Ecotone: Writing About Place: MythicPlace

[Fragments from Floyd] While it not mythic, the story of Mary Draper Ingles is epic-- a larger-than-life heroic drama that pervades this region. This woman's experience in these very hills enters my thoughts often and comes to me as I contemplate "mythic place". In our comings and goings through Montgomery County each week, we unknowingly cross Mary Ingles footsteps with our humming wheels. It is a story that deserves a wider audience, and so I will simply offer her tale to you.

P.:

I'm an idiot. On [Saturday] I thought out a contribution to Mythic Places that says I'm looking for great deeds and noble purposes of long ago and not finding them in shopworn Ohio, but on Sunday, I repent my shallowness -- even though I liked what I wrote.

For I have walked the Cleveland streets where Eliot Ness walked, on his long, sorry slide after busting gangs in Chicago; I have climbed the steps, now demolished, that Dr. Sam Sheppard climbed on his tragic quest to keep his innocence; I have walked the halls where America's first big-city black mayor walked (though ignobly on my part, in the mere pursuit of a birth certificate). Lincoln came to Cleveland, and Dr. King; and all manner of scoundrels; and hopeful, ordinary folk whose purposes were no less high because their powers were small.

I have seen the modest social hall where immigrants and visitors conceived and shaped one of the Balkans' few successes, Czechoslovakia. Often I have crossed Public Square, where thousands of women once rallied for the right to vote and thousands of men rallied again and again for the right to negotiate over the shape and value of their work. I have counted the coins on John D. Rockefeller's grave and pondered something that proletarian and plutocrat proved together, before greed took over and rust devoured us: That in sharing wealth and space and ideas, and in tolerating, if not embracing, those we share with, we all prosper.

I think that maybe I mythed the point of the exercise, for that's a truth, not a legend. But it's a truth people are apt to forget in the morning, anyhow, so with your permission, I'll let both entries ride.

I don't (yet!) publish a weblog, but I do enjoy yours. (Editorial note: several weeks after posting this, I did start a weblog, [Hoarded Ordinaries].) This is from my offline journal for Wed, Dec 17, 2003: in it's own roundabout way, it explores Mythic Place...

--Lorianne

Just past 8:30 am as I sit here writing at the kitchen table. The refrigerator hums loudly; beside it, the dog slurps his breakfast. In the office Chris masters a CD of a local choir's Christmas concert: the usual mishmash of sounds that means home.

I just sent an email to Chris's dad. He'd responded to my latest [Pedestrian Thoughts], suggesting that the scant references to symbolic birds at the end were more effective than the isolated paragraphs on birding in the middle. And thus with one insightful comment, his keen lawyer's mind honed in on the cusp of the debate in nature writing today: to what extent should we focus on actual places peopled with real birds, and to what extent should we focus on spaces of the spirit, locales populated by symbolic creatures like Dickinson's [feathered hope]?

In my mind ,we should do both: Nature is, as Emerson argued, the symbol of spirit; at the same time, though, Beauty is its own excuse for being (as he argued [elsewhere]). And so this table at which I sit writing is at once a Platonic table, a representative of any table at which someone might sit and write; this dog, a symbol of any dog; and Chris, an emblem of any man, or husbands in general.

At the same time, though, it should certainly matter that this particular table was purchased in Nashua, NH, bought from a company that has no qualms, I'm sure, about selling mass-produced tables made from lumber harvested from rain forests or other shady sites; it should matter that this dog named Reggie is a chow-shepherd mix, 7 years old, rescued from a pound just outside Boston some 5 years ago. It should also matter that as I wrote that last sentence, Reggie was pacing about, haunted by squirrels either real or imagined, and at the end of that same sentence he plopped down noisily on the bedroom floor, sighing.

And the Chris who sits clicking at the computer, repeating the same recorded phrase over and over in an attempt to get a song ending just right, is not Everyman much less Every Husband: instead, he's Chris from Michigan; Chris who quit a corporate computer job (Chris the ex-VP) to play Renaissance lute for pure joy; Chris the son of a retired lawyer who reads stacks of books in a living-room in Michigan and who enjoys discussing them with his lit scholar daughter-in-law here in New Hampshire.

And so this Keene where we three--Chris, the dog, and I--as well as this America where Chris's dad also joins into the intellectual fray, connected via electronic impulses sped via modem and cable lines...this Keene and this America are simultaneously spiritual places as well as actual. It matters that Keene is home to some 20,000 actual souls, some of whom write, some of whom sing, and some of whom take their dogs on actual walks, treading trails that once were railroad beds, lines that took actual goods from actual factories (now abandoned) to deliver to actual people who wanted to buy things (including mass-produced tables) in the commercial heyday after the Civil War.

So is Keene an actual place or a mythic one? Is it merely my humble home, a place that still surprises me, a newcomer who moved here less than 6 months ago? Or is it a mythic place, a place representative of something larger and greater, a place where my struggle to get out of bed and write each morning is a universal battle of wills, Beowulf against Grendel?

When we first moved to New Hampshire, I was shocked to learn that 20 minutes up the road from our subdivision house in Hillsborough was the town of Nelson, NH: the place where May Sarton wrote her Journal of a Solitude. And not a half hour in the other direction from Hillsborough lies Warner, NH, the home of Maxine Kumin, whose In Deep essays I'd eagerly read in the suburbs of Randolph, MA the same spring that we adopted Reggie. Reading of Sarton's self-imposed solitudes in a quaint New England town and reading Kumin's musings on a neighbor's pregnant mare in rural New Hampshire, I'd imagined these places to be wild--distant and removed from my actual life of shopping lists and indifferent students.

The thought that art could be written in my backyard--the thought that a mythic house on a hill where people were actually creative, and wrote, did really exist within a comfortable drive from my home--was alarming. If Maxine Kumn is the type of person I could encounter at any moment shopping for groceries at the local store (and she is), then what was I doing with my life? Instead of longing for a mythic table at which an idealized writer could pen universal truths, the stuff of tomorrow's myths, why wasn't I starting with the actual: this table, this pen, this writer in this place, this moment?

And so now the dog lies resting here in the kitchen, having moved from his spot in the bedroom. The kitchen faucet drops as it did yesterday and the day before that as Chris continues to click at the computer, having moved on to master the next song. Hark the Herald Angels Sing--another myth from another time and place--while here in Keene at 9:14 am on Wednesday, December 17, the rain falls from grey skies onto increasingly sodden, slowly melting snows. Is this place mythic, or is it real? Only the snows know.

[under the fire star] Shri Marundeeswarar Temple: The temple was built in the 11th c. AD. According to the temple history, the sage Agastya came to Shiva with a terrible stomach ache. Shiva cured him, and taught him medicine. He also cured the ailing sun and moon, as a result of which they both worship Shiva here every day. The doorway of the god's inner sanctum faces west, because the sun worships him at sunset. Most Shiva temples include shrines to the nine planets, including sun and moon. This temple does not, because the sun and moon themselves are worshippers. Valmiki, author of the epic Ramayana, prayed here for Shiva to appear before him. Shiva did so, and there is a shrine which marks the spot....

[older and growing] My first offering for Ecotone - thanks to Beth and to Fred for the suggestion.

...So it was that, without only the sketchiest first-hand knowledge, I built myself a child¡¯s-eye-view of the English countryside. A mythical landscape; an archetype; an ideal; a mosaic assembled from all of those idealised portraits reflecting the countryside as those authors wished it to be. My mythical countryside was an adventurous schoolboy¡¯s dream ¨C freely accessible woods to explore, trees to climb (with perfectly-spaced branches), fields to laze in; streams to wade through (just shallow enough not to come over the top of Wellington boots), traffic-free county lanes to stroll down, grassy hills to race up and roll down, all linked together by winding sandy tracks and pathways (no heavy, cloying mud here) with delights around every corner...

[CassandraPages ]Sitting on the wrong side of the little rented car, I watched out the window while my husband, happy in the left-handed world of British motoring, drove south. Lulled by the rhythm of the rolling grassy land - undulating, calm, with hardly a tree - I suddenly sat up, astounded...

[The Geek Icon - And, Wendy, There Are Mermaids] When I was little, we'd often sail to [Santa Cruz Island], one of the nearest and largest in the Channel Islands. The north side of the island was inevitably either foggy or windy or both. We sometimes stayed a night or two in Little Scorpion, but often sailed around to the south side where the island shielded the weather and offered mellow, calm, warm anchorages. But before we scuttled off to sun ourselves at Coches Prietos we'd often make a visit to the Dragon Cave....

[Feathers of Hope (Pica)] Claude L¨¦vi-Strauss insists that myths are a language because they only exist in language; that they must be retold. Jackson's retelling of Tolkein's epic must count, in part because of the introduction of the New Zealand landscape into the contemporary consciousness.

[(alembic)]The more I tried to makes sense of my understanding of the spells we cast when we weave words into myths, the more I realized that the one place on this earth that made me feel the power of myth is the one place I can least describe. Not because I lack for words; it¡¯s because the place is indescribable. It¡¯s so large that it doesn¡¯t fit into language, if you will.

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