That which is much bigger II

There is a moment in the Mabinogion when Gwydion, trickster and uncle to the Welsh hero Llew Lagh Gyffes, must enter the underworld to find his lost nephew. This is my favorite moment in the story, because in an instant, Gwydion disappears into the earth as he chases a mysterious pig that flees from his pen every morning. This animal leads him to a broad river, which in turn leads him to his nephew. This moment is fairly significant, as it charts the cosmogenic elements of the Welsh, one that I cannot relay, but one that weaves its way through your entire being.

A group of my students gave a presentation on water as a sacred element and water as a commodified resource. They were very articulate in their religious depictions of water, offering examples of how water is sacred element from a Judaic, Muslim and Christian background, and how the sacred essence that these traditions convey are greatly diminished when water is bottled. One student commented that, 'the sacred essence of water leaves when it is left standing and concealed' in a bottle. I appreciated this sentiment, and I think Gwydion would as well, for the river he follows is moving considerably, just as the pig that leads him on. There is a sense of uncontained movement, or as Steve Martin and John Candy once noted, Martin: "I know, I know, just go with the flow," Candy: "Like a twig on the current of a mighty stream."

I offered my students another perspective on water, this one from Stephen Mitchell's translation of the Tao Te Ching

15
The ancient Masters were profound and subtle.
Their wisdom was unfathomable.
There is no way to describe it;
all we can describe is their appearance.

They were careful
as someone crossing an iced-over stream.
Alert as a warrior in enemy territory.
Courteous as a guest.
Fluid as melting ice.
Shapable as a block of wood.
Receptive as a valley.
Clear as a glass of water.

Do you have the patience to wait
till your mud settles and the water is clear?
Can you remain unmoving
till the right action arises by itself?

The Master doesn't seek fulfillment.
Not seeking, not expecting,
she is present, and can welcome all things.

I think they appreciated the subtlety of the Tao and its dual descriptions of movement and stillness, and how both are elements of water. I also told them of a Buddhist saying, "all boats lead to the same shore." The last quote is quite revealing about the role of water, and the vessels we use to navigate it. To exemplify the tradition this last sentiment comes from, I found a trailer to a film I really want to see, Dharma River, which seems quite evocative to me of the movement of water and people.

That which is much bigger

Stephen Mitchell writes a wonderful introduction to the 2000 translation of the Bhagavad Gita (LINK), in which Mitchell asks the reader to consider the story as taking place before a great battle (as it does), but to imagine a great event unfolding in that one moment before battle when the adrenaline is high and when both sides survey the opposing force in those moments of fear and uncertainty. In that moment, Mitchell suggests,

everything is still. The armies have halted in their tracks. Even the flies are caught in midair between two wingbeats. The vast moving picture of reality stops on a single frame, as in Borge's story "The Secret Miracle." The moment of the poem has expanded beyond time, and the only characters who continue, earnestly discoursing between the silent, frozen armies, are Arjuna and Krishna.

Krishna, of course, happens to be much more than Arjuna's Charioteer, he is also God. He picks a fairly significant moment to reveal the cosmos to the hero. 'Whether or not he should fight,' says Mitchell,' is secondary to the question he faces through Krishna, and that is, 'how should we live?'

At his lowest moment, Arjuna crumbles from the pressure, and Krishna teaches him about being, and in closing, Krishna speaks of wisdom, sacrifice, of facing that which needs facing and letting go that which needs letting go,

The man whom desires enter
as rivers flow into the sea,
filled yet always unmoving -
that man finds perfect peace.

There are moments like this, when the veil between the profane and that which is much bigger is revealed, if even between the wingbeats of a fly. I recall reading a couple of years ago that serves a similar role. It was by an anyonomous author about a river near where I grew up, the Snye, which at one time was known as the Chenal Ecarte (which in French means the Lost or Blind Channel). This also happens to be the river I centered my Masters research on, so it was nice to find that someone, some settler perhaps, dreamt of this river as I did, as something much bigger. The poem appears in Frank Mann's 1968 book A History of Wallaceburg and Vicinity,

Chenal Ecarte
(the Lost channel)

Bright, eddying, shimmering, current.
Have you really lost your way?
From the course of common torrent,
Of the lake, the river, bay?

Men call you "Waif stretch of water,
That has run from other astray,
Your Neptune, the old Sea God's daughter,
A madcap, so blithesome and bray"

We've drifted with boat songs as lovers,
Gay, heedless of rudder or sail,
We have whistled to keep up our courage,
When the breezes were blowing a gale.

Thru' marshland and glade we have wondered,
The sport of the winds and tide
The days of that light childhood laughter
Are lost in the gulf deep and wide.

I'm drifting from my moorings, fair water,
From the banks that in childhood I plied,
I'm drifting on Time's swift flowing river,
And needful as you are my guide.

We are both sweeping to the ocean,
Through channels chance fortune has made,
We shall fade at last in its bosom
As inifinities in infinate fade.

Only someone kin to Arjuna could appreciate the Chenal Ecarte, in that one moment you are told it eventually flows into the ocean, bringing everything with it. This is perhaps the irony of the settler who wrote this (if it was a settler), for he or she realizes that the body of water that settled their childhood is the very same body of water that carries them home on time's swift current. Tide and wind, arms on the geological clock are also there, part of that which is much bigger, non-linear, absolute, and always wavering in its cyclical rhythms.

Resonance

I was on my way home the other night from school and heard a documentary on the CBC Radio show Dispatches that reaffrimed a lot of things for me. The feature documentary was about a young boy in Chile who, at the age of 8, presented an assignment on the Selk'nam people of Tierra Del Fueggo. The link to the documentary is here (Dispatches), click the icon under February 1st titled "listen to Jen's documentary."

Over the next few years, the boy, Gilbert, dedicated his young life to studying the language by reading the Selk'nam dictionary and by listening to old recordings made by Catholic priests (how ironic). The last speaker of the language, prior to Gilbert learning, died in the 1970's. There is a curious, if not entirely amazing resonance here, one that has lept an entire generation and found an ear that was directly connected to the heart. I think that most definately this could be considered true ecolinguistics. Missionaries, colonizers and the great effort to modernize that which is deemed 'parochial, archaic and uncivilized' had such a great effect at deforesting not only entire cultures, but also entire languages, the timeless vessels of cosmogenic expression.

The effect is quite similar to taking an axe to the axis mundi, or an entire forest ecosystem of axis mundi. But, here we see, quite evidently, that a seed remained, and in true fashion it has been patterned after what ancestral knowledge dictates is the form of being. This is resonance, and as W.H. Auden once said, "A culture is no better than it's woods."