The Goat-God's City Cousins

..it was always easy, in open and lonely places, to be visited by Panic wilderness fear, but these are the urban fantods here, who come to get you when you are lost or isolate inside the way time is passing, when there is no more History, no time-travelling capsule to find your way back to, only the lateness and the absence that fill a great railway shed after the capital has been evacuated, and the goat-god’s city cousins wait for you at the edges of the light, playing the tunes they always played, but more audible now, because everything else has gone away, or fallen silent ... barn swallow souls, fashioned of brown twilight, rise towards the white ceilings ... they answer to the new Uncertainty. Ghosts used to be either likenesses of the dead or wraiths of the living. But here in the Zone categories have been blurred badly. The status of the name you miss, love and search for now has grown ambiguous and remote, but this is even more than the bureaucracy of mass absence – some still live, some have died, but many, many, have forgotten which they are. Their likenesses will not serve. Down here are only wrappings left in the light, in the dark: images of the Uncertainty. Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, page 303.

Penelope's Dreams

The Odyssey, Book 19:

“Ah my friend,” seasoned Penelope dissented,

“dreams are hard to unravel, wayward, drifting things-

not all that we glimpse in them will come to pass..

two gates there are for our evanescent dreams,

one is made of ivory, the other made of horn

those that pass through the ivory cleanly carved

are will-o’-the-wisps, their message bears no fruit,

The dreams that pass through the gates of polished horn

Are fraught with truth for the dreamer that can see them."

Book 19, Translated by Robert Fagles.

Surely the most beautiful passage in the Odyssey?

Hundreds of years later, Virgil describes a tree that grows in the terrifying entranceway of Hades;

"a huge dark elm" with "ancient arms, the resting place ... of flocks of idle dreams, one clinging under every leaf" (the Aeneid, Book 6).

Instead of looking for the Loch Ness monster, (which we all know to exist, anyway, 'scientific' opinion on the matter being no more than an ambiguously desperate cover-up) perhaps explorers should set off to the remote corners of the globe to find this ancient dream-architecture, this tree and these gates of horn. For Virgil's tree, the caverns at Cumae, found today on the bay of Naples (and home of our old friend the Sybil), are said to lead to the Greco-Roman underworld. So they could start by running that terrifying gamut, if they dared.

Those exquisitely described horns, though, could be anywhere, they are only described by Penelope, never seen by Odysseus on his travels. And given the controversy over exactly where the Acheans sailed to and from in the Odyssey, (Greenland, the North Pole, Asia Minor, Cilicia, Zembla?) it's impossible to pinpoint even where they definitely aren't. They may equally be nowhere other than inside Penelope's head, a Greek woman dead for at least 2,700 years. I like to imagine them hovering over the sea in some undiscovered Arctic region, next to the bones of Captain Oates, still trapping and guiding our 'evanescent dreams'.

Native American Owl from New Mexico

Now in the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford.

the Monsters of the Fjords

"...a terrible sea monster.... was seen in 1734 outside the colony. It was an enormously big creature: Its head reached the yard arm when it rose out of the water. The body was as thick as the ship and was 3 - 4 times as long. It had a pointed nose, and blew like a whale. It had big broad limbs, and the body seemed to be covered with barnacles, and the skin was very rough. The general shape was that of a serpent. When it dived, it lunged backwards and then raised the tail above the surface a ship's length away." - Hans Egede, 'Det gamle Groenlands nye Perlustration eller Natural Historie' (1746)

Thank you everyone who came out to our Swedish and Norwegian shows. The highlight for me was the epic last 80 miles into Egersund where we drove winding, u-bending roads through spectacular granite cliffs, and forests so altitudinous they were filled with cloud (though all this did provoke a small amount of car-sickness). As I stared down the immense chasms, into the sullen fjords below, I remembered Bishop Egede's account of the sea serpent he had witnessed in the coal-black waters of Greenland in 1734, and I scanned the surface for any movement I might consider suspicious or sinister. The same creature, (an 80 foot long black sea snake, with a camel-like head) was spotted by over a thousand people off the coasts of Gloucester and Maine in 1817, as well as by crew members of the HMS Dedalus in the late 19th century, and is still officially unknown to, and unexplained by, science. (the usual submerged giant squid theory not really explaining the 1000s of eye witness reports of a head with teeth, given by terrified New Englanders) .

I would even have been happy with a washed-ashore giant squid carcass, of which there were a mysteriously large number on the Norwegian west coast during the late 19th century (evidence of a larger, infinitely more predatory beast lurking in the waters perhaps?)

Or a giant octopus (Pacific wartime reports exist of monsters more than 200 feet long, 4 times the size of the largest giant squid); or a Megalodon, a type of enormous pre-historic shark, which may or may not be quite extinct, if certain recent accounts from the South Sea Islands be taken seriously. The megalodon could/can(?) grow to 100 feet, 3 of them together could have eaten our ferry for breakfast.

But the Norwegian waters refused to render up their secrets, much as the Norwegian audiences had refused to render up their merch-money (heh heh, just kidding). I did see a jellyfish from the jetty as we waited for our ferry. Only it turned out to be a bit of seaweed.

Keep watching the waves.

The Sybil at Cumae

"When you have landed and come to the city of Cumae and the sacred lakes of Avernus among their sounding forests, there, deep in a cave in the rock you will see a virgin priestess foretelling the future in a prophetic frenzy by writing signs and names on leaves … but the leaves are so light that when the door turns in its sockets the slightest breath of wind dislodges them. The draught from the door throws them into confusion and the priestess never makes it her concern to catch them as they flutter round her rocky cave and put them back in order, or join up the prophecies.”

The Aeneid – Book 3 – 440-450

A woman is haunted by a phantom as she sits at a table, or perhaps she is the phantom herself. Her face flickers like a silent film between the shapes of a human and a bird. Her hands move restlessly over piles of leaves, painting each one with a Greek letter; and even to an antiquarian, familiar with modes of Greek no longer used in the modern language, the sentences and words she is fashioning would make no literal sense. But there is somehow a weariness, a strange, tangible lassitude in the leaf-prose, as if there can be an exhausted quality to words, as if they can finally not even refer to themselves; to their own meaning.

The woman is immensely old, the bird older, an inhuman eye with intimations of pyramids, archaic astronomies, pre-human heroic ages. A long day has passed and night is coming in, vast tracts of irreclaimable time have been and gone, with only the day and the night, the sun and the moon rising and falling in rhythm. As an evening wind stirs the leaves through the open window, exhausted, half-seen sentences begin to creep across them, in fact it’s as if the letters and the numbers of the future flit lightly, kaleidoscopically, in and out of their order and recombine into nonsense.

And the strangest thing is this wind moving the leaves, it seems to carry some tang of lost memories, forgotten moments of clarity felt during childhood trips to the sea, an uncategorisable but intense yearning, as strong as thirst or dread. Animals yelp at doorways, deep sea fishermen returning to the cove cast their lines up into the sky in the gathering darkness, as if to snare birds, bats, unknown configurations of stars. Tourists dressing for dinner in nearby hotel rooms shiver and momentarily lose focus, seem to follow some invisible presence passing hugely under the waves.

Helenus, the son of Priam, warned Aeneas about this woman 2,800 years ago, how she writes her prophecies on leaves and then allows the wind to blow them into incomprehensibility.

For Aeneas it was an inconvenience, he needed a magic spell to unscramble the messages from his future. In our era, in the long track of years since Aeneas, all the magic spells have disappeared.