The Days of No Shadow (... and then a deer barked)

Recently, Britain experienced a blocking high pressure system, leading to an extended period of ‘anticyclonic gloom.’ Such are the conditions in which myths are created and as Blodeuwedd and Lleu indicate might still be created. 

Journal entry:

15th November, Friday

Early light.
 Thick mist
 Licked with salmon
 On the eastern edge.
 Frost glitters
 Along the cabin roof
 And rimes hoary
 On the solar panels.

Rooks pour off
 The music stave
 Of telegraph wires
 Whirling around the one oak.

The mist erupts
 With black wings
 And ragged song
 And such mysterious
 Determined intent
 That there is something
 In me that flies
 Off with them.

Episode Information:

In this episode I refer the story of Blodeuwedd and Lleu from the Mabinogion. I also refer to Gwilym Morus-Baird’s reading of it. 

The female tawny owl was recorded in the field by Sean Townsend (Freesound 2013).

With special thanks to our lock-wheelersfor supporting this podcast.

Lois Raphael
Sami Walbury
Tania Yorgey
Andrea Hansen
Chris Hinds
David Dirom
 Chris and Alan on NB Land of Green Ginger
Captain Arlo
Rebecca Russell
Allison on the narrowboat Mukka
Derek and Pauline Watts
Anna V.
Orange Cookie
Donna Kelly
Mary Keane.
Tony Rutherford.
Arabella Holzapfel.
Rory with MJ and Kayla.
Narrowboat Precious Jet.
Linda Reynolds Burkins.
Richard Noble.
Carol Ferguson.
Tracie Thomas
Mark and Tricia Stowe
Madeleine Smith

General Details

In the intro and the outro, Saint-Saen's The Swan is performed by Karr and Bernstein (1961) and available on CC at archive.org.

Two-stroke narrowboat engine recorded by 'James2nd' on the River Weaver, Cheshire. Uploaded to Freesound.org on 23rd June 2018. Creative Commons Licence. 

Piano and keyboard interludes composed and performed by Helen Ingram.

All other audio recorded on site. 

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction
• 0:45 Journal entry
• 1:30 Welcome to NB Erica
• 2:47 News from the moorings
• 9:32 Cabin chat
• 17:01 The days of no shadow
• 26:10 Blodeuwedd and Lleu from the Mabinogion
• 36:12 Signing off
• 36:23 Weather Log

Transcript

JOURNAL ENTRY

15th November, Friday

Early light.
 Thick mist
 Licked with salmon
 On the eastern edge.
 Frost glitters
 Along the cabin roof
 And rimes hoary
 On the solar panels.

Rooks pour off
 The music stave
 Of telegraph wires
 Whirling around the one oak.

The mist erupts
 With black wings
 And ragged song
 And such mysterious
 Determined intent
 That there is something
 In me that flies
 Off with them.

[MUSIC]

WELCOME

The clouds have parted and the waning moon, still almost full, shines icily down on the fields and darkly wooded coverts, stretching hag-limbed lunar-shadows of trees across the towpath. A fistful of stars, bright and steely, flung abandoned into the night, slowly coalesce into constellations glitter above the velvet-black blades of the bullrush. 

This is the narrowboat Erica narrowcasting into the darkness of a chilly November night to you wherever you are.

I am so glad you are here. How are you? Are you finding things a bit tough going recently, too? The big old moon is shining, the night chill is creeping across the fields, so come inside. The stove is warm, the kettle is singing, there's a seat I set aside especially for you. Welcome aboard. 

[MUSIC]

NEWS FROM THE MOORINGS  

I have to say that, for a number of very different and unrelated reasons all converging at once, I have found the last week or so since we last met here incredibly difficult. It’s been a bit of a struggle and, at times, I haven’t been able to cope very well. I’m so thankful for Donna’s constant love and support – and of course, Maggie’s ability to bring a bit of perspective to all things. Actually, I don’t think I am alone in this. Many people I have talked to have also been finding life a bit of an uphill struggle. These times happen, storms come, and by their nature, we are right to fear them and battling against the wind is tiring. If you feel that, it's simply because you are human and so very much alive. 

I am therefore so utterly grateful that you could make it and be here tonight. For me at least, things are appearing a little brighter again, but, tonight, I kind of need this space. Let’s find something wonderful together!

Today the sun was out. It was the first bit of proper sunshine that we have had for a long time. Actually, I think Donna said that it was sunny for a bit here sometime midweek, but I was at work and inside the whole time. Although it soon clouded over, it was good to feel that languorous warmth seeping over your shoulders and back.

This afternoon it rained. Real, proper rain. It hasn’t rained lack that for seems an age. Although it does feel a little strange to say that. Many times recently going out has necessitated some kind of wet weather clothing. But it was from thin mist and mizzle, not proper rain drops. That wetting drizzle that leaves you damp without you really noticing. But this afternoon, the wash and patter of rain against the cabin roof and windows. It was like hearing the return of a long-lost friend’s voice.  

It’s been a time for rook and jackdaw of recent. Sweeping the sky with arcing streams of heraldic shapes hurling their scalding songs and calls haphazard against mist and cloud. The other day, one of the ravens, frog-cronking, circled low around the major oak on the canal bank. It’s leafy canopy almost bare. Round and round it went. Nothing answered. Nothing moved. Aptly enough, the skyscapes have been grand, almost gothic in tone and texture, of late. The sort of skies that any artist would feel duty bound to add a corvid or two. I have to admit that I feel more settled and easier when the rooks gather. Reforming their old communities for the winter. There’s a sense of companionability about them as they forage the fields together. Field fishing. Guardian sentries keeping lookout, posted on strategic highpoints. The local sentry points I know. And when I see them, I know two things. The rooks are around and that rook-winter is here.

Earlier today the male swan, the cob, and the cygnet came up. The cob snorting his greeting at the stern. It was good to see them together again. Although, I am a little worried about the cygnet. There’s nothing obvious, but I sort of get the feeling (intimation almost) that there is something not quite right. I don’t really know enough about swans, and it may be just that this one simply is a bit quieter than the others. It’s pretty much independent now. Whiter feathers are breaking through the grey. Time is passing swiftly.

The old ash at the top of the hill, next to the convocation of oaks, is still thick with leaf – although, even from a distance you can see the umber and the mustards. The oaks are looking sparse, taking on their winter profiles in etched spiky silhouettes.

Along the towpath there is a surprising amount of green among the browns of die-back and soil. The fresh greens of nettle new growth, spearmint green, plantain, ranunculus, and cow parsley too. By the water’s edge too, vetch is still climbing, its spindly, impossibly symmetric, leaves, and the spangle of vivid colour of its flowerheads. A little further down diminutive flowers of creeping thistle. And every now and then, the solar burst of dandelion sunshine. Later, on the rise of pastureland, scattered half-blown dandelion clocks count the months following summer. Out of season. Beguiled by the damp, mild November air. Unexpected displays of life.        

On the canal’s surface, the small winds and slow currents are gathering the leaves together, sweeping them into largish rafts. The arborescent equivalent of pack ice.

[MUSIC]

CABIN CHAT

[MUSIC]

THE DAYS OF NO SHADOW (… AND THEN A DEER BARKED)

For well over a week, a thick blanket of cloud stretched low across the sky from horizon to horizon. Featureless, blank, heavy; a wash of textures more than colours: old laundry water, walls of rotting chalk cliffs, trodden snow. For day upon day, it hung, oscillating from between just below 2,000 ft, to just around 6,000 ft. Dense fields of grey that sometimes bled groundward in smeared swathes of smudgy mizzle and mist.

These were flat days. The days when there was no strike of sunlight on surface, rough or round, to create form and textures of twig and fruit, and blade of reed. The fullness; the roundedness that we expect. Even distance shrank away, blurring into the mists that hid the comforting guide of our horizons. For these were the days of no shadow. Day after day. Windless, damply mild. Days of no sun. Days when dusk fell too early, even for winter. Days when we walked untethered, shadowless, disowned and repudiate by our familiars that bind us to the earth.

Days of silver and grey that felt oppressively strange and strangely oppressive. Windless, blank, days when we would look up to the sky and it said nothing. Silver is a portentous colour in old mythic worlds like the Mabinogion. Days silvered wet with mist were days when the uncanny happened. The days when the weird was at work. It was then the other realms swam close to us. Not for them the flatness, the barrenness, the drab or dreich of our days. For us, there was no white stag wreathed in mist, no shapeshifting Gwydion, blurring the boundaries between human and other than human, closing the gap between the fracturing chasm of species and the possible and impossible. No fair Blodeuwedd, scented sweet of broom and meadowsweet: Blodeuwedd ‘the flower-faced’, ‘owl woman.’

Days of an uncanny sense of disenchantment; flatness. That it should affect so many of us in such a similar manner was strange in itself. After all, in many ways, this seemed to be the absolute epitome of British weather: Dull, damp, mirk. It is precisely the trope used by everyone who lives outside the UK to describe the weather in Britain! I suppose that it’s just that we are not used to it lasting so long. Not day after day, weeks at a time. This time it seemed to get to so many people. Often, it was the first thing we mentioned when we met. The gloom. The lack of sun. It seemed to get under our skin with a peculiarly depressing effect. Me too. I usually find myself at odds with how others experience the weather. I usually enjoy these misty days. It often brings out the colours – particularly the autumnal leaves and the berries. It makes them pop. But it was difficult to get passed that curious sense of heaviness. As if the sky itself was pressing down on us. Along with everyone else, I began to wake each day and look for a thinning of the clouds, a break, a hint of blue.

Perhaps there was also something about its timing. The sense of deflation that so many are feeling about all that is going on at home and in the rest of the world seemed to be mirrored by the heavy skies and the flatness of the light that sullenly lay on the canal’s surface without shimmer, without life.      

However, for us there were more rational explanations and descriptions for what was happening – although it might be added, explanations that did not necessarily satisfy or nourish us any more than the Celtic myth. For nine or ten days, a large blocking anticyclonic weather system sat over the UK. High pressure that trapped a layer of mild damp air below it, pressing it onto the contours and gradients of the land beneath, and, as high pressure tends to do, refused to budge.

These blocking highs are not uncommon. In summer we are used to stretches of dry sunny days. In winter stretches of days that are bright, cold, and crisp. Either way, days filled with light.

And it is also true that it is not as if these times when a blanket of saturated air becomes trapped are unheard of. They are not. I was brought up with the stories that Mum and Dad told of thick suffocating smog that refused to move for weeks and even months. Perhaps, it was, after all, just the timing. Perhaps, we were somehow not ready for this one. Or just that it lasted longer than we had hoped. After a fairly wet beginning to autumn, according to our picture books, this should be the time of crisp fallen leaves, morning mists being burned off into champaign clarity. Not this endless succession of drabness. The Met Office described it as anticyclonic gloom and it seemed to sum up everyone’s mood exactly. Nightly, their weather update flashed on my phone, ‘still no sign of an end to the anticyclonic gloom.’ In the end, even they just dropped all pretence and just referred to it as ‘the gloom.’ It wasn’t as if it were dangerous. They weren’t the catastrophic floods experienced in Spain and other parts of Europe and beyond. They didn’t even really make things difficult or even inconvenient – although working off solar was difficult and added extra concerns to the day.

They were just void. Just drab, gloom, in a world sucked dry of mythology. And as true as that felt, of course it wasn’t the whole story. For it too was a fertile environment writing its own mythos. It is precisely times like these that give rise to mythopoeism as rich and as creative as any in the distant past. For they too were turbulent, volatile, times. Times of great uncertainty and big questions. Times hung with the mists of mystery. Indeed, the Mabinogi were born from a time of great confliction and unrest, violent, unpredictable. A time of darkness and beckoning unknowns. It is what gave it its power and its soul and even its longevity.

Arguably, the most famous story of the Mabinogion is the story of Blodeuwedd. The young woman conjured by the sorcery of Math and Gwydion from “the flowers of the oak, and the flowers of the broom, and the flowers of the meadowsweet” fair Blodeuwedd, ‘flower-faced’ ‘owl woman’. “The n most beautiful maiden ever seen.” It’s an abiding image and one that has repeatedly depicted and reinterpreted throughout history. The story itself is unsettlingly ambiguous.

Her creation was to provide a wife (and more importantly an heir) to Lleu, Gwydion’s nephew. Lleu’s mother was Arianrhod (meaning, ‘silver wheel’ to represent the turning of the seasons) the goddess of fate, the moon, time, fertility, and rebirth. Gwydion had brought the boy up, keeping him under his wing – well actually had kidnapped him – and in him Gwydion was creating the ideal man and king. He grew up twice as fast as other boys and eventually the story teller tells us Lleu became the “most handsome lad that anyone had seen. However, because of Gwydion’s deceit and scheming, Arianrhod had placed three curses upon the boy, one of which was that he could never marry a woman from the race that lived upon the earth.   

Lleu takes Blodeuwedd as his wife and is given a kingdom by Gwydion to rule. And thus, this woman of untameable wild nature, is caught in the petty but brutal and bloody politics of men. Surely, Gwilym Morus-Baird’s reading of this story is right. Both Blodeuwedd AND Lleu are manufactured beings. Blodeuwedd, in a very real sense – wild nature forced into the image desirable by men – nature cultivated and husbanded, so to speak, in both senses of the word. Lleu, set up in life and given everything that he needs to be the type king Gwydion perceives as ideal. He is essentially shoe-horned into the image of Gwydion’s idea of the ideal man’s man: Alpha male.

As Gwilym argues, this whole fourth branch (cycle of stories) of the Mabinogi is not a blueprint on how to run the ideal kingdom, but challenges Gwydion's perceptions and is in fact a warning about how NOT to rule a kingdom. It is not about heroes pressing toward a golden future, but about hubris and the inability of humans to control wild nature or their futures. Despite all the machinations of Math and Gwydion, the end is failure. Lleu ends up heirless and his kingdom faces a future without a successor and all the turmoil that will bring. For her part, the untamed wild woman of flowers husbanded into wifely form, is vengefully turned into an owl, the creature, the narrator of the Mabinogion informs us, most hated by all the other birds, and thus forever doomed to spend the rest of her life in the darkness of night.

Such is the history of human actions and the lessons that still remain unlearned. Blodeuwedd: The arrogant attempts to subdue nature and tame it to our demands, and its catastrophic consequences. Arianrhod: The refusal to acknowledge the feminine and the tragic consequences of rejecting its counsel and wisdom. The one-eyed pursuit to define masculinity in terms of power and often violence. It is an exasperatingly familiar story of actions with unthought consequences and the arrogance of power and those who seek it. All these big questions are still with us today. Every time I look at a newsfeed or read posts on social media, those same debates are there. Those same voices that echo back to the Mabinogion and countless other myths and legends are still there. The warnings of the older story tellers are still unheard, dismissed, ignored.

And so, one night last week, I went up and stood upon the stern deck. The night was mild, and a wreath of mist curled over the damp hollows of a nearby field. There was no moon, nor stars. The cabin lights of the Erica shone warmly upon the waters speckled with fallen willow and oak leaves. Whisps of smoke, more as a hint than anything visible, rose vertically from our chimney. As I stood, in this gloomy time of no shadows, I speculated on living in a time without shadow or myth. Then to my left from one of the fields came the sound of a roe deer’s bark. A hoarse, strangulated yell, half fox, half crow. I wasn’t too surprised. I had seen one in a nearby field earlier in the evening when I was taking Maggie for a walk. It’s an ancient type of sound. A primal one. One to which your body responds more than just your hearing. It’s a mythic sound and perhaps that is what put me in mind of the Mabinogion with its repeated use of deer and stags. I stood in that breathless, ancient silence, waiting for the call again. And then… And then an owl called out, clear and strong. The whickering kee-wick of a female tawny. Shimmering across the fields from the stand of trees that shelters the old hedge-path. Blodeuwedd! After all this, you cannot be silenced! You are still here. There is something that will outlive the petty kingdoms and empires we create, the discordant clanging of ideological blindness. þæs ofereode, þisses swa mæg: Those things passed – these may too. And Blodeuwedd, we WILL remember. We will remember who you are in all your wildness and power, before a man tried to craft you into his image of beauty and force you into serving the pettiness of his desires and plans. And your voice still rings out after all these years, casting tone and shadow into the shadowless days of our living. There is something here that will continue. That will outlast even myth. You cannot be silenced. Even in our darkness, Blodeuwedd, your voice is heard.    

SIGNING OFF 

This is the narrowboat Erica signing off for the night and wishing you a very restful and peaceful night. Good night.

WEATHER LOG