Brittania on Amazon

 I've started watching Brittania on Amazon. I'm not sure why since they canceled it before finishing it.

There's a character in it that's a combination of Oedipus and Lear, so that's interesting, although, at some point, I start wondering if they're going to do anything new.

I struggle with the historicity of the show. Everybody is wearing pants, including the Romans. It has a scene where a druid harvests mistletoe using a scythe, which checks with the historical record (at least according to the Romans), but the scythe wasn't silver; it was rusted and gross. The Druids, it seems, all have eating disorders. Every one of their men weighs less than 100 pounds.

They make the point several times that the druids and the Celts never write anything down because of some religious objection that they never really specify. That comes directly from Roman historians, but a lot of people question it, including JRR Tolkien.

The druids and the Celts wrote constantly. Everything we have from them is covered in the symbols of their complex alphabet. They grew flax and raised sheep, so it just doesn't ring true that these people didn't write. Tolkien and other historians believed that when the Romans converted to Christianity, they destroyed all of the Druid and Celtic writing they found. We know they did that with other cultures, including older Christian texts, so that seems possible.

Tolkien believed that among these destroyed Celtic and Druid texts were the original myths of the British Isles. He believed, as I believe, that myths define a people. Having them be "true" or "historical" isn't the point. The stories define the culture, and without our own myths, we developed our culture based on first-century Judaic and Roman/christian myths.

What's left of my people's mythology (the Scottish) is fairytales and ghost stories. Waterhorses, werewolves, kelpies and selkies. Tolkien pointed out that the texts we do have, like Beowulf, were Norse stories transferred to Britain by Norse invaders.

Some people believe that the Autherian stories are remnants of Celtic myths, but while those stories have a lot of Celtic trappings, they are decidedly Christian, which suggests, to me at least, that if they are Celtic myths, they are remnants that were Christianized.

Without any genuine British myths to work with, Tolkien decided to make his own, and that's where we get the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings. Even that is heavily influenced by Germanic and Norse myths, but his Elves, with their elvish writings, are clearly meant to be celts, and Gandalf, with his pointed hat and long beard, is the very image of a druid (as described by the Romans.)

They do get a couple of things right in the series. For one thing, they have the Druids practicing human sacrifice. We have a fair amount of archeological evidence this actually did happen. They go a bit far, though, and have the Druid village decorated with thousands of human skulls and moments of cannibalism. None of that has any historical or archeological evidence.

A great deal of the show focuses on Kelly Reilly, wearing a wolf stole, a leather bustier, shooting a long bow with Robin Hood-like accuracy, all the while her auburn locks flow in the wind, with a mind of its own. All of that is pretty hot. She's basically a Celtic Xenia Warrior Princess. I like the idea of female heroes; it fits well with my people's mythic view of ourselves. I do wish these writers would keep in mind that flawed heroes are more interesting than perfect ones, and tragic heroes are the most interesting of all. Kerra's only flaw is her constant self-doubt, which becomes annoying.

Early episodes have Ian McDiarmid playing King Pellenor. It's like the writers sat down one day and said, "hmmm, what's a good name for a British mythic character? Oh, I know!" McDiarmid must be one of those guys who looked seventy his whole life because Return of the Jedi was forty years ago, and he looks exactly the same. He wears a beard in this, but once he speaks, all you can hear is, "yesssss, my young apprentisssss."

I'm gonna ride it out to the end because this is a period I am pretty interested in. That might be my undoing, though, because it'll frustrate me if they do it wrong.

Claymores are weapons that came out of converting the Scottish to Christianity, so I don't expect to see any of those (but I probably will). I would like to see some kilts, though. I can't think of a reason why all these weirdos wear pants.

Apollonia's Thunderbolt

There’s a scene in The Godfather where Michael is hiding in Sicily from the men who tried to kill his father, men who would kill Michael for his killing of Sollozzo and McCluskey.  Michael is out shooting birds with his friends and bodyguards, and he chances upon a group of school children on the street guided by their young mistress, a woman named Apollonia, a woman Michael had never seen before.

In a moment, Michael forgets about New York; he forgets about his father and the men trying to kill him.  He forgets about the army and the family business and college–he forgets about Kay, and there is only Apollonia.  The intensity of his gaze causes Apollonia to take a step back.  Noticing Michael’s condition, his friend says, “I think you were hit by a thunderbolt.”  and then he says, “In Sicily, women are more dangerous than shotguns.”  

Most men can relate to a moment when this happened to them, even if the thunderbolt came not from a beautiful girl but from another man.  I could say something like, “I guess it’s happened to me this many times,” but that would be a lie.  I know exactly how many times it’s happened.  I know the day of the week, the place, the weather, how she wore her hair, how her clothes hung on her shoulders.  I remember it all.  In sixty years, it’s happened five times.

The thunderbolt doesn’t mean marriage, a relationship, happiness, children, or grandchildren; it doesn’t mean any of that.  Unless you’re one of the eleven people on the planet who have never seen The Godfather, you know things don’t work out for Michael and Apollonia.  Michael ends up back with Kay, the true love of his life, if you can call what they had love.

In my life, I’ve always chosen not to pursue these creatures romantically.  I always did my best to get to know them, and even to this day, I have regular conversations with nearly all of them.  One of them reads my writing fairly regularly and sends me notes of encouragement.  In thirty-five years, we’ve never discussed the thunderbolt, but she knows.  How could she not?  I could take you today to the very spot where it happened.  It’s not far away.

My plan has always been to get to know these women as well as I can and become friends; then, if they want something else to happen, it will happen.   That’s always served me well, although I did end up getting married that way once.  I have no regrets.

A few weeks ago, on a day when I had a million things on my mind and lots on my schedule for that day, and that week, it happened again.  The thunderbolt only happens by surprise, and boy, was I surprised.

It was such a surprise that I immediately became of two minds on the subject.  Part of me was elated.  Even if I never saw this woman again, my old heart had survived every attempt to destroy it and was functioning as well as it did when I was seventeen.  The other part of me immediately said, “Lord, take this cup from me!”  Those sorts of thoughts, those sorts of feelings only look foolish in a man my age.  Part of me hopes we’ll meet again.  Part of me hopes she’ll get a job in Paris that leaves on Friday.

If you stood these five women, these five thunderbolts that struck my life,  in a line, hopefully, they’d get along, but also, they would look like five sisters, even siblings of the same brood.  I very clearly have a type, and I haven’t a single clue where it comes from.  Maybe it’s a memory of someone who befriended me as a baby.  Maybe it’s a lover from another lifetime.  Maybe this is the spirit of Shakespeare’s dark lady come to haunt me because she cannot rest.  It’s not just the color of their hair and eyes that match, but the shape of their face and lips.  It’s kind of spooky, to be honest.

I honestly hope I never see this woman again.  It’s cool that it happened, and it made me smile all the way home, but there’s nothing good that can come of this.  I’ve pursued these women before, and it can be disappointing.  One was the older sister of a friend, and with her, I soon discovered there was no cake in that cake; it was all icing if you take my meaning.

I doubt that’s the case here, though.  One of the advantages to only seeing women to whom you have been introduced is they usually share qualities of the person who introduced them, and that usually means there’s some substance there.  Usually, that is.  

We like to say that women are slaves to their emotions.  Men are worse, but we’re better at hiding it.  Men can also, some men at least, become slaves to their muse.  I think, ultimately, that’s what a girl that makes you thunderstruck means.  She’s to inspire something in you.  It feels like love, but it’s something much stronger and much different.

I know a million tales of guys who were nearly destroyed pursuing the girls who struck them with thunder.  I suppose that’s where the tale of the siren comes from.  She was so beautiful, and her song so compelling, that he flung himself into the sea and was dashed on the rocks.  Every guy I know knows somebody that happened to if it didn’t happen to them.  

In his youth and his arrogance, Michael pursued the father of Apollonia, determined to have her after her thunderbolt claimed him.  In case you haven’t seen the movie, I’m not going to say what happened, but his youth and his arrogance led to tragedy and pain, both for him and for Apollonia and her father.  That’s a lesson for young men.  The thunderbolt doesn’t always mean what you think it means.  Respect that.  These are powers greater than you understand.

Mitch Myers, Dan Rose, And The Call To Adventure

 Joseph Campbell, not my brother, but Professor Joseph Campbell, who taught literature at  Sarah Lawrence College in New York, studied epic poetry and compared its forms across cultures.  His experiences in World War II and his exposure to Carl Jung led him down a path that culminated with the creation of his theory about The Hero’s Journey or the MonoMyth.

In the Hero’s Journey, a character travels from a state of unenlightenment and naivety through trials and challenges and arrives at a point that not only transforms him but also has a transformative or explanative impact on the culture he came from.

The Hero’s Journey begins with hearing the call.  Menelaus calls Odysseus to fight the Trojans, Gandalf tells Frodo about the ring, and Obi-Wan tells Luke he must learn about the force.  My fifty-year journey has been about discovering where I came from and what made me–what familial, cultural, and accidental influences made me what I am.  Normally, this wouldn’t be a hero’s journey, but in my case, the forces that shaped me are the forces that shaped the country and, in particular, shaped Mississippi and Jackson.  The impact of these forces is what makes this a hero’s journey.  It’s not about what made me as much as it’s about what made us.

The call to action in this story came from my teachers when I was sixteen.  Before my encounter with them, I was satisfied only to learn the parts of the story that were unique to me and not look around the corners to see the whole image.  It was talking with these men that made me understand there was something fundamentally different about people in Mississippi who started school in nineteen sixty-nine, and talking with them made me want to understand it.  I heard the call.

Sometimes, you can hear a story many times and still only understand it once the right person tells it.  We know the universe through stories.  That’s what Campbell was getting at when he wrote A Hero with a Thousand Faces.

Stories are made of moments.  Moments are statements of being:  The bird is red;  The soup is cold;  The dog ran out. When you combine these moments, it makes a story.  “The red bird flew past our chair on Wednesday.”  Stories and emotions compose everything we know.  Everything else is just matter–the dust left after the universe made the stars.  

Turning 16 was not a good year for me.  My mother believed it best to try and treat my brother’s schizophrenia at home, which made being at home uncomfortable at best.  I found refuge in spending as much time as possible in weight-lifting gyms, primarily the downtown YMCA and Gordon Weir’s new Natalus-equipped gym. 

My school, a private Episcopalian school, was in quite a bit of trouble.  We had three headmasters in four years, and the new headmaster saw it as his mission to reshape the community and culture at my school completely.  That meant getting rid of several faculty members and quite a few students he saw as distractions and unleadable.  Feeling my community under attack, I felt honor-bound to do something about this, which seems ridiculous now since I was only sixteen and not a very good student.  The only thing I had going for me was that I was twice the size of my new headmaster.  He never missed an opportunity to point that out.  I’m pretty sure, in his heart, he believed he could take me and, later on that year, would put that theory to the test.  I also knew that my father’s name carried some weight, but I refused to bring that up as this was my fight, not his, and I wasn’t entirely sure he’d back up my argument.  

Part of reshaping St. Andrews meant that David Hicks, my new Headmaster had to replace the entire high school science department, having found issue with the existing one.  Two of his new hires became very important in my life and genuine beacons in my lonely existence.  They told me things and asked questions that made me hear the call to adventure.

The first was Mitch Myers.  Coach Myers was, at best, twenty-three years old.  From New York, his attempts to get into medical school weren’t going well, so he took a teaching job in exotic and remote Mississippi.  It’s not unusual for medical schools to turn down the application of young people in the sciences their first two or three times.  While Mitch was in Jackson, he applied to the University of Mississippi Medical Center.  His performance at St. Andrews impressed the parents at our school enough that they ram-rodded his application through UMMC.  Mitch got his MD in Jackson and stayed to practice medicine here for many years.

Mitch became very interested in physical culture in New York, particularly weight-lifting.  That became the common ground of our friendship.  Most of the weight-lifters I knew were tradespeople.  A surprising number were in law enforcement.  Mitch was one of the few serious weight-lifters I knew who were also educators and communicated at that level, even if he did have a strange accent.    

In 1979, sports drugs were just beginning to be an issue.  In Mississippi, there weren’t yet any laws against them.  A doctor in Jackson was even testing and prescribing anabolic steroids for the linemen at Ole Miss, a practice that would get the team suspended these days.  I was buying Dinabol from a gentleman who worked in law enforcement.  He was a bodybuilder, and I was a weightlifter.  He was a friend of Heavy Herb Anderson, if that helps you understand where this man fit into the world.  

Mitch Myers was also my football coach.  We discussed training techniques.  He liked trying crazy things like doing a thousand crunches in a day and suffering for a week.  His knowledge of chemistry and biology gave him a pretty informed opinion on steroids.  He was against the idea but didn’t tell me to stop.  He did make me promise to discuss it with my primary physician, which I did, and not to exceed the doses we discussed.  Steroids themselves aren’t addictive, but their results can be.  I wasn’t always very good about staying within the dosage guidelines Coach Myers and my doctor set for me.

During the year, Jackson Academy announced that they would add a high school the following year.  Since some students weren’t happy with David Hicks, there was talk among us of a group leaving St Andrews and going to JA.  One afternoon in the gym, Coach Myers asked me, “Those academies, they just for keeping the black kids out.  Right?”  

I didn’t know how to answer him.  I knew some academies were made for just that purpose, but by this time, most of them had gone out of business or were headed that way once it was declared unconstitutional for the state to pay parents an “educational grant” to send their kids to private school.  Where JA was concerned, I didn’t know the answer.  In the years hence, I learned that Jackson Academy was unrelated to the Citizens Council Academies.  JA was started when Jackson Public Schools switched from phonics to whole language and from old math to new math, and for some parents, this was inadequate.  There are people still who believe whole language and new math were communist-inspired.  

“I don’t know, coach,”  I said.  “They might be different, but I don’t know.  I’ll find out.”  I don’t know that I meant for that to be a promise, but it ended up being one.  “Finding out” why private schools started in Jackson, their difference and their effect on the larger public schools became a life-long journey.  One I’m still on.   I didn’t start the journey that day, but I heard the call.

Dr. Hicks hired a midwesterner to take over our biology classes.   Dan Rose was born in Illinois but traveled the world, including a stint teaching English in New Guinea.  Playgirl magazine named him one of America’s most eligible bachelors.  He died just as eligible as he was when they named him such.  

The biology classroom had a storage room, which Rose converted into a private office.  Unbeknownst to David Hicks, Dan Rose received guests in his “office” between classes, with the door closed, where he would tell you stories and share cigarettes and whiskey with you, if you had any, as long as you pet his dog.  That sounds like something I entirely made up, but more than a few can attest to its veracity.

Normally, when you’re sixteen, adults talk to you like you’re sixteen and tell you a lot of bullshit rather than the truth.  Dan Rose wasn’t like that.  Dan spoke to me about cigarettes, cigars, whisky, marijuana, and mushrooms.  He said to me about women.  Oh, he loved talking to me about women, and I needed to be talked to about women because I hadn’t a single clue what I was doing in that arena.

One day, Dan told me the story about Jesus and the pearl of great price and asked me if I understood what he was saying.  I took a sip and said I did.  He grasped me by the shoulder, looked me in the eye, and said, “I want you to forget every girl in this goddamn school and focus all your attention on Paige.”  

I told him I agreed, but so did nearly every boy I knew, and she had been complaining loudly about their lack of gentlemanly patience, so I resolved to (at least as far as she was concerned) be extra gentlemanly so that she would know I appreciated her in more ways than these other guys understood.  Even though it got me friend-zoned back to the cretaceous, I still think that was the right decision.  There were a number of shitty men in her life, but I wasn’t one of them.

One day, Dan Rose asked me, “What about Jackson Prep?”  

“It’s mostly a feeder school for Ole Miss,”  I said.  I still stand by that statement.

“I heard it was a bunch of pricks who wanted to keep the negros out.”  He said.

I’d never heard an adult lay it out so plainly before.  I’d rarely heard other kids lay it out so plainly.  Dan Rose put the meat on the table and the ball in my court.  I respected him so much and wanted to respond well, both truthfully and as frankly as he had been with me.

“I don’t know what the rules are there,”  I said.  “I know they don’t have any black students and never had any black students.  I met the headmaster but didn’t know him very well, and their coach tried a few times to get me to switch schools, even though he had gotten in a fight with my brother.”

I felt ashamed.  This was a very important issue, and I didn’t have the answer.  St. Andrews, I knew, had at least one black student in every grade, but I didn’t even know their policy about admitting students who weren’t white.  Now, I can look back and forgive myself for being just sixteen and not filling my head with these things, but that day, in Dan Rose’s stockroom office, I felt that I had let him down.  

“Let me ask around,”  I said.  “I feel like I should know this, but I don’t, but I think I know how to find out.”  That part was a lie.  I didn’t know how to find out.  I could have just gone to my dad and asked him to explain it, but that puts him in a spot both as a parent and in his job.  If I was going to find out which schools were about racism, and which schools were about something else, and what started it all, and where it all might lead, I’d have to do it on my own.  I heard the call to adventure.  I’ve been on this adventure for more than forty years, and I’m not done yet, but this is what started it all. 

The Way The Machune Works

A lot of the time, I'll start a writing project where I'll have the whole thing pretty clearly in my head, and I just have to go through the process of squeezing the tube until the words come out of my fingers.  I don't like to stop before I'm finished because once  I stop and do something else, it can take me weeks to return to the piece and finish it.  I have four really promising pieces in a folder now named "unfinished" that I hope to get to this week.

I'll never have enough confidence in what I'm doing that I can stop in the middle, go do something else for a few hours, and return to my keyboard and finish with the same energy I started.

This morning, about an hour before my alarm went off, an idea about a memory began poking needles in my brain.  When the alarm did go off, I thought I could get up and bathe, brush my teeth, shave my head, get dressed, and go downstairs to meet my ride that takes me to church, as I had planned...

Or I could write.

Children with communication problems can become very unsocial.  That was me.  If it's not dealt with, it can become something of a critical problem for the child, and they begin to lose what little vocabulary they gained; at the very worst, they can become functionally mute and anti-social.  That was not me.  I had three very vocal siblings, a very vocal grandmother and mother and nursemaid, and more than that, I had Martha Hammond's kitchen across our backyard, where I could sit and listen, and for whatever reason, there I could talk.  

I do enjoy socializing.  I enjoy church and Sunday school.  I was going to lunch at Hal & Mals and go see the last performance of Passage at Millsaps, but once I touched the keyboard, I saw the word count meter advance, but I wasn't getting closer to where I wanted to finish, so I typed and typed and typed and missed my leave-the-house time for Sunday School, then Church, then Lunch.  One-thirty came, and I could either leave for the play or stay and read over and edit my work.  I'm really bad for not doing that.  It's so anti-climactic and so unlike the passion of making the words new.

I suppose that makes me an unreliable friend.  I suppose it's always been so.  There will always be times when I have to be alone to work out the things in my head.  Sometimes I get them out and decide to show them to people, and sometimes I decide whatever it was I created, it wasn't worthy.  

I wouldn't wish the artist's mind on anyone.  It's not a stable or happy way to live, even though there are moments of ecstasy when what you create matches what you saw in your head before you began.  

The Agony and the Ecstasy is a movie about Michangelo made in the sixties.  It's also part of the deal for those who wish to create.  So are questions about "Who is that funny man in the dark with a pen and paper?  I never see him talk to anyone."   

It's not a matter of "this is what I choose."  It's a matter of "this is what I am."  and I've made peace with it.  If you ever expect to see me and don't, there's always a chance this is what happened.  It's not a bad thing.  It's just the way the machine works.