Funny but during the sunny weather I felt so creative and now its cold and grey again I feel a creative vacum. I just want to sit beside the fire with a cat and escape into the imagination - I just finished Tolkien's 'Children of Hurin' - which was compelling in its tragedy as Hurin is led inexorably towards his doom - the Alan Lee watercolours and pencil drawings accompanying the text are beautiful.
Its funny Tolkien is such a master that he makes the myth and the land alive - I almost feel that its a spiritual reality - I find myself leafing through Tolkien dictionaries and poring over the map as though the history and geneaology of middle earth are real, (and maybe it is as far as his works are all beautiful pieces of art and so encountering them is akin to spiritual experience). But he was a professor of Anglo Saxon at Oxford and based some of his sagas on real Aglo Saxon and Icelandic myths so maybe they resonate on an archetypal level. Elves wakening under the starlight beside the waters of cuivienen, trees of gold and silver light in the land of the Valar, Beren and Luthien wandering together in the forests of Doriath in the First Age, The seven dwarf fathers asleep under stone for ages long. Yes, in my opinion Tolkien is the high king of the imagination and has given me many beautiful, happy, dark, tragic, compelling and poetic moments for which I am thankful. I seem to remember reading in Jung that when the outer world is quitened the inner world comes alive - but the tele and radio have to be turned off first!
Reality cannot be ignored either, but there is so much supression, deprivation and government sanctioned killing going on that I can't bear to look these days.
I am reading 'The Once and Future King' by T.H. White and this excerpt from the book of Merlin struck me.
Merlin to Arthur in the company of the Animals: " We find that at present the human race is divided politically into one wise man, nine knaves, and ninety fools out of every hundred. That is, by an optimistic observer. The nine knaves assemble themselves under the banner of the most knavish among them, and become 'politicians': the wise man stands out, because he knows himself to be hopelessly outnumbered, and devotes himself to poetry, mathematics or philosophy, while the ninety fools plod off behind the baners of the nine villans, according to fancy, into the labyrinths of chicanery, malice and warfare.'
It does strike me that White is conflicted about the apparant destructiveness and cruelty of humanity, perhaps because he was affected by two world wars, but how much more reason have we to be now that we are alive to witness a critical period of mans destruction of the environment. Not that I hold myself aloof living amongst the products of consurmerism like most others.
Waite lived for a time in Ireland (an almost feral existance although this viewpoint may be exaggerated by English sensibilities). He found himself rejected by the natives who suspiciously spied on him, which depressed him - another person I admire Gerard Manley Hopkins had a similar experience of isolation and disconnection while living in Ireland which I can relate to having grown up here as an alien (english, non church-going. It wasn't until I read the rare book 'Valley of the Squinting windows' by Briskey Mc na Mara and the works of Edna O Brien that I really gained some understanding of domestic life in Ireland in the past. Thankfully things have moved on with the rise of younger generations, although many are leaving now.
