The Mountain Poems of Hsieh Ling-yün

Not a Chinese painting but one done by Heywood Sumner of the New Forest.

Climbing Green-Cliff Mountain in Yung-chia

Taking a little food, a light walking-stick,
I wander up to my home in quiet mystery,

the path along streams winding far away
onto ridgetops,no end to this wonder at

slow waters silent in their frozen beauty
and bamboo glistening at heart with frost,

cascades scattering a confusion of spray
and broad forests crowding distant cliffs.

Thinking it's moonrise I see in the west
and sunset I'm watching blaze in the east,

I hike on until dark, then linger out night
sheltered away in deep expanses of shadow.

Immune to high importance: that's renown.
Walk humbly and it's all promise in beauty

Poetry is a great healer of the soul, and reading Robert Macfarlane's, The Wild Places, I came across the Chinese poem above, to quote from the site the poem is taken...

"During the last decade of his life, living as a recluse high in the mountains of southeast China, Hsieh Ling-yün (385-433 C.E.) initiated a tradition of "rivers-and-mountains" (shan-shui) poetry that stretches across millennia in China and beyond, a tradition that represents the earliest and most extensive literary engagement with wilderness in human history."

The concept that flows through Ling-Hun poetry is of course echoed in Gary Syder's book - Mountains and Rivers Without End.

A fragment from Snyder's poetry, called "The Flowing.".

Headwaters

Head doused under the bronze

dragon -mouth jet

From a cliff

spring - headwaters, Kamo

River back of Kyoto,

Cliff-wall statue of Fudo

Blue-faced growling Fudo

Lord of the headwaters, making

Rocks of water

Water of of rocks

http://www.davidhinton.net/Pages/Hsieh%20Ling-yun.html

Earth Has the Lord-Builders.

Sometimes you just pick up a book and thumb through for the joy of the words, well here is a few caught by Jacquetta Hawkes, the first is from Beowulf

With seabirds sousing in the spray,
And the hail and the snow seep down day by day.
Heavier are wounds then
For the sweet lord in his heart. And when
The sorrow of the thoughts of kin
Run through his mind and searches in,
His heart goes to find them in the hall
The warriors of old strength




And here she introduces the concept of the new Anglo-saxon invaders to the land of the Celts;
"The invasions were almost as incoherent, as empirical as those of prehistoric times, and the invaders had to fit themselves into the land as they found it before they could begin, without plan or intention, to remould it. In so doing, inevitably they were drawn to the open and still cultivated lands that encircled the decaying towns. But just as it made little difference to the Britons whether they were struggling to maintain disorganized lives in the corner of a forum or the corner of a cave, so the Anglo -Saxons accepted the relics of Roman civilisation as a natural if awe-inspiring feature of their new land"

Here she quotes a part of The Ruin, which most people believe is about Bath...

Curious is this stonework! The Fates destroyed it;
The torn buildings falter; moulder the works of giants.
The roofs are tipped down, the turrets turn over,
The barred gate is broken, white lies on mortar
The frost, and open stands the arching, cumber of lumber
Eaten under with age. Earth has the Lord-Builders.

Taken from The Land by Jacquetta Hawkes

The painting is taken from The Royal Academy pictures shown for 1897 and is called "A Corner of old England" by C.E.Johnson R.I.

Abel Cross by Ted Hughes

Where the Mothers
Gallop their souls

Where the howlings of the heaven
Pour down onto earth
Looking for bodies
Of birds, animals and people

A happiness starts up, secret and wild,
Like a lark-song just out of hearing
Hidden in the wind

A silent evil joy
Like a star broken stone
Who knows nothing more can happen to it
In its cradle grave.

The Chronicles of the White Horse

The Christmas season takes us back to childhood and stories, and amongst my books Peter Please's ' The Chronicles of the White Horse' is one I pick up and read again. It is a small story not in the league of great tales, but it features a boy and his adventures with a detective mole.

There is an air of mystic about it, the boy has to learn to be 'not there' invisible, to become like a stone, his mind has to become stilled so that there is 'no thinking', in this state he becomes at one with the world of nature around him.

The Great Iron age hillfort, that belonged to the people of the''White Horse'

The story rests on mystery and mists and eventually takes them to Wayland's Smithy; one night there is a full moon shining directly over the old stones and in the words of the story.."Creeping moss, whorled ferns, lichens, dead branches, grass clumps, shone on its back and side", in the party are the boy, Ben the mole detective and the White Rook. It is at this point that the drama of the story unfolds, the horror of something unseen begins to make itself felt. At first there is a low humming noise whistling through the trees, and slowly bats begin to appear dancing over the silvered moonlit meadow, but they are not quite bats they achieve sinister shapes, then they hear the padding of claws across the frozen grass. The little group have taken refuge in the longbarrow, in its cavelike interior, and they start to tremble as a great yellow-eyed monster appears in front of the stones.

Ben tells them to think marigolds, and slowly the monster disappears so that there is only a layer of leaves in front of the stones, a marigold starts to grow, and as suddenly dies. Followed by a whole host of other marigolds but they too die. The small group trapped in the cave of the barrow, start to imagine into life childhood horrors, the rook, a great eagle.

The story culminates in a shooting star falling to earth, and the great white horse, that is forever galloping across the downs, to once more take flight and gather the dead in...

"I could see it reining on a bridle of light, caught in mid gallop, halting awhile as it has always done and always will. The light barely touching the earth. I heard the sound of the star breaking. The night finished here. I was at the door of the manger. I could see its bloodstained hooves. I heard them pounding between the standing stones. Calling the night, calling the dead and all the things which have ended. Calling them home, no longer free to wander, choke and haunt the living... the night-mare had passed"

http://www.peteralfredplease.co.uk/

Roses

Some summer photos on a cold day. Roses bushes like fruit trees I collected at one time, but my garden has become neglected this year, though both the rose and the fruit trees produce their crops...... The rose for me is a beautiful flower in shape colour and form, you can even buy its scent as tea rose at our herb shop in Bath, its strong smell of crushed stem reminding you of summer, along with the scent of lavender....

Lockeridge sarsens

Apple pie neat cottage with perfect thatched roof

Moss prowling around

Winterbourne Monkton

The photographs above may be an extraordinary juxtaposition, but the female figure on the W/M font has certain similarities with the pose of the Indian goddess Kali, our W/M female is almost dancing.

The story of Kali is complex, in that she represents many things, she is seen as standing on her husband with a chain of skulls round her neck, she is a personification of everything, not necessarily war though her role is often depicted as such, but someone who overcomes and triumphs over the physical and spiritual aspects of life. She can also be seen as a mother goddess, a long line that stretches through the neolithic to present times, from the Willendorf figure to Gaia, she is a representation of female power.

In the Christian faith misygony set in, women's role became secondary, from the 'Fall of Adam' the stories that were to evolve round women, tend to see them as either 'good' or 'bad', and it is from here that we have the rather grotesque figure of sheela n gigs developing, a warning against the sins of the flesh.
Some would argue though that these sheelas come from the Celtic trinity goddess tradition of mother, maiden and crone and it is from this source that the figure of Kali can be seen, an all powerful female, this is possibly relevant given an Irish context.
Also it must not be forgotten that our Norman medieval overlords and sculptors came from a different background, they had seen exotic statutary abroad, and sometimes this shows in their stone carving. tThe now destroyed church of Shobdon in Herefordshire has a very eastern Christ on one of the tympanum, his slender arm raised in a blessing, the legs exaggeratedly splayed apart with the vertical folds of his robe falling between. Shobdon's imagery is seen to come from Byzantium art.
To return to our mysterious figure on the W/F, she does'nt quite fall into the sheela-n-gig fold, there are other christian stone depictions of 'dancing women' , one to be found on the Kilpeck church, though in this case it is a man and a woman dancing. The church would have probably seen dancing as a sin, and to quote Romilly Allen here;
"Let them praise his name in the dance; let them sing praises unto him with the timbrel and harp.... the extravagance of the attitude, however, suggests that dancing is intended to be symbolic of those worldy pleasures and vices against which the church has always protested"

And it is here that the interpretation must be understood, the dance is a vice, another temptation to be averted, the sculpture has been freely interpreted on the font - the descent into hell that the font represents is here pictured in this figure.
The church itself harbours another strange aspect, this is the great prehistoric stone in the churchyard, said to be a capstone from the Millbarrow, a 19th century vicar had it laid to rest on his grave, and this rather strange gesture suggests to the modern eye that paganism still lurks somewhat quietly beneath a Christian heart. Can we follow this train of thought, to the fact that the Winterbourne Monkton church is also named after Mary Magdalene, seen by some as a fallen women, though her character explored here....
http://thelmawilcox.blogspot.com/2008/11/mary-magdalene-and-winterbourne-monkton.html
gives two sides to her nature. Of course, now we can come back to the figure on the font and see a parallel with Mary Magdalene, a doctrinal misogyny carried through the centuries, or perhaps that is just in the imagination.
And what of the colouring of the font, the red stain on the ‘window’ decoration below, the blue of the Norman zig-zag, are we looking at water here, and if so is the water representative of the Winterbourne river that flows through this settlement. Are not ideas beginning to come together, do we not see the sacred nature of water reflected both in the font and the figure thereon.
The Winterbourne flowing into the Kennet, at that special spot the Swallowhead Spring, a goddess begins to reflect back to us, are we peering dimly into a Bronze age past where the goddess ruled here at the spring, fed by a 'magical' river that disappeared over the summer. Can we interpret our figure as a fertility/mother goddess, for that is one of Kali’s roles.
Imaginative stories weaving in and out of each other, the medieval brain interpreting old gospels, old bestiaries and a pagan past that lay like a thin veil over the landscape. We know that the medieval peasant never quite gave up his fascination with superstition and pagan ways, the ritual of fairs echoing the old celtic seasonal festivals, how do we trace the mindset of people many centuries ago. As the carver took up his chisel what was he thinking about, his mind awash with images of the bible, did he heark back to an earlier age, the stories of the poor people, or did he listen to his Norman overlords as they set down their wishes for the new churches......

The prehistoric stone said to have come from the Millbarrow

http://thelmawilcox.blogspot.com/2008/06/winterbourne-monkton-church.html