(no subject)

Oh blimey, TIL...

The American poet Robert Frost, who was living in England at the time, in particular encouraged Thomas (then more famous as a critic) to write poetry, and their friendship was so close that the two planned to reside side by side in the United States. Frost's most famous poem, The Road Not Taken, was inspired by walks with Thomas and Thomas's indecisiveness about which route to take. Thomas enlisted in the Artists Rifles in July 1915, despite being a mature married man who could have avoided enlisting. He was unintentionally influenced in this decision by his friend Frost, who had returned to the U.S. but sent Thomas an advance copy of The Road Not Taken. The poem was intended by Frost as a gentle mocking of indecision, particularly the indecision that Thomas had shown on their many walks together; however, most took the poem more seriously than Frost intended, and Thomas similarly took it seriously and personally, and it provided the last straw in Thomas' decision to enlist. Thomas was promoted to corporal, and in November 1916 was commissioned into the Royal Garrison Artillery as a second lieutenant. He was killed in action soon after he arrived in France at Arras on Easter Monday, 9 April 1917.

I cannot believe so many people are so fond of that twee poem and i have never heard that awful context before.

Roads - Edward Thomas

I'm thinking of Thomas today because i ran across this poem of his today at the museum:

I love roads:
The goddesses that dwell
Far along invisible
Are my favorite gods.


Roads go on
While we forget, and are
Forgotten like a star
That shoots and is gone.


On this earth 'tis sure
We men have not made
Anything that doth fade
So soon, so long endure:


The hill road wet with rain
In the sun would not gleam
Like a winding stream
If we trod it not again.


They are lonely
While we sleep, lonelier
For lack of the traveller
Who is now a dream only


From dawn's twilight
And all the clouds like sheep
On the mountains of sleep
They wind into the night.


The next turn may reveal
Heaven: upon the crest
The close pine clump, at rest
Ancl black, may Hell conceal.


Often footsore, never
Yet of the road I weary,
Though long and steep and dreary,
As it winds on for ever.


Helen of the roads,
The mountain ways of Wales
And the Mabinogion tales,
Is one of the true gods,


Abiding in the trees,
The threes and fours so wise,
The larger companies,
That by the roadside be,


And beneath the rafter
Else uninhabited
Excepting by the dead;
And it is her laughter


At morn and night I hear
When the thrush cock sings
Bright irrelevant things,
And when the chanticleer


Calls back to their own night
Troops that make loneliness
With their light footsteps’ press,
As Helen’s own are light.


Now all roads lead to France
And heavy is the tread
Of the living; but the dead
Returning lightly dance:


Whatever the road bring
To me or take from me,
They keep me company
With their pattering,


Crowding the solitude
Of the loops over the downs,
Hushing the roar of towns
and their brief multitude.

under sea, under swamp

The whole first floor of the museum is the history of the creation of Wales - starting with the big bang. I am not really a natural historian, but I felt myself curiously pulled into a spiritual mood, uncommonly moved by the awe of the cabinets of rocks as the labels explained their age and the processes of their making.

I contemplated that the Myth of Creation embodied by the Map is more or less correct; that is, beginning with the mystery of the Stellar in deep space and deep time. 'This was once all sea' and 'this was once all forest that became swamp' are both overlappingly true, as well as 'this was once all ice'. Those are all Lunar-Stellar visions, one on the path of Land, and the other two on the path of Sky. The 'this was all forest which turned into the swamp' times were called Carboniferous (not 'carbon-nefarious' as i mistakenly told my husband today while trying to remember)

A lovely ex once got me a book called the Museum of Lost Wonder by Jeff Hoke. It's wonderful. A hardback comic book laid out like walking through a museum, and each chapter contains the museum exhibits (some of which you can print out and fold up as a papercraft model), which are all philosophic-alchemical concepts. I cannot resist physical space. I love houses...malls...hotels...Disneyland....cities that feel like infinitely huge buildings...the Backrooms...for sure, I do like forests and stuff, but my attachment to land-based practice is probably in truth more place-based. I get excited about manmade environments too, especially when they are strange or otherworldly. I like museums mostly for being in a museum, which are typically monumental imperialist follies with high ceilings and unexpected corridors. And so a book which expresses a place you can go - almost like a mindpalace or near-astral journey - is an absolute delight.

by Jeff Hoke

Something i felt today walking round the museum was a pathwalking sense of proceeding through time, of exploring the Traveller's Map physically. Because I walked from room to room and time passed by me - first space, then sea, then swamp. then dinosaurs. After swamp, came these very Lunar landscapes - barren desert, tundra, rock, glacial landscapes, and mountain-valleys cut by water. And then of course, ultimately, man and landscapes defined by man

As you might expect, I visit the Map and do all my inner working by imagining I go to places - the landscapes those points express. I have an unfinished Twine game where you're sort of exploring a fantasy land, but it's laid out like the Landcraft concepts; and a half-finished map for my wall which looks like the frontispiece map of a fantasy novel to the uninitiated but is, again, that diagram expressed in a playful way. I'd never considered a Museum as a conceptual layout before, but I really love it. I think i will travel back to that museum basement in my mind and then extend it, as a somewhat more 'interior' and domestic version of the outer landscapes i travel to. Maybe i'll make a little leaflet-map, Jeff-Hoke-style, complete with a little cafe of the soul and - of course - the gift shop.

(It's not uncommon for your classic Pathworking Script to end with 'in the temple, you find an object. What is it? take it with you, it is for you' and i hate that, I always feel embarassed and on the spot about maybe choosing or not organically 'finding' a thing, or feeling indecisive. Anyway, the equivalent for the Museum of Landcraft visual journey would be 'now you are in the gift shop'.)

I also discovered the UK is really old - when the map of Gondwana and Laurentia etc, the ancient supercontinents which existed before the map changed to how it is now, with (modern day) Africa glommed onto the (modern day) Americas - the UK is actually there, already an island apart looking just as it does today. And known as 'Avalonia', which lets you know something of the character of the sorts of people who named and popularised this history.