Dancing the Sun Up

Dylan Thomas records in the introduction to his selected poems:

I read somewhere of a shepherd who, when asked why he made, from within fairy rings, ritual observances to the moon to protect his flocks, replied: `I'dbe a damn' fool if I didn't!'

I was struck when I heard of the custom attached to Morris dancing of dancing the sun up on May 1st, up high on hills around the country. I was even more taken when I discovered that it happened on the Chevin above Otley, a place of immense beauty and historical interest. It was one of the reasons I chose to join Briggate Morris, knowing they danced upon the summit every May Day.

The views across the Wharfe  valley are beautiful, the clear view of Almscliffe and the archaeological remains of a beacon suggested to me that these two locales were used to communicate across the valley, Almscliffe also being in sight of the Grey Stone at Harewood, where cup and ring markings indicate Bronze age settlements nearby.

Touching on the archaeology, the Chevin has many prehistoric remains to see, including a roman road, cup and ring marked rocks and a standing stone known as the Bull stone. Further down the hill are remains of an Iron age settlement, more local standing stones are recorded in recent memory but are lost to the passing of time.

So fitting that we dance upon the Chevin on May Day, a place where our most ancient ancestors would have congregated on such auspicious days to ask for light in the coming months.

And the sun came up, and I couldn't help but feel proud of us - for even if we didn't personally raise the sun for all to see on the morning following the rainiest April in a 100 years, we still danced upon a hallowed hill that has meant something special to people for over 5,000 years, on Beltane.  

We'd be damn fools if we didn't. 

Mirror of Elicona

The Mirror of Elicona

I feel very honored to be one of the dedicate-ees of this beautiful work by Phil Legard - The Mirror of Elicona. Published by Hadean Press, it is a magical work relating to poetry, psychogeography, magic and romance.

Accompanying audio will be published on the Larkfall website soon!

West Kennett

A contrast to the wind and rain-lashed stones down the hill at Avebury, West Kennett long barrow was tangibly warm, quiet and calm. The hill it lies upon looks over the pregnant belly of Silbury Hill across to windmill hill with its neolithic enclosure and perfect bell barrows. I felt the slight unease of entering chambers already inhabited, the dark spaces to the north and south seemingly full of unseen figures, but the overwhelming calm of the place is beautiful especially set against the extremes of midwinter weather. We reached the tomb at midday although the skies seemed to be darkening already.

It brought back instantly the experience of stumbling along a cliff side to reach Barclodiad y Gawres in Anglesey in a torrential rain storm, each step a struggle until we reached the entrance and became muffled from the howling of the wind, safe from the rain, warm and safe with the ancestors. The positions of both passage graves seems designed to amplify the womb-like effect of climbing back into the earth, the uphill struggle we all face before death washes over us.

We had formed vowel chants (along with two of our dearest friends, S+S) with magical intent in preparation for a performance at the John Hansard gallery in Southampton some days prior to our visit to Avebury. The few consonants included invoked the gods of places sacred to us, although our dedication placed them a long way from their respective shrines.

                                     

Xenis Emputae Travelling Band - West Kennet Long Barrow Vocal Improv by larkfall

The echoing acoustics of the artificial cave, along with the low quality of my smartphone recording make this a very rough listen!

RAF Bempton

The Aghori see everything in world as created by Shiva and therefore as beautiful, whether it be flowers, shit, the living or dead human body or any other creation that exists. They live in on the outskirts of society beside the Ganges river in the charnel fields and partake in all that is forbidden in conventional Hindu culture. I became interested in their practices in relation to the spaces we consider taboo or frightening, such as derelict buildings, sites of murders or atrocity and ritual spaces. The female Aghori in this clip laughs when she tells the interviewer that some of the dead bodies which she consumes during cannibalistic rituals get up and attack her. To face the unheimlich with humor, to seek out the frightening and to understand why it was fearful to me became a motif in my personal activities for a time.





When we lose everything of worth to us then we start to realise the beauty in things we were formerly ignorant of, the world becomes born again and bears fruit of which we never could have imagined. To say we only have one life is a fallacy, we live many lives which run concurrent with each other, lives of imagined pasts, futures, dreams and after-lives.  James Hillman suggests in Dream and the Underworld  that 'the scene in a dream' is a metaphorical version of waking life and 'those players of yesterday have now deepened and entered my soul'. My name in Anglo-Saxon would be Twyla or twilight, perhaps I am destined in some way to seek the space between.





Seeking out the literal liminal spaces between the overworld and the underworld can be a tumultuous pastime. I recall the day we walked through the metaphorically loaded blast proof doors of RAF Bempton's cold war bunker, designed much more to keep something terrible in than to hold the nuclear war out so it seemed.




To enter the depths we were to brave asbestos particles which prompted us to wear flimsy paper suits and P3 filter masks to keep mesothelioma at bay. The closeness to death and destruction was hellishly portrayed around us in painted murals, horned demons fornicating with buxom women, hermaphroditic pornography from hell - supposedly painted by a satanic coven in the 1970s who, it is said, squatted the then moth-balled bunker before being evicted.



 The floor did not exist, we trod thin planks of wood over burnt and rotten cable ducts, the huge space where the generator lay was a gaping black hole.




We spent probably less than an hour underground, slowly moving from blackened room to room, the blackness made any details bar the graffiti hard to distinguish and the conditions seemed so treacherous that it was hard not to panic.



As we drove back from the coast homewards we stopped in York for some food. I got a phone call from my Ma telling me that my estranged father had collapsed at home with a ruptured aorta and had lain for many hours alone, unable to reach help until it arrived completely by chance. His chances of surviving the emergency surgery he was about to undergo were very slim, less than 10% at least. It threw our exploration of the imagined underworld into strange perspective, as if I had been acting out some kind of journey into Hades to retrieve him with no knowledge of his real life peril.



The shaft of daylight that had shone down from the disintegrated emergency exit had seemed most surreal of all, having stepped down through the decoy bungalow, down the stairs, down a long sloping tunnel, through an antechamber and past the huge armored doors, the many seals upon this chamber seemed to separate us from the world almost absolutely but then the furthest point into its depths threw on us a mocking beam of bright sunshine, illuminating the rusted skeletal remains of a staircase.

A few years after our visit, a young man vanished after apparently visiting the bunker. His disappearance and apparent death has been linked to an 'occult' (great unintentional pun!) by his parents, as if the paintings and history of the walls of the bunker could have come alive and claimed him. Whether or not the bunker was inhabited by satanists or witches seems debatable, I have seen no proof but the myth alone seems to hold enough power to make it truth in people's minds.


What do we seek from communication with the dead? What secrets do they hold for us? The lives and character of people we know does not cease from the last point we spoke to them, even in dreams they evolve and change, reacting and commenting on new situations in surprising and enlightening ways. To communicate past the point of passing shows that consciousness does not end at that point and our awareness of the afterlife can awaken from slumber, those who are no longer with us return again.

The things I came to fear most were the stifling negative attitudes to a lifestyle free from conventional taboos, often from those who fetishised the notion of abandoning them themselves. My own inelegant attempts to live my life in a more honest way were readily abused by individuals who wanted to gain power over me, since it seemed to them I must be weak-minded and mentally ill for wanting to invoke change at all. I was all too eager to accept counsel from an image of enlightenment with no practice to back it up. I am thankful for the circle of true friends I have that saved me from myself on so many an occasion, as well as mourning deeply for those that I lost, though they live on in so many ways.

Seamouse 2 - Tricks of the memory

Thanks to Ian Cockburn for curating the second issue of Seamouse. The first was beautiful and I was very happy to collaborate on a short piece with Phil Legard for the second relating to dreams, love and landscape. Buy at the Thought Bubble comic festival in Leeds next weekend!

Avebury Omphalos

I'm walking a labyrinth that returns to Avebury. People die from waking view but live here in dreams. It feels like somewhere that you have to go back, I'd love to live here one day.

Beating the Bounds, Psychogeography in Leeds

The designated public places order set around Leeds city centre almost seems like a challenge, especially when you get to hit Bridgewater place with a stick.

We started on Woodhouse Street, where a tram depot would have been placed - if Leeds City Council ever actually followed through with their promises.

Through the LGI back road to the Clarendon wing and Joseph's Well is a veritable gold mine of quirky, kitsch architecture and strange geometric gratings.

Pretty reflections looking like some kind of Sumerian script from the gods.

Me and a friend shared dislike and bad experiences of the Clarendon Wing and its hopeless looking play area overlooking the underpass, with some kind of ventilation shaft filtering the forlorn toys.

We adopted an abandoned shopping trolley, which added a 'trashhumpers' quality to the rest of the proceedings for me.

The space where the international swimming pool was, now leveled and bleak. The walk took us through many empty spaces.

We arrived at Bridgewater Place, silent tower of Babel.

and we kind of scuttled away to find a bus after that, leaving four brave souls to finish the circuit.

Mary Bateman

Image by Simon Bradley

The Yorkshire Witch is on display at the Thackray Medical Museum in Leeds. Her incomplete skeleton, held together by sinew and flakes of mummified flesh seems to me to serve little purpose as an educational tool for children, more a spectacle of the kind supposedly abandoned along with side show 'freaks' and public hangings. A woman, who was nursing a baby at her breast in the hours before her execution at York, who has paid a far greater price than just death; not only was her corpse pickled, displayed, flayed and sold as strips for charms but now she is dealt further indignity as a permanent exhibit, an item of morbid curiosity.

I feel haunted by viewing her remains, I see little benefit in viewing them, more so an uncomfortable understanding that her status as 'cunning woman' alone resulted in the series of post-mortem assaults. She lived on Timble Bridge, near Leed's Parish Church, under which flowed the beck I see daily. I think of her every time I see the beck, and have traversed through the underground culverts to view the now-subterranean bridge, where once she too must have daily seen the water pass by.

I wish to free the Yorkshire Witch. I hope that within the next two weeks I can implore Leeds University, who own her remains, to give Mary Bateman's bones a burial. The 202nd anniversary of her execution falls on Sunday 20th of March 2011, the vernal equinox. I will write a letter, and post up a petition in the next few days to send to both the museum and the university.