Lent

Dear friends,

Mardi Gras and Ash Wednesday are just passed. In my tradition it is now Lent; this is not the time for remembering the disadvantaged (for the good woman or the good man, that time is every moment), but for remembering to remember the disadvantaged. The world today is cruel with horrors; the world has always been. In the spirit of Lent, I offer a brief passage excerpted from Les Miserables, a novel in the structure of a folktale. It is a speech by a bishop, which I admire for its directness, its poetry, its lack of sentimentality, its brevity, and its honesty, and its message speaks to us whatever faith we are of and whether we are observing Lent, or not. And though the subject of the speech is France of the early nineteenth century, there are many parts of the world to which this same subject now applies: Rwanda, where there are few wells; Nepal, where there are few orphanages; Haiti, where there are few homes that consist of more than a blanket; and the inner cities of half a hundred municipalities in our own nation. And there are places in the world that have little time or hope left for the experience of wonder, or where the folktales and hero myths that sustain a people are being forgotten along with the languages they have been told in.

The translation is by Norman Denny.

My brothers and friends, there are in France thirteen hundred and twenty thousand peasant cottages which have only three outlets, eighteen hundred and seventeen thousand which have only two, a door and one window, and three hundred and forty-six thousand which have only a door. This is due to something known as the tax on doors and windows. Consider the fate of poor families, old women and young children, living in those hovels, the fevers and other maladies! God gives air to mankind and the law sells it. I do not assail the law but I give thanks to God. In Isere, in Var, and in the upper and lower Alps the peasants do not even possess barrows but carry the dung on their backs. They have no candles but burn twigs and lengths of rope steeped in resin. That is what happens throughout the highlands of Dauphine. They make bread every six months, baking it over a fire of dried dung. In winter they break the loaves with a hatchet and soak the bread for twenty-four hours before it can be eaten. My brothers, be merciful. Consider the sufferings of those around you.

Sleeping Elf

This...is beautiful.


I've written the artist - who resides in Melbourne, Australia, but who also keeps shop at deviantart as Burgundy Phoenix - to ask if she is a puppeteer. I am in awe. What craftsmanship! What imagination! Now I must go catch my breath.

Dante's Heart Poetry Contest

Great news! We are launching a poetry contest for Fall 2008: click here for the contest guidelines. Ever Saskya, author of The Porch is a Journey Different from the House, will judge the contest. There is a small entry fee; first prize will receive $125 + publication in Dante's Heart: A Journal of Myth, Fairytale, Folklore and Fantasy; second prize will receive $75 + publication; and third prize will receive honorable mention + publication.

The contest looks for contemporary and vital poetry that speaks to the mission of Dante's Heart and that is concerned with the experience of wonder or with myth (whether in relation to culture, language, politics, ars poetica, etc.).


Entries are due November 2008 - this is the early news! Please spread the word - we look forward to an exciting competition and to being invigorated and challenged by the entries.

Daniel Fusch
Editor, Dante's Heart

P.S. The art piece above is grace 2 by Joel Harrison - which I have shamelessly borrowed for this blog post because I happened into it today and was startled and delighted, and had to share the piece with others who might be interested.

Earth, Sea, and Sky: or, Marvels of the Universe

That's the title of a beautiful late nineteenth-century book that I found in the back of a library a few years ago and that I haven't told nearly enough people about. It is a treasure. Remember Bastian Balthazar Bux's eyes when he stumbled through Mr. Coreandor's bookshop and just had to open up The Neverending Story? Those were my eyes when I found this old, dusty, leatherbound volume, with its over 300 engravings and its innumerable pages. The book offers short anecdotes on "all that is wonderful on the globe, in the waters, or in the starry heavens." The language of the book is Victorian and yet not - there is a vitality to its descriptions that is almost desperate. For example, in describing the earthquake that overtook Lisbon a few centuries ago, the book declares of such earthquakes: They bury mountains as we bury the dead.


In the aftermath of this decade's upheavals in Indonesia and Pakistan, we better than our fathers and mothers, perhaps, can feel the full horror and awe of that sentence. Although: what do we, who are here comfortably or somewhat comfortably blogging, know of that? Ask those starving among the bodies about horror.

But this is my favorite of all the books of that century. It is beautiful beyond hope. Take the first paragraph, for example, of one chapter:

There are beautiful creatures in the great deep with colors as gorgeous as those of butterflies; moreover, like butterflies, some of them have wings and rise like birds from the surface of the sea.

How well I remember a crossing from the white cliffs of Dover to Calais many years ago by ferry. I had never seen a flying fish, but that night by moonlight I saw three flashing above the darkness of water beside the ferry, carried so far north by some wild warm current. I watched them, rapt, as the first child must once have watched the first butterflies. And when I stumbled down onto the docks with my French pocket dictionary and a few coins in my pocket, all my mind was consumed by the thought: What beautiful things there are in the sea!

These days, thanks to the existence of the Internet, you can find a copy of Earth, Sea, and Sky on ebay or alibris, though once it must have taken a treasure hunt indeed.

Cherokee Stories

The last few years have seen something that to me is very beautiful: living, current tellings of Cherokee stories - as well as those of other American Indian nations - available to wider audiences. No more the dry anthropologies of the late nineteenth century: these narratives of myth and folklore are bright and vivid in their colors, alive, current, real. Barbara Duncan's Living Stories of the Cherokee - which transcribes the tales of active storytellers in the Eastern Cherokee Band in North Carolina (storytellers who tell their tales at schools or at council meetings, or just on Saturday afternoons on the porch) - is a monument in literary anthropology. Its authenticity and vitality is due to: 1) the fact that Barbara Duncan lived in Cherokee, North Carolina - she was not an outsider brought in; and 2) she treats each story as both story and record, rather than as just one or the other: in this, she grasps something central to this culture's storytelling. Definitely take a look: it is a passionate book.


Also - recent years have seen a surge in children's books - with such art! - telling the old stories: the story of the first strawberries, for instance, is beautifully told and beautifully painted in Bruchac and Vojtech's book:


I wish I had the last painting in that book scanned to offer here, but you will have to buy or borrow the book. It is a breathtaking illustration: the man and the woman together, reunited by the strawberries, and holding the berries cupped in their hands together, their faces lit with the soft red glow of the shining fruit.

These books mean a great deal to me personally. Strawberries and a few other "leftovers" from past generations had great significance in the house in which I grew up, though often without much definition - all that was left of that segment of our heritage. To this day I keep strawberries in the house, by the door or on the mantel - though it was not until I was a teenager that I knew why.

Impersonally, as an admirer of folklorists and all artists and scholars of mythopoeia, I celebrate these books as a great gift to this generation.

Also, take a look at what's coming in Cherokee, North Carolina: this nation has no casino - instead, vibrant drama, a museum, a cultural center. Somehow throughout the brutality of the centuries this people has kept its dignity and its stories and by doing so has remained a people. It is something to be admired and celebrated, and it is a wondrous thing that a wider audience is now listening to their musicians and their storytellers. We are traveling further around the circle of Time.

Didier Massard: Voyages Imaginaires

Today's Morning News: Black and White and Read All Over features an interview with Didier Massard, the Parisian tabletop photographer whose gallery series Voyages Imaginaires features dreamlike or fairy tale scenes.


I think the interviewer hits on the perfect description of the emotive mood of Massard's work: "Didier Massard’s photographs look like they could have been on the cover of your favorite book as a child, or come straight out of that weird dream you had last night." According to Didier Massard himself in the interview:

"I try to keep alive the ability of childhood to transform as a game an object into something else. I am doing the same in a sophisticated way. This means that I have a special relationship with things and consider that they may have a different meaning than what they appear to be. It is a great satisfaction when a trick succeeds."

Consider, for example, this landscape, with a carousel planted in the midst of a snowy wood - the "trick" is indeed beautiful; as Massard claims, the carousel - a recognizable object - becomes something else entirely:


And yet it remains a carousel. Is this not what fairy tales do? Take objects that are quite familiar and every day and plant them in strange surroundings, so that a farmer's daughter finds herself contending with trolls and becomes both more than a farmer's daughter and more fully realized as a farmer's daughter? Or so that a spinning wheel becomes something entirely strange when it begins spinning wool into gold, yet in doing so becomes more fully realized by the reader as a spinning wheel, that is, as a tool with an almost magical power to transform a plain substance into something blindingly wondrous in its usefulness? We forget that in spinning, we turn thread into a coat or a dress or something beautiful. We forget the alchemy that takes place. To remember, we have to see the spinning wheel as if for the first time, as a strange and wondrous artifact. Watching the wheel spin gold allows us to do this. The same is true of the carousel in Didier Massard's photograph: seeing the carousel like a surprise in the snowbound forest, we recover the childhood wonder of our first encounter with a carousel as an artifact strange and beautiful.

To view more of the Voyages Imaginaires, see Didier Massard's website, which is available in both French and English versions.

Coelacanth documentary clip

As a follow-up on my earlier post on cryptozoology, I had to post this - a clip from a Japanese documentary:



40 seconds into the clip, you will be granted an underwater view of the coelacanth, the fish known as the "living fossil," presumed 200,000 years extinct until it appeared in a fishnet off the coast of California. The gracefulness of this fish that time forgot is accented by the musical score for the documentary, an almost outlandishly sweeping romantic melody: suggestive of the nostalgic and heroic overtones of the "lost world" or "land that time forgot" myth.

One further contemporary cryptozoological cultural phenomenon: the wild success of the art galleries - and later the books (I believe there are now four) - of James Gurney's Dinotopia:


Despite contemporary discourse about the shrinking of our world into a "global village" (or perhaps partly because of it?), and even though we no longer draw maps that have white spaces (which is probably a fallacy of our chartography), our artists, writers, and journalists continue to wonder about the white spaces on the map.