(Mis)Adventures In Mysticism

The word "mystic" gets thrown around a great deal. Or, at least, it does by me, when I'm in a certain mood. In the end, though, what does "mystic" really mean? Does anybody really know?

As it turns out, yes, Wikipedia knows. It's not like love, or culture, or Winnebago, it's not one of those words that defy sensible definition. Mysticism is a case in a world where so many things appear to be more "edge" than "case".

What's really weird about getting the meaning of mystical (at least the definition of the word) all tied down is that I didn't understand what it meant before. In a metaphysical realm so often rife with double meaning, vagueness and general goal-post moving matters of mysticism appear to be relatively straightforward.

As always, it doesn't take long before the deception provided by appearances becomes obvious. The bit we can be sure of is that mysticism is about making a connection to something. What the something is, ah, that's the rub.

If you're going to be glib about it then you can say it's about making a connection to God, capital-"G" and walk away ensconced in a cocoon of meaningless sophistry. Don't get me wrong I'll sink a pint with the bearded sky daddy any time he wants to get down to my local boozer, but the entire concept is as easy to forge a mystical connection with as any arbitrary non-god-like person on the planet.

There are plenty of non-god-like people already in the boozer, so why wait for bearded sky daddy to leave cloud mansion? They don't like him down the pub anyway, the management maintains burning bushes are a health and safety violation. Besides, his wallet is always "unfortunately" burned to a crisp in his lower branches.

The first question that springs to my mind in the matter of mysticism is "what do you mean by connection?" Say we're limbering up for "the big one" (whatever that turns out to be) so we decide to start small by making a connection to another human being. How do we do that?

If the goal is simply to speak to them then a simple "Hi" will suffice. Although the aspirant may feel the experience, if it is that, is on the underwhelming side. It has to be that "connecting" with someone is a deeper experience than "greeting" them. At this point, I can imagine many readers groping around to find a genital-themed experiment to try next.

Let's just leave that be. You can definitely get happy by slapping another person on the wobbly bits but are you "connecting" to them? A soup of mind-altering hormonal responses says yes. But good luck charming the infinite ineffable into the sack. The clue is in the name, the ineffable must, by default be un-eff-able. This whole business is like eating an entire chocolate trifle when you're hoping to gorge on chocolate cake. A trifle is not a cake, they both taste nice but once you're hungry again the craving for cake will resume.

So if we're not talking about talking with a person, and we're not talking about practicing dubious personal hygiene with a person, then how do you "connect" with them, in the mystical sense?

All of a sudden the scale of the problem becomes apparent. At least a person exists to be connected with. When it comes to the mystical experience the other end of the mystic telephone is connected to something we can't comprehend.

With mounting disappointment we realise, the mystic experience is about doing something that is ill-defined with something that you have no physical evidence even exists.

Did I mention that I wrote a novel? Did I further mention that the novel is out this week? (Oh, come on, you didn't expect to get off without the sales pitch, did you?) As it so happens and entirely coincidentally the revelations at the heart of the mystic experience are a crucial component of the antagonist's journey in that very novel. Crazy, ou quoi?

Of course, he gets it almost entirely wrong, he doesn't know what it is he is communing with. The wretched fool screws up the relationship and when the relationship entirely takes place in the metaphysical beyond, well... stars will fall if you follow my drift.

What is super-bizarre here is that I only realize that I wanted to talk about the pitfalls of frail humanity experimenting with the mystic experience right now. I wrote the novel a decade ago. It is possible to want to talk to your audience about something and not even know what that thing is.

There's a connection for you. The storyteller is trying to connect to the story reader through the medium of the story. The story, for its own part, comes from, somewhere, out there, beyond. Ask any author and they will tell you, they write down the story but they tend not to create it. At some point, the author is a "receiver" of the story from... from... where? Where in Hades does the story actually come from?

Sounds to me like the author, in that act of creating fiction is connecting to something vast and undefinable. Once they're connected like that they bring back messages. Like a broken Oracle the author is trying to communicate truth by spitting out thousands of lies. The art of writing is to pare down the lies and to tip the wink to the reader what they are so the reader can sift out a truth it would have been impossible to find were it not for the fiction.

It's not the only way to get there, but that definitely sounds like a mystic experience to me.

Early Encounters With The Horned God

I grew up in Wales and I read all the 2000AD I could lay my hands on, so Cernunnos was going to be an obvious gateway into the world of Celtic myth. The Horned God is a tricky one, for sure. He is the easiest way to understand that there's more to life than a binary categorization of things into good and evil.

It's a long way to get from one place to another, for sure, and through a tangled wood of myth-making, shadows and appropriated truths. I am just over forty years old so I was of an age to be reading children's literature in the early 80s. This was a long, long time before Wikipedia so, although I can send you straight to reasonable definitions of all the things I mention here, you have to understand this is a modern luxury.

I think my first encounter with the Horned God in any sensible shape is with the inclusion of the character Herne the Hunter in the 1984 adaptation of John Masefield's The Box of Delights.

Which, obviously I can now just show you via YouTube. As you can tell it's a bit of a head-bender, even now, adapting the transformation battle from the myth of Taliesin and adding a strange interlude into the flow of the plot of the story. Naturally this would lead to an inquiry about who the hell that Herne the Hunter guy was from any nine-year-old boy. The problem is that in 1984 the available adults around me had lost touch with the notion of the Horned God, and tended to view the world as a series of dualities.

The matter was further confused when I encountered Alan Garner's Bresingamen books, at the time there were two The Weirdstone of Bresingamen and The Moon of Gomrath. The 20th Century was a wild time for children's literature. I think a lot of stuff got past editors who might have questioned the completely insane trips through philosophy and mythology that occurred in these volumes because it was "for kids" and hence didn't need to be coherent and were allowed to be disturbing in a deep place where lives the soul of man because it had been trivialised. (Trivialised in the heads of the marketing bods at the publishing houses, the writers showed every signs of taking this stuff very seriously.)

The Moon of Gomrath introduced me to the Wild Hunt, which in some places was thought to be lead by Herne the Hunter. Somewhere along the line I got introduced to Pan from Greek Mythology as well. I remember asking my grandmother for some explanation of the Wild Hunt and she couldn't do much better than explain that it was a "third force" in the book beyond the forces of good and evil.

I think that's doing pretty well without going into the exact idea of expanding out from a Tolkien-esque allegory into a new space in which myth connects the human soul to the very well-spring of magic and creativity. Much apart from anything else I think those concepts are troublesome to me even now, let alone when I was nine and I think my grandmother, despite her love of weird fantasy fiction, would have thought that notion beyond the pale.

Right at this moment it seems obvious to me that as a budding writer of fantasy and horror, living in Wales from the age of 7 until I left at 20, that I would develop a fascination with the lore of the British Isles and, more specifically, the mushy corpus of "Celtic Mythology"*. One of the most fascinating things about the Celtic mythology specifically was that it served as an inspiration for authors like Garner but rarely was it adapted in the way that, for example, Roger Lancelyn Green wrote The Tales of Robin Hood. Robin Hood is a fascinating folk hero for different reasons, in that his story is believed to be tied down and defined; this is impossible. Green also wrote of King Arthur, a figure who edges into the Celtic realm and preserves this idea that his myth cannot be definitively captured or set down; this is true but it shouldn't stop us from trying, in fact in the struggle to attain an impossible definitive telling of a tale is the well from which all storytellers should draw.

At the time of experiencing this fascination, however, there were frequent times when I felt like I should just give up. It was immensely frustrating to read stories by people inspired by stories that they appeared to know when I couldn't find an "authoritative" version to separate out what was "real mythology" from the poetic licence of the author.  Now I know that they only had a little more knowledge than I did and a better idea of how to do research, they were riffing off the same anthropological sources as I was, so, in short they had more idea of how to look for stuff and so had a slightly broader experience of the topic. I didn't appreciate in my late childhood/early teens how slight the older author's advantage was.

As I grew older still I continued not to have the internet, I continued to experience a surrounding apathy for my own interest in these topics, but I did continue my interest due almost entirely to my love for the stories of Slaine in 2000AD

Next Time: My Adventures With Slaine and Celtic Mythology

*Celtic Mythologians tend to attach the lore to Ireland and then add Scotland as a footnote to that, get quite excited about also mentioning the Cornish and leave the Welsh out of it because they have the Mabinogion.

New Bridgetown - The Details

So, here's a kerfuffle and no mistake. As I previously made known I'm planning to bring back Bridgetown in as big a way as is humanly possible. The first new tale will be released on the 21st of June to the Bridgetown Blog.

What that actually means is somewhat down to yourselves, dear readers. I'll be honest, back in 2013 making sure that a new Tale was up every Sunday and commit to a full time job nearly killed me. So, although the tales will continue, it will be at the rate of two a month at present. If the situation changes there will be a further announcement.

The way for you to make that further announcement happen is to Subscribe to the Bridgetown Tales through Patreon. By becoming a subscriber you will unlock extra perks detailed on my Patreon page.

The original Bridgetown blog isn't going anywhere. In fact I'll be updating old stories with redrafts as they become available. Your financial support is appreciated but my continued efforts to produce new tales, and new ways for you to enjoy the tales, will continue regardless. The money just makes the plans bigger and brighter. Of course, it also brings the production of new content closer in the calendar.

If you are new to the Bridgetown Tales then you can read the first three books now. They're posted in blog format, so start with the oldest and work your way forward.

The Patreon subscription money that I make will not only support the ongoing life of the serial but also allow me to create even more new content. I have loads of plans for more cool stuff coming in the future and I will keep you in the loop here and on my facebook page.

Bridgetown's Coming Back

Let's keep it simple.

Back in 2013 I spent a year writing the Fairy Tale blog "Tales From Bridgetown". When it was done I was exhausted but enriched by my journey. Over the last few weeks I've been planning the next phase of the journey.

A further announcement will follow shortly giving more details. That's all for now.

In Other News

The Bridgetown Tales blog has surpassed 1000 hits this week! Which could provide some explanation of why I have not been posting so much. I have some video reviews to put up but while BT is going so well I want to ride the wave of enthusiasm. Besides which it will be November soon enough.

I have sufficient BT in the bank at this stage to ride out eight weeks of non-productiveness. It sounds a lot but in a couple of other busy weeks I managed to chomp through two of my buffer occasioning this mad scramble to get back on top of things. Running a serial is somewhat exhausting.

I am managing to cram in other activities such as reading books for review, reviewing Starfall for gotchas in preparation for beta and even little bits of other new work here and there. Bridgetown Tales has taken precedence in writing time, however, because it's fun to be writing a serial and also fun to be writing something which is proving to be somewhat popular.

Will try to post a bit more often. Have promised this before. Mean it this time. Honest.

The Campbell Effect

It's going to be an old-fashioned story post today mostly inspired by news that Neill Blomkamp isn't the only filmmaker from a country not traditionally known for its film industry who can attract the Hollywood buck with a showreel. The BBC carries an item about a Uruguayan filmmaker, Fede Alvarez, who has been courted by Hollywood after posting his SF short Ataque de Pánico! (Panic Attack!) on YouTube.

What's got my story senses tingling is not so much the news that the internet is putting people in touch with one another in ways hitherto unimaginable; after all Blomkamp's story tells us that. What's baking my noodle today is the number of people who've been complaining about its lack of a story.

It would be easy to rant about how this is a filmmaker's technical reel, not a story-based submission and in fact many have on YouTube and also on snarker's paradise Slashdot. However such a swift rebuttal fails to account for one important thing. People are showing, in a mystic, hippie, "wisdom of crowds" kind of a way that they're becoming fed up to the back teeth with hollow spectacle or narrative pretensions. They want the two combined.

The basic reason the two often fail to go hand in hand is that the more money goes into making a film the less experimental the producers feel like being with the story. Also, it seems, if a director is tagged as an "effects" director then a decent enough story and/or dialogue is seen as a bonus rather than something to shoot for.

The holy trinity of narrative, dialogue and effects rarely come together to the extent that when they do, such as in feature films like the original Matrix, it changes the way people even view the art of cinema. The best reviewers routinely look at the three together. Even movies like Pulp Fiction change the landscape because what I've lazily classified as "effects" really adds up to "visual language" which may or may not require the addition of special effects.

The sad fact is that examples of movies like Pulp Fiction and The Matrix are too few and far between and even then they always leave something to be desired. Some people find Pulp Fiction's dialogue to be too mannered. Some people find The Matrix's dialogue too much like a sophomoric philosophy essay. One thing seems to be agreed upon: Narrative can survive a lack of visual language or top notch dialogue for many but without coherent and satisfying narrative the other two elements are left out in the cold.

The big problem here for Hollywood is something I'm going to dub the Campbell effect, which I only wish was a reference to Bruce Campbell. The Campbell effect refers to anthropologist Joseph Campbell's Monomyth, the basis for all movies since Star Wars changed the game in the 70s.

What defeated conventional wisdom then was that Star Wars came across to someone with an ear for dialogue like a generic firework display, yet it captured the imagination of a generation. Harrison Ford was not alone in feeling Lucas could write dialogue, but it might be best not to subsequently attempt to perform that dialogue as speech spoken by a coherent sentient being. The surprise success of Star Wars in spite of hideous dialogue made Alec Guiness bitter and has been a constant irritation to writers of natural language from that day until The Phantom Menace nose-dived in the popular imagination and labelled the Star Wars saga a disappointment that had once held much promise.

So what's the issue? I don't know if I'm qualified to answer that question. Only two or three people on the planet have ever experienced my best narrative work to date and it isn't even finished yet. I think it's really good, not in an egotistical way, I'm surprised I wrote such a great narrative myself. I don't know that it's great, though. The writing needs more work and then, once finished I need people to read it and love it in order to know that I've hit the nail on the head.

So my opinion remains that of a consumer rather than a producer of content, and it is simply this: I think that in order to write an effective narrative you need more than a basic understanding of some 12 step plan for making "every great story ever written". What you need  is an emotional depth enough to recognise what it is that qualifies as a sympathetic fulfilment of each of those steps in turn.

It's not enough to produce the convincing facade of a battle with the guardian of the threshhold between the known and the unknown. You need to understand the emotional landscape of your protagonist enough to tease out the true antagonist who stands at the threshhold of their internal landscape. You need to make the encounter happen in terms pregnant with meaning for that character. You need to make all parts of the story parts of the story's protagonist on an essential level.

That's not an easy job. It's the product of years of writing practice and not stylistic practice at that, it's a discipline of structural practice that is often suggested but rarely attempted. It also requires that the teacher of such practices has the emotional depth to recognise when a writer has missed that most vital of points. A reader can be such a teacher, I am proud enough to believe that the Mrs is actually such a reader, such an analyst of story that she can home in on emotional dithering and falsity and hold it to account. She would never claim to be a writer but she is the nemesis of the lazy storyteller.

That's why, to be truthful, I am so proud of Starfall. It's because she loves it so and she loves very few narratives to that degree. Her analysis always has the ring of truth and yet, after the fact, always seems so obvious.

In other news Rage are losing ground to Robojoe in such an elegantly narrated fashion that it shows up the publicity stunt that this whole staged "battle" really has been.

Until Monday make mine a robot destroying Uruguay whilst consuming a delicious Sunday roast with all the trimmings, all, of course, smothered in delicious chocolate.

P.S. Tweeter  ElPared says Avatar "was like a koala crapped a rainbow in my brain!!!" best commentary evar!