Robert Borski's "Witch's Broom"

In honor of the approaching Halloween festivities, I want to feature a snatch of poetry from the current issue of Goblin Fruit, which is one of the best online journals for fairy tales; these are just a couple of phrases from Robert Borski's poem "Witch's Broom":

Only the best straw will suffice.

This is why she makes sure
to fertilize the field properly,
burying alive a dozen little boys
in the thick ground, just before
the advent of spring rains.

The handle -- which must accommodate
her legs in several different fashions --
she forges from wormwood and polishes
with bat grease....

Read the rest of the poem here. I am delighted at the creativity and playfulness of the piece. In fact I am jealous and wish that Dante's Heart had published it. The last few lines of Borski's poem are breathtaking in their humanity, so please don't be satisfied with the little bit I've included here, and go get the rest.

Happy Halloween, boys and girls -

The Editors, Dante's Heart

Soldier in winter

We have featured Venator_Somniorum's work on the blog before, but I just had to drop a note about this new piece, entitled Like I Promised:


Elegant! These days, anthropomorphic animal fantasy is difficult to pull off, but I have long been passionately in love with animal stories in folklore - deep roots there - and this just appeals to me on a level deeper than the intellectual.

Venator has a brief prose vignette to accompany the portrait, which you can read here, and from which I'll excerpt only enough words to use a breath on:


The snow still didn't stop, while the small team tried to reach their camp. Many wounds and scars covered them, those who survived the trap, to show the pride of The Alliance.


I am still trying to decide whether the alienness of the lynx's eyes is a flaw or a strength of the piece. In any case, worth the sharing. Venator has a gift for evoking something haunting, even in pieces that with only a few different brush strokes would have remained unremarkable. I will have to ask our art editor what she thinks of this particular one; I suspect she will dislike it, but there is something in the mood of the piece - perhaps only the sternness of the face against the bleakness of winter - that makes it difficult for me to draw my eyes away.

I fear I remain an entrapped and unrepenting fan of space opera and Star Wars (at least the older Star Wars) and of vast, outlandishly epic scenes with sweeping romantic scores that border on the sentimental or hyperbolic. Yet also I am still searching for that painting of the tiny baby dragon curled up on an autumn leaf, which was the subject of our first blog post. Caught between the desperate celebration of the Mahabharata (with its heavenly weapons and burning supernovas tossed so casually about a tiny battlefield) and the quiet of a haiku, I can only sing out my fascination for the violence of all those fantastical moments that strike us out of our chronos and make us see the world again as for the first time.

Mountain Thoughts

Dear readers,

Travel, fatigue, and the excitement of gathering submissions for our first issue of the Dante's Heart journal have kept me away from the blog too long. I'm back. I am reading Bill Buck's retellings of the Sanskrit epics, and had to share a passage - the prose is beautiful, the translation of Hindu mythwork into American English is stunning, an ennobling of our own native tradition and a great credit to the original. If you haven't run across Buck's and Mahabharata and Ramayana yet, this is very worth doing. Also Shirley Triest's illustrations are a wonder.

So:

Once when Sanjaya had gone to get water, Dhritarashtra's holy fire tipped over in the dry leaves and grew to be a forest-fire, and Sanjaya at the river in the evening saw two sunsets through the trees, one to the west, one in the south.

Wild animals burst past then, yet Dhritarashtra and the two Queens could not move. The fire had cut them off on all sides; they met the flames in peace.

And after, Sanjaya rose from the water with the deer and bear and elephants and walked three times round where their camp had been. He poured some ashes into Ganga and went all alone up into the Hills, into the lonely Himalyas watched over by the gods.

Sanjaya's memories fell away like the dead ashes of a burnt-out fire--the bright stars of arrows in the sky, the rending sounds of the great bows, the sparks of shattered swords, the cries in the night, all were no more--and he thought to himself, "Earth my mother, how ungrateful and heartless were all those who rejected your bounty and instead chose to go to death. How could you appear to them as a mansion of sorrow, where no one could remain?"

How can one read this and not catch one's breath?

We are hoping to receive submissions for Dante's Heart that engage with many myth and fairytale traditions. The sanctus mundi that ripples beneath our cultural consciousness is rich and vivid, jungle and desert and dark deep all at once. Like Darwin and St. Francis, I am in love with the diversity of life. We become too used to encountering fairy tales and any accounts of marvels and wonders only within carefully bordered zoos and menageries - within encyclopedias of fairy tales, or children's carefully illustrated editions of Grimm. Even so with myth: we think of an almanac of Greek figures meticulously catalogued and distanced, rather than the vicious and vociferous bursting of myth into our daily lives. With Dante's Heart we will hope to break the zoo open a little bit more and try to catch glimpses of myth and fairy tale thriving in the literary and artistic wild.

Tears of a Dying Hope

Take a look at this artist's work at devianart - the artist goes under the attractive callsign Venator_Somniorum. I believe he hails from Scandinavia. The best of his work is desperately emotive and atmospheric. A figure weeping tears (unless it is a Virgin Mary) is difficult to pull off in art, but he has done it. Haunting: this feline thing stepping into the lake of hope under a chill moon. I have no words. It is beautiful.

Of the Night Land, and the End of Man

Recently, I stumbled into a website (with the above title) devoted to William Hope Hodgson’s bizarre and beautiful novel, The Night Land, with an array of art, fan fiction, timelines, maps, and essays. The site is very worth checking out, especially the art. For example, this painting of the ab-humans at their meal:

What a chill ran through me at this brooding image, at the looking about of these ghouls at some small sound, at their impending leap to their feet to chase fresh prey. For those new to The Night Land, the novel is set in a future so distant that the sun has burnt out and an eternal dark covers the earth. Humanity through its tampering with the natural universe has long since opened Doorways through which various predatory or malicious Forces have dropped into our existence. The remnants of the species live in the Last Redoubt, a pyramid refuge beset by the misshapen creatures that have populated our dying earth, some of those creatures having burst in through the Doorways which humans learned to open but not to close, and some of them (like those above) our own descendants. Here is one of the Forces, spinning angrily in the forever dark:

William Hope Hodgson at his artistic best presents us with mythic and terrifying nightscapes (never I will forget the screams in the dark and the patter of running feet as unseen and giant creatures chased the fleeing humans across a dry seabed). At his misogynist worst, his narrator makes James Bond and Buck Rogers appear staunch feminists by comparison:

And I shook her a little, for this naughty spirit which did not be gone from her. For I perceived that my manhood had but stirred the woman in her to that strange quick humbleness that had seemed to be only a quenching of her wayward unwisdom...and I to know that Mine Own did be a wondrous maiden, full of all life and spirit, and to be held wisely and to be loosed wisely, all as did be for the best to bring out the uttermost of her goodness which did be in all her being, and to be very lovely, and to make me feel as that I did be a giant that held a white flower very tender; but I to feel also that I did be her Master.

Even that would serve simply as an unabashed celebration of the d/s lifestyle, if, that is, there were any bondage in the book, and if it were not that the hero’s love interest has the intellectual and emotional awareness of a very young child.

But even given the flaws of the novel, the Night Land that Hodgson creates is difficult to forget. It is a hellscape that haunts the imagination long after the initial read.

In this, I realize I am only parroting the reviews of many writers and editors, from Lovecraft to this day. What I want to say separately from this is: the art! the art! It can’t be missed: much of it is as atmospheric and desperate as the novel itself. Also, the timeline and the assemblage of essays and scraps of reviews (on the pages called Night Thoughts and Night Voices) is a prodigious archival feat: the creator of the website is to be commended. Among the highlights are several discussions of The Night Land in relation to The Time Machine, reviews of Hodgson by other writers of science fiction, and extracts from biographical writings on Hodgson. There are also, as you might expect, debates over Hodgson’s treatment of femininity and the erotic. The website is updated with new materials and links a few times a month. If you have read The Night Land, definitely take a look. If you haven’t, view the gallery, and it may be inspiration to track down the book.

Madeleine L'Engle is no longer with us

Returning from vacation to get my fix from the Endicott blog, I have just read the saddest news: of Madeleine L'Engle's death, at age 88. I cannot possibly write an obituary or memorial here that would do justice to our loss. Endicott has written the best memorial there will probably be. But now I find myself picking up my tattered old copy of A Wind in the Door with sadness, such sadness, and my insides are a winter day. Madeleine L'Engle was one of the great ones, and had the deepest heart and spirit - it shows in all of her work. She lived life kindly and fully, and knew, like the characters in Peter S. Beagle's The Last Unicorn, how to make the clock strike the right time:

Kairos. Real time. God's time. That time which breaks through chronos with a shock of joy, that time we do not recognize while we are experiencing it, but only afterwards, because kairos has nothing to do with chronological time. In kairos we are completely unselfconscious, and yet paradoxically far more real than we can ever be when we are constantly checking our watches for chronological time. The saint in contemplation, lost (discovered) to self in the mind of God is in kairos. The artist at work is in kairos. The child at play, totally thrown outside himself in the game, be it building a sand castle or making a daisy chain, is in kairos. In kairos we become what we are called to be as human beings, co-creators with God, touching on the wonder of creation.

And she understood fairy tales better than anyone:

I am a writer. When I am grappling with ideas which are radical enough to upset grown-ups, then I am likely to put these ideas into a story which will be marketed for children, because children understand what their parents have rejected and forgotten.

She was the first great storyteller I met as a child, and she has been the one to whom I've returned many times as an adult to remind myself to listen to the heart's own music. Losing her is like losing a grandmother. I believe she is in a beautiful place, but she is not here, telling stories.

When I was thirteen, I started writing a letter in my horrible penmanship to tell her how much her books meant. I never finished or sent the letter.

Mourn with me. And celebrate her many books - novels, poems, plays, faith journals (such as Walking on Water, which is the source of the passages I've quoted) - which have taught so many young readers so many things about love, death, loss, faith, art, and hope. Long may her stories live in our memories.

Ciruelo 2008

Ciruelo's 2008 dragons calendar is available - take a look! The art is of uneven quality, but afew paintings are so breathtaking that one would have to be mad to miss out on them. Only Michael Whelan is a match for white dragons!

I seem to be on a dragons kick of late. Does anyone remember Patricia A. McKillip's Forgotten Beasts of Eld? The book appears to have become as forgotten as the magical beasts it celebrates; I have been blessed enough to know a medievalist who remembers it. These days you are only likely to find this book in the young adult section of the bookstore, though it may be a rare young adult who will enjoy it. But ah! what a book. I remember the dragon, Gyld: The great wings unfurled, black against the stars. The huge bulk lifted slowly, incredibly, away from the cold earth, through the wind-torn, whispering trees.

When the sorceress whom the dragon obeys consents to leave her mountain fastness for the sake of love, she and her beau try to figure out where to put the dragon. We can store it in the wine cellar, her beloved remarks cheerfully.

That poor, cramped behemoth with its wings tight around it, sleeping in the dark in the scent of wine.

Another book worth reading - this one more recent - Elizabeth Kerner's Song in the Silence, now a complete trilogy. I must warn you that to read Kerner's novel(s) you must be in the mood for a very starry-eyed romance, but the books are alive with a vibrant and desperate poetry, and a deep humanity. The dragons are truly both new and ancient to the reader, and desperately memorable. There is one scene in which Lanen, the woman who heroes her way dauntlessly through the novel, midwifes a dragon through a breach birth, though the heat of the dragon mother sears her arms almost to the bone. Kerner's imagination is both raw and elegant.