and ascent, this last reunion with her mother was the main theme of the festival.

1. Blake’s illustrations to Blair’s The Grave showing The Soul exploring the Recesses of the Grave expresses the descent of the soul owing something to emblems of the Eleusian Mysteries (figures on a Wedgewood vase in his possession).

2. In the Frontispiece to Jerusalem the figure of Los descending into the recesses of the Grave i.e. exploring the underworld with the light of his Intuition, owes much to his illustration for Blair. Like the low doors leading into the crypt or cloister of Westminster Abbey where Blake spent much of his time the door is Gothic. The man advances tentatively but with eager profile, half afraid, half exalted with wonder.

This concept was of huge psychological significance to Blake for whom the salvation of humanity was dependent on Los, the Imagination, descending into what Jung would later come to call the unconscious, in order to give light and life to the soul, Blake’s Jerusalem.

3. Awake! Awake! Jerusalem

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 06 Oct 2012 12:31:00 +0000

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Another article from Transitions one

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 05 Oct 2012 12:44:00 +0000

Anansi meets Miss Muffet on a Cross-Channel Ferry

Maggie Harris

Folkestone. And was my first landing a literary one? No, it was with my mate Emily, we’d met at the factory, and me the water-crosser, the alien, the migrant with whole stones in my mouth. The Queen’s English trembled on my tongue, years of colonial implant; Creole and a host of ginger lilies, not daffodils, regurgitated in my stomach. She was from Shepherdswell, a village girl with a stammer, beautiful, blonde and with an eye for fashion that had enticed me with her boldness, with her strength. Meeting back at that plastics factory in Sandwich, girls like us from Ramsgate, Ripple, Deal, joining the women who chain-smoked over the machinery, turning out into pubs and clubs from Margate to Bridge at the weekend. Through Emily I found out about the King’s Road, about shoes that cost a month’s wages, about clothes that belonged on the backs of willowy brunettes and not on factory girls whose speech negotiated an entire rite of passage.

And my tongue would begin to ease itself into the locality, would curl round the dropped h’s, revel in the ‘innits’, learn to use the ‘f’ word with the regularity of breathing. But my body lacked behind, skin and bones to her Munroesque stature, a shadow behind her at Bridge Country Club, both wearing the dresses we made ...And Art walked like a ghost behind me, a ghost uncomfortable in this new place, the land of opportunity that had up-rooted me and my family from a country dissolving post-independence. And it waited at the back-door as both me and Emily got married, had babies, and it was her move to Folkestone circa 1976 that saw us walking along Capel-le Ferne.

A new skin grew along that promenade, a new voice that blended Caribbean lullabies with English ones, celebrating the blue of this baby’s eyes whilst I sung her Marley’s reggae.

That walk along the promenade, a million miles from home, was the first step to marking this territory; that would see Art brush his ghost-dust off his winter coat and lead me, sometime in the 80s into the Metropole. The Arts Officer then was John Rice, a young Scottish guy with a long black ponytail. The workshop through whose doors I’d walked filled my mouth with stones as another self beat its small fists against my breastbone. Many moons ago I had had aspirations of being an artist. I wasn’t sure quite what kind of an artist: I drew portraits prolifically, got an A at GCE, landed at Stansted with some idea of being a dress designer. That was not to be, and playing with paper and ink, oil, and watercolour had for some years existed alongside raising my little girls, with some slight recognition – submissions in exhibitions in Kent and the Mall Gallery. But the two-dimensional form defeated me, words screamed in schizophrenic frenzy in the way I spoke and imagined, in the way that memory and recognition danced in a domestic home-space like stars. So I reached for the pen, hence the workshop. And the sea on the Leas sang such a song I knew its chorus, and my footsteps began to walk as if they knew their way.

There would come a time when my voice would be recognised, that I would be given my first ‘gig’ as a performance poet, alongside John Agard at Cranbrook Library; and came the day when I was asked to represent Kent alongside Caroline Price in Europe on KCC’s European Women Writers’ project, MUSE. And so to Folkestone I had come, the Leas again, walking that promenade alongside women poets from Ireland and the Nord-Pas-de-Calais and Bruges regions, our disparate voices rising like starlings down past the harbour, ready to board the ferry the next day for Calais. And that was the day my stomach, disturbed at its good fortune, disturbed by rich food and the terror of being brought into the light, began to plague me, a condition that would torment me for years. Later it would be given a name, IBS; but the battle between the physical and the mental, between the memory of belonging and the fear of belonging, between the naked self and the words that would eventually occupy a life of their own in publications that went out into the world like teenage children, I would come to realise had a purpose: this limboland I occupied was the very source of my being an artist.

From where the fear of water came I do not know. As a child I had steamed up-river with my father, a tug-boat captain on the Berbice River, a river of Amazonian breadth and depth, happily and fearlessly, running inside the barges of bauxite like Natalie Wood on the train- tracks in This Property is Condemned. Health and Safety with its stifling paroxysms did not exist then. At age 17 I had crossed the Atlantic boldly, daring to look out of the windows. But boarding a cross-channel ferry would send my soul tumbling to its darkest depths.

I had crossed it on previous occasions, on day trips, with family and friends, and on factory outings with women whose raucous voices, underlined by John Players and Embassy, had sung Vera Lynn and knocked back shots of vodka even before the coach deposited us on the ferry. I remember Emily getting pissed as a coot onboard before we’d even got to the beer festival, and having to sleep it off on the coach on the other side of the water whilst I had to find other friends to play with. But on one crossing there was something about its fathomless depths and the way the ferry dipped and rolled, that had suddenly filled me with fear. Perhaps being a new mother had something to do with it, I remember looking at my baby girl and trembling, remembering the sudden death of my father when I was aged fifteen. That, and the fact that I couldn’t swim; and that my aspiration to be some sort of artist had not yet been realised. I remember distinctly thinking myself into sanity: get a grip girl, you ain’t seen nothing. You frightened of water? Let me tell you, if it wasn’t for water you wouldn’t even exist. You think you got problems? Well think of your father’s ancestors: think of them rolling, pinned like sardines on a slave ship forcibly extricated from an African homeland in the name of sugar. And some fat merchant on this side of the Channel may well have been the one to build his grand house of stone on the backs of your fathers. And from somewhere the figure of Anansi had surfaced; that spider trickster had travelled from Africa too, imported in the minds of all those incarcerated on that ship and deposited in Guyana. And all those nancy stories came to mind, heard from childhood, tales of charm and trickery over-coming tumultuous odds, the souls of the enslaved freeing themselves. John Agard is a master of Anansi stories. He had imported Anansi, a much-travelled figure whose African DNA is now a hybrid of Caribbean, North American and British fusion. John and I, like so many from the Diaspora, are hot-house and hybrid, and it was Anansi who had shown us the way.

I remember writing a poem about Anansi on that ferry, he himself dictated the words, singing as he spoke O Anansi O Anansi O Anansi O, You walk on water, skip on land, and leave in your wake your fables like beads, dangling from my hand. (Lament on ‘The Pride of Dover’, 1999)

Recognition and acceptance are sisters, to misquote ... God grant me the will to accept the things I cannot change and the strength to do the things I can ...and my voice is no longer full of stones. I would walk boldly into Saga that was, and ask for help for a festival, I would run a workshop for their workers, I would have tea with Roger de Haan in his office through whose windows the channel lurched in a variety of disguises. I would receive a Year of the Artist award, would read my poetry under the canopy with its roof like sails and in the Folkestone Literature Festival; and always remember my journey and those of others who had followed the sweet smell of sugar.

A million miles away from home. Home, where is my home? Grace Nichols wrote, ‘wherever I hang my knickers that’s my home’. I would move from Kent to Wales, and constantly return; I would be the mother of the bride as one of my beautiful daughters got married in St John’s Church, would stand in a bevy of wedding guests along the Leas on a bright August day where the bride glittered like the sea and somewhere a little me with a mouth full of stones walked by. And often now I walk the town with my grand-children, whose Folkestone accents pepper the air at such speed I ask them to slow down, enunciate. This Folkestone where my grand-daughter Kanisia would bring her golden voice to the Bouverie Centre and win a singing competition, Bouverie’s Got Talent, and where another grand-daughter Chloe writes poetry, and who has been featured more than once in the local paper. And this year, another gift: whilst attending a Live Lit workshop in Tontine Street, an idea evolved for the creation of a performance piece, Daughters, which will feature four women poets, and Chloe. I lost touch with Emily many moons ago. But Folkestone, you have helped me to define

Martini Girls

Maggie Harris

1976. And me and my baby are riding the train

Her curled to my belly, warm on my thighs

And the train hiccups through Dover, skims

For one surreal moment along the track

With the sea to our left and a bright sun swimming

On an emerald sea.

Then the tunnels

And a force-fed wind screaming its anger

At our freedom to move through its confined space

And I’m moving my fingers to cover her ears

Her sweet baby four-month ears, remembering

The classics, the occasional Bob Marleys

The dancing with her still wrapped in my belly.

Folkestone. And me and my baby meet Emily

(we’d worked at the factory) , she’s wheeling her baby

I’m carrying mine, the sun’s shining bright

And we’re warped in delight at our beauty

21(ish) real hair, good teeth, breasts fulsome

To whistles, oestrogen dripping and both of us wearing

The dresses we’d made,

Martini labels on black, on red

Backless, shoulder-less, full-skirted pretend Munroes

Teased into being our mothers (but cool) with trips

(before childbirth) to Jap and Joseph and Anyone

In the Fulham Road.

Sun hot on our heads we parade our babies

Along Capel le Ferne. Watched the sea, swelled fatter

And fatter as The World and His Wife took time off

From strolling to peer at our babies and croon

How like their mothers they were

And they don’t stay babies for long, enjoy.

2001. And this memory rises as I ride on the train

And I think of my baby, now 25

And her babies and Emily’s babies

And Emily and wonder what happened

What happened to those Frocks?

(from From Berbice to Broadstairs, Mango Publishing, 2006)

Whilst contemplating the sea

(from the Saga Building)

Maggie Harris

a linen ceiling

dropped like a handkerchief

chandelier glass and light

steel and chrome

freckled ammonite concrete floor

a place for brunches, lunches

business meetings

who shagged who the night before

the sea like a voyeur

cinema screening

panoramic patio, tilt-backed chairs

the smoking zone

remembering the time

a Zulu choir shattered

the glass, reclaiming

a space, returning

once-silenced voices

out over the Channel and home.

The Lights of Calais

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 21:48:00 +0000

Another Article from Transitions One

Lights of Calais

Memories of a Cross Channel Swimmer

Extracts from Farewell My love by Sultan Mubarak to be published by Out of the Blue and distributed by Khan Art studio.

Shaukat Khan was the youngest swimming champion West Pakistan had ever produced who at the age of nineteen was brought over to swim in Butlin’s International Channel Swimming Race .

His story begins with a loud banging at the door. It is Bashir from the Pakistan navy who was to be his trainer for the race from Calais to Dover. Excited and nervous to be representing his country at international level and never having been in a plane before, he had just arrived in England and overslept after a dream about being captain of an air balloon.

“This won’t do”, says Bashir, “I will report to my ship’s Commanding Officer that Sultan Mubarak is no good for practice. If you do not get up in the morning to do your exercises and practice swimming in the sea, you will not be able to cross the Channel in record time. You must obey my orders. I have been sent from my ship to train you and help you to win the Butlin’s International Channel Swimming Competition for Pakistan. It’s no joke, its not only my honour that’s at stake, but that of my ship, our country’s honour, and all those people in Lahore who helped to raise funds to make it possible for you to compete. And don’t forget that the deputy commissioner of Lahore, Nazamudin the proprietor of the Nazam Hotel in Anarkali Bazaar, Khawaja sahib director of sports from Government college, and Professor Hameed from Islamia college, secretary of the swimming trust, all worked hard to send you. So do not forget, you owe it to them to train hard and win for their sake. Of course, you should also remember that your father, mother, brother and sisters and neighbours and friends and all the people of Lahore who came to the railway station to give their best-loved sportsman a memorable send off. They are all praying for your success, so remember that their happiness depends on you. Don’t you ever forget it”…………

Shaukat’s first dip into English waters.

I took off my tracksuit. I already had my woollen swimming costume on. This costume was given to me by Anarkali Bazaar’s famous department store, Inyat Ullah, as their contribution to my swim. I put on a plastic head cap to keep my hair tidy and massaged a little lanolin cream on my body and put on eye goggles. It all got fuzzy. I couldn’t see anything. I took off the goggles, rubbed some sea-water on the lenses and put them on again. It was all right now. I took a little walk on the pebbles, got to the edge of the shoreline, gauged the depth of the water, took a deep breath and jumped in. “Christ, Oahu. It’s ice cold.” It blew my mind. I had a sharp ice pack feeling and a burning sensation went from the top of my head, through my spine and down to the toes of my feet. “Shit, shit, shit.”

My whole body had a shock. All the organs of my body froze and I began to sink like a stone in the English Channel just a few yards from the shoreline.

Standing at the edge of the beach, Bashir could not see me coming up to the surface from my maiden dive. “He is not coming up. Shit, shit.” He hurriedly took his shoes off. He was not expecting this to happen. He got his jumper off in a flash, then he saw a little finger appear on the surface of the water , then a hand, then arm and body with a splash and another splash.

Jesus Christ, the water was cold. I had never experienced anything like it in Lahore. How could the water be so cold? It should be frozen into ice blocks.

“Oh Allah, give me the strength, warmth and courage to overcome this cold water.” I was told that the English Channel water was very cold but this is so very very extremely cold, ten times more than I had imagined. “Oh, Allah I am done for. What I am going to do?”

All the things Bashir said came to my mind. I couldn’t let down all those people. They would kill me when I got down from the aeroplane back in Lahore. The passion of shame would run high and somebody would not stand for the disgrace and dishonour I brought to my people. If I could not swim because the water was so cold they would shoot me dead on the spot, like a football player who was shot in Uruguay for not winning the match when his team returned from Europe. People were shamed, and the nation was disgraced, and they ould not handle the dishonour of losing the match. That may happen to me. I wouldn’t be able to see my friends because they’d be ashamed to see me. I wouldn’t be their favourite sportsman any more. I’d get booed everywhere I went. I could never put my family into this disgraceful situation, especially my father. He would not be proud of me any more and would say that his son Sultan was no longer his child. I would be disgraced by my nation, dishonoured by my friends and disowned by my family. I could not have that. My heart began to pump more blood to my brain, to my arms, to my legs, and to my whole body, it was going like a brand new Ferrari with Sterling Moss in control. My passion ran high. I was not going to let anybody down. It was just a little cold water, just the initial shock to the body that came with not being acclimatised yet. I had been in England only two days after all, eating that bloody food wrapped up in the newspaper.

I pulled myself together and kick started my legs. “Cold, what cold?” I convinced my brain that there was no cold. I was determined not to be afraid of cold water. When I got my arms and legs moving, the blood began to circulate. Then I felt little bit more comfortable and a little warm. I shouted in my heart, “Allah –u-akbar, Allah-u-akbar – God is Great” and started to swim towards the East Dock.

One stroke, two strokes, and so on. I managed to build up rhythm. Splash, splash. Into the water and out of the water. I swam breast stroke. It is slower but more comfortable. It has rhythm and great style with less effort. You just float on the water like a graceful dolphin. Push both arms forward, close together, float like a log and give a kick with your legs by bringing your feet to up to your bottom then spreading them out again to give yourself a push - like frogs do with their legs as they swim. Your head goes down into the water, you take deep breath, getting as much oxygen as possible and breathing out when your head comes out of the water. This needs some practice. Breathing in and out is very important, otherwise you take in water and choke. As you kick your legs out with a frog-like motion, your body goes forward with both arms close together to a position over your head. Then you open your arms and push water away from your body in a semi-circular motion and with this motion your body floats

forwards…You keep repeating this action until you’ve built up a comfortable rhythm, and then you’re off, swimming happily.

Practicing in Lahore Shaukat Khan had gone on a strict fat diet regime.

A typical evening meal consisted of two raw eggs, swallowed in one go, and one hundred mls of cod liver oil, polished off with naan and freshly made full-fat saturated halva. After physical exercise and a little rest I swam every night until eight. Over the weekend when pools were not busy, as the college was closed and there were no swimming classes I did my ten-hour non-stop swim, lap after lap, with a little break for hot milk. This was my routine for two months.

A public demonstration had been organised to show my fitness and long distance swimming ability. I swam in the local fast flowing river called the Ravi. It is a very dangerous river full of turbulent water, with strong currents and unknown nasty creatures. I swam for fifteen miles followed by a motor boat with armed guards ready to pounce if I got into any trouble, but nothing happened. I was full of enthusiastic but naïve passion and was highly emotional. I knew little of the dangers of this stupid exercise. The public were lined up on the both banks of the river to see this demonstration. The following morning the newspaper published a picture of the marathon swim with the headline ‘Sultan Fit For English Channel Swim.’

On August 14th 1959 Shaukat Khan was to attempt to swim the English Channel. The participants were flown from Lydd to La Touquet where they had a champagne reception, after which……

The atmosphere changed and happy faces became grave. It was time for a serious and dangerous competition. Time to recollect the years of hard practice, ambition, and passion for what you believed in. Time to recall the promises you had made to yourself and remember what people expected of you. Time to show what you were made of. It would be a competition in which men and women would show their strength, determination, and stamina. They would struggle to win, struggle to overcome the cold, the distance, the strong currents, the rough sea, and all the elements that nature threw at them in a notorious sea where mighty Spanish Armada ships lay wrecked on the bed.

Thousands of sailors had lost their lives in these waters over the years when their ships had got entangled in storms and gales, or lost their direction in thick fog and become victims of the Goodwin sands..….

As I tried to get some rest in the hotel at Calais, my mind drifted to the day I could no longer bear the cruelty of my father and had decided to run away as far I could go. It had been a dreadful and horrible decision to make. I would have to leave my brothers and sisters, friends, and worst of all, my grandmother, Buri Meia Maa. She was the love of my life who dedicated herself to bringing me up. She cared for me and provided for all my needs, even if she had to walk miles to get something for me..….

I was woken by a knock on the door. It was time to get ready into swim gear with my tracksuit over the top. Bashir had towels, hot food flask, water and a lanolin container in his baggage. We were put on board the bus and driven off to Cap Gris-Nez beach. There was a midnight chill and a strong wind blowing. Thousands of spectators thronged the beach. Television spotlights, TV and radio crews were everywhere, and photographers with Rolleiflex cameras. Out in the Channel you could see fishing boats anchored in deep water, their mast lights bobbing up and down in the swell. The strong wind turned gale force and waves began to bash hard on the rocks. It was quite a frightening scene. Small rowing boats struggled to come ashore. Whenever a boat arrived, his number was announced on the loudspeaker and the corresponding swimmer was brought to the starting point. His time was noted and off he went in the water, accompanied by his trainer in the rowing boat: splash, splash. Off he swam towards the big fishing boat waiting to go with his swimmer on the swim of his life. The observers were already in the fishing boat. The gale got stronger and stronger. Many swimmers had already left.

I had my body greased with lanolin and searched for my boat to come to shore. I got very restless and tired with the strong wind blowing and became very cold, but in fact, the water temperature was warmer than standing on the beach, so I lay in it and waited for my boat to arrive to start my swim. I was a nervous wreck, and impatient.

Then I heard news that many boats had capsized in the water on the way to beach, with some managing to right themselves andcontinue toward the beach. After waiting over an hour it became clear that eighteen boats had capsized and that their swimmers would not be able to join the race. The waiting swimmers were by now in a state of high tension, full of anxiety, sick feelings and disappointment that years of training and high hopes might all fizzle out in a gale force wind. Unfortunately, I was one of those eighteen whose boat did not make it. With our covering of oily lanolin we were like sick sea-lions, shivering like madmen. There were no facilities for de-greasing us as nobody had expected this disaster to happen. We were plucked like oil-covered birds saved from sea wrecks, loaded into helicopters and flown back to Dover Lodge Hotel. The hot showers degreased our bodies and after a cup of hot tea we went to Dover beach to wait for the winner of the race to touch the English shore and claim the prize….

The Race was won by an Argentine swimmer namely Alfredo Camerero. Mr Butlin seeing the disappointment of the swimmers who couldn’t partake offered a prize to any one of them who could make a solo attempt in the next fourteen days.

I believe we decided to have a go from England to France on the 3rd of September so we didn’t have to take the chance of going to Calais by boat and starting from Cap Gris-Nez. But it gave us a big problem. Not only do you have to understand complicated tidal science to swim the Channel but also be a very powerful fast swimmer to overcome strong tidal currents. Crossing from England to France is harder than the other way round as you have less time to catch the French tide. To begin with you go along with the English tide towards France which flows for six to eight hours in a north-easterly direction from Dover, then, when you arrive mid-channel you have to catch the changing French tide, running south east towards Calais. If you miss it you are out of luck because nobody can complete this swim against the tide. Take two strokes forwards and the tide will drive you three strokes backward, losing distance all the time….

I started my swim from Shakespeare Cliff beach, a famous landmark and highest cliff in Dover, popular with Sunday visitors who come to catch a glimpse of France on a clear day. Dominating the sky it is the first cliff you see when getting nearer the shore when arriving by ferry at Dover from the continent. I was greased with lanolin from neck to foot and got off to a good start. There was a calm sea and a high tide. Captain Reed’s fishing boat was anchored a mile away in the deep water and small rowing boat came to the beach to accompany me. It was like a scene from Stevenson’s Treasure Island. I loved that book so much, and I had read it many times. It was in my first year college syllabus, along with Charles Dickens and Shakespeare. And now I was in Kent, the county of Charles Dickens.

It was high noon, time for the tide to flow northeast and carry me into the mid-Channel. I was feeling great and going with tide. At last, I thought God was on my side and I prayed that the weather remained good. It was not long before we joined the big fishing boat, and the small rowing boat was pulled onto its deck from where the observer would watch my progress. One splash, two splashes, and then the rhythms repeated themselves endlessly. My mind drifted to my father’s cruelty toward me and how I could not stand his humiliation and constant nagging……..

I heard a big siren. I was in the water swimming and my mind was drifting away. I heard shouts to watch out for a great big giant ferry only a few hundred yards away from me. It was sailing away slowly and all the passengers came onto the deck. They hailed three cheers “HIP HIP HOORAY, HIP HIP HOORAY, HIP HIP HOORAY!’, and the captain of the ferry blasted the big horn. It was a magic feeling, very uplifting, that made a shiver pass through my whole body. I waved back. All of a sudden my spirits lifted and from nowhere energy flowed into my body and soul. Flash cameras clicked and all my disappointments vanished. But in a short while the ferry disappeared below the horizon on its way to France.

I felt a little thirsty and hungry and made a gesture with my hands to Mr Price. I was passed on a cup of hot tea with a drinking straw. It was so hot that it burned my mouth. Then I had some hot soup and other exciting foods. From time to time salty seawater got into my mouth and made me cough but after this difficult refreshment I continued on. Quite soon after I threw up all the food I’d just eaten because of the fumes from the escorting fishing boat that made me sick. I felt very uncomfortable but it was worth it as I could see the lightship lamp that marked the mid-channel point. I was halfway through my cross-channel swim. Hooray! Hooray!

It was important for me to reach this point so I could catch the French tidal flow to Calais. Mr Price was urging me on from the fishing boat’s deck, “Go on. Go on. We are nearly there. Bit faster. Bit faster. Well done Mubarak.”

Much of my lanolin had been washed away and my fingers began to claw because of the cold. It was vital my hands were open properly as they acted as oars dispelling the water. Without these blades it was useless. Though I was swallowing loads of seawater and my feet had no feeling at all, my spirit was up for it would not be long to go. The French tide would take me to the Calais beach. …

It was getting a little dark. I had now been swimming for eight to nine hours and visibility was becoming difficult. I kept bumping into the boat and breathing in diesel fumes so they lowered a small tender to keep me at a safe distance. We were now not far from the lightship. Suddenly I felt terrible stings all over my body. I had no idea what was going on, and was overwhelmed by the sensations of these hot stings and excruciating, unbearable pain. I heard the shouting of Mr Price. “Watch it, watch it.” They got out the jellyfish shovel, but it was too late. I was in the middle of it. They stung my neck, shoulder and belly and my skin got red, tight, and sore. It swelled up like a balloon and was so painful I thought I was going to die. The lanolin had completely washed away and my skin had no protection. Every stroke I made was pure hell. I just wanted to sink to the bottom of the Channel and not go on any more. I was losing spirit. All I could think of was this horrible hot sting, and the excruciating pain.

Mr Price kept on encouraging me. “One stroke more, and then another. Go on! Just hold in there, look we can see the light of Calais.” When I saw them for myself I took encouragement and drew some strength from nowhere. I was given hot tea and tablets to ease my pain and swollen areas, which were now twice the size they had been when we had left Shakespeare beach about ten hours before.

I resolved to carry on regardless, but didn’t like the idea of my body, in this horrible dark cold ocean, being eaten by fish, crabs, and winkles, while barnacles grew over my body. I would rather be buried in the Goal Baag, Lahore, where I would smell of lavender, roses, lily of the valley, jasmine and sweet peas - and where my soul would remember the kiss of Elisabeth forever.

I could feel that captain Reed was worried about my physical condition, which was deteriorating fast. My strokes were getting slower and slower, and I was sinking. They were talking about aborting the swim attempt, but I would have none of it. We passed the lighthouse. HIP, HIP HOORAY! But the dreadful news was that I had to hurry up or I would miss the French tidal flow. I couldn’t muster any more strength and although I was putting every effort into getting my body muscles to work for me, was getting slower and slower. I did not want to miss that French tide. Then when I got a cramp in my right leg my predicament got worse. The body was not listening to my mind and was saying to hell with your spirit, I’ve had enough.

My spirit was like a ship abandoned by its crew and captain in a stormy ocean, for my body was just bobbing in and out of the waves like a cork. I found it impossible to kick my legs which were getting cramp. My neck was swollen, and my shoulder hurt every time I moved. My belly was tight and sore. My eyes were like goose eggs and my hands were all twisted. Now I was swimming sideways, with one leg and one arm. I had been in the water for thirteen to fourteen hours. There was not a chance in hell that I would catch that French tide. While I was contemplating what to do, cramp appeared in my left leg and I began to sink. Mr Price jumped in the water while Captain Reed and his crew struggled to get me onto the deck. I was like frozen tuna fish, all stiff, and kicking with pain. I have a slight memory of someone frantically rubbing my body with a towel to put some warmth back into it. I was given a dose of brandy, ointment for my jellyfish stings and taken down into the hold. I saw the lights of Calais from the corner of my swollen eyes, and they remained a mystery to me.

`Promised Land’

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 21:41:00 +0000

From Transitions 1, An interview with Nikolaj Bendix Skyum Larsen about his film; `Promised Land’

Graffiti taken in 'the Palestinian Squat' where Reza and Nima lived

The following is by the editor in conversation with Nikolaj about his film

The waters might not part for immigrants as they did for Moses, but still the Channel is there to be crossed. Asylum seekers will flee violent regimes and, it seems, they love England, the country we sometimes love to hate. Why? Because they’ve heard – and this isn’t just relatively speaking - its politically stable and prosperous. “Because everyone has work and a roof over their head”, “Because life there is good” , “The people are good” , “England is the number one country for human beings”, as some of the individuals in Larsen’s Promised Land say.

Do we, often deficient with our welcomes, not quake with shame? Coming as we do from this relative stability and prosperity, even during recession, our journeying to a Promised Land might entail travelling to the place of our dreams: a Himalayan mountain, a Greek island or a wall rife with ancient history. Not so for those fleeing war-torn countries to escape devastation and torture, and yes that would amount to a better life for them. Haven’t we who already possess this fundamental, always sought and expected the same, our ideals no different from theirs?

Larsen’s hypnotically beautiful film commissioned for the Triennial portrays the hope of refugees on the last leg of their flight from their own countries as they wait in Calais to cross to their Promised Land. Living with them in Calais’ Iranian

camps or the Afghan jungle, he and cinematographer, Jonas Mortensen have earned their trust and the resulting piece, no quick-storied news item, is a perfectly observed narrative which is not a drama. Although his protagonists have come from lands where the authorities pull out their nails, chop off their fingers or poke out their eyes - and these brutalities make the French police’s beatings look laughable by comparison - Larsen doesn’t dwell on traumas or intrude on the introverted or seriously depressed.

Mostly from Iran or Afghanistan, those who have come forward - Reza and Nima, Kamron, Khan, Hasam, Jafar or Mohammed – are intrepid and often audacious questors with a quiet but resolute pride. Despite extortionists demanding money for their illegal human trafficking organisations, they’ve not yet - unlike second generation immigrants - experienced disillusion, the flip side to hope, and still it is hope rather than misery that fuels what Larsen describes as their incredible strength.

Yes he admits there is tragedy and sadness and yes, what they are doing is illegal. But to have had lives so desperate they find themselves propelled on an epic journey to better it, believing so strongly in a destination they cannot know, is, he finds, fascinating. What a gamble. What a life changing adventure. How would we western Europeans cope in the same situation?

Despite the rawness of their living rough, we, the audience, are treated to a feast of sight and sound, set out triptych style across three screens. Flocks of migratory birds swarm like flies across the sky. A lone seagull flaps its wings rhythmically through the air. A father and son whose faces we cannot see cook and warm their hands over a fire on the floors of a ruin. We listen to his words. A highway of lorries and lights move slowly and hugely through the dark. The sounds of the docks and vehicles around us are so close we might be there, in danger even of being run over. But the sweeping complexes of roads and flyovers are almost elegant and soon the soundtrack lifts to something hauntingly melodic and ethereal. Sometimes the sea glitters. Sometimes grey waves roll in. Monumental ships pass dignified across the setting sun. The legendary stuff both of sea-gods and monstrous trials.

Poised on the double-edged poignancy and power of these images we’re sucked in, teetering in our awareness between the critical everyday of these would be survivors, ‘hanging-out’ in Calais’ parks, and their larger fate. The first is in the detail of day to day survival, of deliberations and focuses. The ‘how to’ questions and rehearsals concerned with getting across that Channel, from Calais to Dover, whatever it takes.

How often does the Euro tunnel parking lot guard switch?

How will they avoid detection once inside the lorries?

How will Hasan manage to cross the Channel if he can’t swim?

The second is the possibility always, of transcendence. Reza and Nima. Kamron. Khan. Hasam. Jafar or Mohammed. Glistening waters. Rolling waves. Huge seas, real and metaphorical, waiting to be crossed. The universal side to their stories says Larsen is the most tantalising. Love, war, disillusionment and danger, the monumental themes, are all there speaking to us all of dreams of utopia. Of moving on or away.

Are the men with this resolve and strength, heroes? With the dividing line between victim and hero slight, Larsen erring on the side of the latter, thinks they are. An Afghan family selling their house or shop to send their eldest son far away to work and send back his wages, imbues him with great responsibility. He is in a sense their Chosen One. But the hero is also anyone setting out on a journey through hostile communities, across mountains, deserts and parched wildernesses to the very edges of the seas. It takes guts. And if our Reza and Nima, Kamron, Khan, Hasam, Jafar or Mohammed’s stories contain shades of the mythic sea-crossings - Odysseus returning home or Jason looking for his fleece – it seems the gods who protect their vessels and set their course were, as usual, sometimes there and sometimes not.

Rebelling against Iran’s current political climate Reza had fled with his young son Nima to the mountains where they lived in hiding for six months. Unusually, his wife asked him for a divorce. Then he had to run again. The small boat that took them to Greece carrying eleven people filled up with water because it was too heavy. Still they made it to Italy, then Germany and Amsterdam where Reza bought a bus ticket to London but got stopped in Calais.

Kamron, a nineteen year old living in the Afghan jungle (makeshift camp), thinks that all Afghans would return to their own country if war ended. He believes that other people think that he’s a terrorist. Mostly they ‘hate us’, he says. He too talked of a Turkey to Greece speedboat which crashed killing twenty four of his countrymen.

Like Leander who swum the Hellespont to reach his love, Hasan from Iran has something of the lover’s ardour about him but lacks Leander’s ability to swim, and it is not towards his love he is moving but away. In Iran he had everything. Money, security, work, but the woman he loved married someone else. Now he says, he has nothing. In Calais he found himself a cabin unknown to the police, and while he watches his friends swim to ships that will take them to Dover, he has tried and failed, even with a life-jacket, eight times. Perhaps his very personal journey was to come to terms with and maybe overcome his grief. And perhaps it occurred in the cabin. “It is like a hotel” he laughs. He has been in Calais for forty days. “Life is easy here”,“Quite hard to leave really! ”, he says.

So have the courageous been rewarded? As far as Larsen knows, Reza is repairing computers in Wales where he’s living with his son. Jafar finally got to England after attempting the crossing twelve times. Now he is in police custody. Mohammed is attending English classes and has joined a gym in a city in Scotland. He is lonely. Even the best results don’t have unequivocally happy endings.

As the P&O ferry passes the setting sun, Hasan is left on his own. Perhaps it’s just as well. He has an inkling of our legacy for he has been told that he would feel very alone if he were to make it to England. He has had friends in Calais but in England he would be lonely he repeats. As he couldn’t cross to his love, luckily, unlike Leander, he didn’t drown. Instead Hasan has returned to Iran.

We can hardly compare our immigrant heroes to the slaves who escaped from Egypt or even the survivors from a flattened Troy who went out to form new cities like Rome or Troynovant (an old name for London), can we? Larsen, himself a Danish migrant attracted by the energetic metropolis of London replies ‘we don’t know yet’. His reasons for leaving his own provincial home town aren’t the same as an Afghan’s who’s travelled the length of Turkey, Greece, Italy, Holland, Sweden, Switzerland, Belgium, Denmark, Germany … to France. But a quest is a quest. No matter he had to wash dishes. He was in the country that was not so much a safe haven to him as a cultural idol. Yet he, like his protagonists, once left home in order perhaps like Odysseus, to seek it again.

We can all claim quests of our own. So at the very least, because in ‘enlightened self-interest’ welcomes are reciprocal, we should match the boldness of wave-making voyagers for whom England beckons, by helping them feel at home. Every culture is a mixed bag of races enriched by diasporas. Nikolaj’s work of art clothes the individuals who inspired by hope would roll up on our shores, in a gentle but insistent humanity.

Promised Land2011, 50 minutes, HD. 3 screen projection, 5.1 surround sound.

Promised Land portrays Mohammed, Jafar, Hasan, Camron, Khan, Reza and his three year old son, Nima - young migrants who will go to any length to cross the Channel from the French seaport town of Calais to enter Britain in the hope of finding a better life. The multiple screens in Nikolaj Bendix Skyum Larsen’s Promised Land combine beautiful cinematography with footage captured by migrants to give a deep insight into their close friendships, their hopes, dreams and ways of coping with the misery of their
situation, their journeys from war-torn regimes, and dangerous attempts at getting into Britain - their Promised Land.

Promised Land is commissioned by the Creative Foundation for Folkestone Triennial 2011 and is made with generous support from The Roger De Haan Charitable Trust, The Arts Council England and The Danish Arts Council.

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