Why a dance?

The Owl and Eagle make a Gate

 

Last Saturday we had the first performance of our Dancing the World into Being outside in a landscape overlooking both the Black Mountains and the Brecon Beacons.  You can see some more pics here.  The response of audience was warm; in some cases people seemed deeply affected by the dance and its music (a capella choir,squeeze-box, gongs and percussion).  One old friend said to me that she felt the dance spoke to her body and I was pleased about that, because that’s what we intended.

Every since I started teaching beginners’ T’ai Chi, I have been aware of how tense most people are, how armoured our bodies are, and how long it can take for people to relax, breathe and move without strain.  It may be that our compulsive digital activities are closing down our physical and sensory awareness – after all, so far there’s no smell, touch or taste on the internet.  We can get trapped in a world made of words and images, imprisoned by a circle of angry flaming, conflicting interpretations of reality, competing views of what reality is.  I can’t be the only one who can finish an internet session feeling tense and stirred up – not in a good way.

Thank God for music, poetry, gardening, films and novels which know how to lead us out of this trap.   And dance, I believe, both doing it and watching it, is the means par excellence of bypassing the sinister sentinels of the linear-verbal world and offering us a way to vivid, sensory and emotional experience,

Dance has a strong connection with mathematics – many folk dances weave complex knots and patterns, play with twos, threes, sixes, sevens, eights, here’s a diagram from our choreographer, Gillian’s notes.

Shamrock pattern from our dance

 

These can all be related to sacred geometry, which is one of the ways I discovered years ago to lift my mind up a level into a liberating (though sometimes scary) and more abstract realm.

This realm is a simpler place than our crabby catastrophising world, and it points the way to understanding how something can come from nothing (some scientists and mathematicians can take us there too, as long as their agenda is not too narrow).  If you are interested in this kind of thing, have a look at these sites – Sareoso and Singinghead.

But for me, the biggest virtues of mounting a dance performance like ours is that it hints at a real mystery – how something comes from nothing – via a creation myth buried in an ancient Welsh tale, the story ‘Math son of Mathonwy’ from the Mabinogion.  Our dance is intended to take you back into a mode of being and perceiving which our ancestors knew.  Certainly they could not afford to be cut off from their bodies and their senses.

These ancient tales are a gift from them to us, but the rub is that the stories from the Mabinogion  can’t be appreciated properly and understood by the linear-logical mind.  They need to be acted out, danced, played with, listened to in English and in Welsh.  And then, just maybe we can hear our ancestors whispering to us, dancing with us.  And I think we need to listen, we need to join in.

There’s another chance to see our dance at the Globe in Hay on Saturday October 21.  details here.

 

Why do children believe in magic while adults don’t?

Wayland does magic with the boys

Yesterday Wayland and I did our Mabinogion workshop again, at a rural primary school near Hay in Wales.  We tell the children we have been sent by the Children of Don from our hiding place in the hollow hills to show them what real magic is.  It’s not a lie: Wayland and I share an obsession with a particular story from this collection of old British tales, written down in Welsh in the middle ages.  We do the workshop in English with some Welsh thrown in, especially for spells and charms. The children get to curse and bless, find out about the four magical ‘Hallows’ which the Plant Don brought to Britain and then use them.  They get to participate in an act of magical creation: making a woman of flowers from nothing, to make music, dance, become ‘servants of the invisible’.  They charm the boy-turned-eagle down the tree and turn him back into a human,

Every time we do the workshops, the children (9,10 years old) tell us how much they loved it, and we are always impressed by their understanding of what magic really is, an understanding which disappears in ninety percent of adults.  I always come away feeling inspired and enthused by the kids and their terrific boldness and brio – and puzzled and sorry that most of us lose these qualities as we grow up.

About 25 years ago I was at a party in London, a party I didn’t really want to be at, and I wandered out into the garden with my glass, to waste some time before I could politely leave.  At the bottom of the garden was a fountain and a boy of about ten, idly kicking a deflated football at it.  United in boredom, we started to chat and the boy poured out his heart to me: his mum and dad were separated and he had just been living for a while with his dad in Germany.  Did he mind?  Not too much, but there was one thing upsetting him: his dad was a scientist while this lad was a lover of magic, magic in all its forms, from stage magic to stories and ‘the real thing’.  His dad had told him he was now of an age when he had to choose: science or magic, he couldn’t have both.  He didn’t know which to choose.

‘Listen, I said, I promise you don’t have to choose!  In fact it’s very important that you don’t, that you become one of those people, like me, who goes on believing in magic when they grow up.  You can still do science if you want, no problem.’ ‘Really?’ he asked.  ‘Yes!’ I said ‘and anyway magic isn’t what your dad thinks it is.  You’ll find out that as you grow up, as long as you don’t let go of it’.

When I think of that boy now, as I often do, a man in his thirties, I wonder whether he did stay loyal to magic, or whether he was sucked into the orthodoxies of our scientistic world.

By now you’re asking: what is ‘real’ magic  then?  This is tricky.  In the workshop we say we can’t put it into words because that would destroy it, that we can only show it.

So…I knew a man once who practised the most refined and subtle forms of magic.  He understood the building blocks of creation.  I think he was ‘enlightened’ if that means anything to you. I spent many hours in his kitchen talking to him and being shown strange models and diagrams.  I need to add that this man was utterly unpretentious and had no wish for power or riches.  He was a man of wisdom and knowledge – and magic.

Here is one of the things which he knew how to do: he could slip things into your being which you neither grasped nor understood at the time, but later on, maybe much later on, they would bob up to the surface and you would suddenly find a vista of new perceptions opening up.  Now that he is some years dead, I find there is a quiet place outside of time where many of the moments he created still live and have their numinous power to shift me onwards and outwards – or inwards.

For me this is the real magic, subtle, infinitely skilful, as precise as any science, based on an understanding that forcefulness is never the way, that creation and expansion happen when this invisible ‘third force’ is seen and allowed to manifest.  What is the ‘third force?’  Some would call it consciousness, some the ‘Holy Spirit’, some wouldn’t want to name it.

When the dancers drop their veils and little Blodeuwedd emerges in her flowered wedding dress; when her betrayed partner Lleu, in his feathered cloak, takes the last step down from the oak tree, to be turned by love into a boy again, when, at the end of the session, the ten years olds are clustering round us wanting to talk in Welsh, the old tongue… then we see what magic is and does.  And how it brings us home to what we really are.

Lleu, the shining one, in the oak tree

 

To find out about a course in real magic, go to this Facebook Page or follow @enchantersweb on Twitter

Calling for Dancers for The Dancing Floor

 

The dancing floor in our projected film

We are about to start working on the special dance which is the climax of The Dancing Floor.  This dance is crucial to the film – it embodies the mysteries which the rest of the film has been hinting at – and yet it will be performed by ordinary people, dance newbies or amateurs, who will help with devising the details, developing it and rehearsing it –on and on – until it works.  Luckily I have found a local choreographer, Gillian Hipp, to partner with on the project.

The dance includes a wild horde of children being the Four Elements, a shamanic animal dance with masks which morphs into a vigorous Morris, then there are the courtly dances of the gods and goddesses as they make the worlds and the poignant dance of the sacred couple, the Owl and the Hawk.  The symbolism is from the fourth branch of the Mabinogion (which is a creation myth).  Each phase of the dance has a completely different quality and should have a specific effect on the audience so that they go on the journey of creation and re-union with the dancers.

Horn-dancers from a while ago.

This has made me think about what sacred dance really is and does and what sacred dancing I have done in my life.  I found three main strands: Tai Chi, Gurdjieff’s dances and the whirling dances of the Mevlevi dervishes.  In each case,  watching each of these in action, I was aware of a powerful and unusual effect on me.  With Tai Chi it was a sense of weightless flow and ease which was irresistible, like hearing for the first time a language which seems familiar though you cannot speak it.  (A bit like the chattering of the swifts outside today, ‘don’t fly through that door, it is a prison and a fierce orange cat guards it, he will eat you…’)  With a certain Gurdjieff dance it was an upswelling of strong emotion, both  exquisite and painful, which had been long half-buried, and with the whirling it was, simply, a sense of being in the presence of God.  The whirling I saw at the tekke of the Halveti dervishes in Istanbul, when their sheikh was a very holy man, and I will never forget that it was this practice from mystical Islam which literally opened the gates of heaven for me.

I learnt the whirling myself in a church hall in Manchester, taught by my friend Dick who had learnt it from someone who’d learnt it from the Sufis.  We approached it with proper respect and once we had got over feeling nauseous, were able to whirl together, floating round each other as we moved, for half an hour at a time.  At the end I felt as if I had been drenched in crystal water, and had woken up a different, much enlivened being.  I also noticed, as I sipped my orange juice, that I felt very well disposed towards all present, my heart warmed up and open to the world.

A Gurdjieff dance based on the enneagram

The Dancing Floor dance also springs out of a long study of sacred geometry and principle. When I first tried to get my head round this metaphysical stuff about the origin of the worlds, I would either fall asleep or get angry.  I just couldn’t get it.  It felt like trying to scale a sheer cliff with no handholds.  Then I saw that there were other ways of scaling cliffs and my mind started to take some short flights, which eventually made me realise that we can understand a lot more than we think we can – just not with the front brain.  The whole being, the whole body needs to get involved.

I realised that movements, gestures and rhythms which map or limn these abstract principles have a kind of subtle power, which tweaks and shifts your normal consciousness, takes you to different places, and this is why sacred dance can have such a strong effect.  You can see traces of these patterns in much folk dancing.  Maybe that’s why we find (some of it) so compelling?

The ‘dancing floor’ pattern we show in the film is a way of  expressing the way something comes out of nothing, which our normal rational minds cannot ‘get’.  But deeper down there is something in us all which does get it and which knows the truth – and I believe dance is one of the best ways to activate this part, whether you perform it or simply watch it.

So, if you live in south Wales or borders (I am between Hay and Brecon) and would like to get involved in working on this dance, please get in touch at dancingfloorfilm@gmail.com.

 

 

The Shaman and the Psychiatrist: what is real magic?

Female shaman in Tuva, Siberia.  Photo by Cherry Gilchrist

This true story comes from an academic friend who specialises in shamanism.  During the harshest Soviet years there was a push to exterminate shamanism in Siberia.  Shamans were imprisoned or executed.  Their ‘bundles’ of head-dress, robe and drums were destroyed, to stop them passing on their power to their descendants.  One such descendant was a woman in her fifties who had become a psychiatrist and worked in a hospital.  Her father had been wiped out in the bad old days.

One day two men came to her door and passed over to her a bulky package.  They told her that her father had made a second ‘bundle’ before he was arrested and asked them to hide it until conditions improved.  Then they were to pass it on to her.

She unwrapped the bundle, put on the robes and head-dress, took up the drum – and danced and sang the song of power.  Her father’s knowledge flowed into her and she became a shaman too.  I have seen a video of her dancing.  I know, such things can be faked, but this was moving and convincing to me,

It’s a resonant story about how valuable traditions can be saved and passed on and it is one the main inspirations behind The Dancing Floor film.  I wondered if it could happen to a psychiatrist here in the UK, who had been brought up to practise rational science-based psychiatry.  How would her father (in this case uncle) pass on his knowledge after his death?  Would she fight against the call?  I felt this should not be presented as a simplistic science-versus-faith battle – it is something much more interesting about the battle between current orthodoxy and a much, much bigger view of the world and its possibilities, which includes magic, science, mystery, intellect and everything else; which doesn’t need or want to exclude any creative way of viewing reality.  The film would ask the question: what is ‘real’ magic?

Young Sita (Isha Gurung)  in The Dancing Floor: childhood illumination is forgotten when she grows up

 

And that’s a question which Sally Pomme Clayton will be asking when she performs The Magician’s Apprentice at my chapel on May 21.   If you think about that question too, come along – contact me to book a place.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Davie Bowie and the Cauldron of Regeneration

When that fabulous shape-shifter David Bowie died I was curious to see the videos he had done to accompany the release of his album ‘Dark Star’. If you have not seen them, take a look here. The imagery is enigmatic and visceral: the ritual shaking of the buxom women in their summer dresses, the crucified scarecrows with their rotting faces, his own withered hands, the weird black costume with silver stripes (lines of coke?) and his final disappearance into the wardrobe at the end of ‘Lazarus’. These images haunted me, particularly one night as I lay awake worrying about a friend who had just had a life-or-death operation. To me the images were all about a terrible fear of death. For me there was no sense of acceptance or equanimity about dying in these videos. Fair play to Mr B for his courage in exploring and exposing this terror via these images, but I needed to get them out of my head if I was to get to sleep.

I got up and found that my friend was fine, up fiddling on his computer. Reassured I slept and woke to make a trip to the British Museum to see the Celts exhibition. I was not feeling too good myself, being dogged by a virus which was draining my energy – and then London is a shock to us country dwellers and the BM staff were grumpy and unhelpful. Or was it me out of step with ‘life’ having spent the night thinking about death?

Anyway I was finally admitted, still feeling fragile and bad-tempered about the crowds who were obstructing my view of the beautiful Celtic artefacts. But then I got to the Gundestrup Cauldron.

Abruptly it all changed. As I clambered up the steps to look inside and saw the images face to face a wave of joy swept through my body: the horned god clutching his snake!

the silver warriors marching towards the cauldron to be reborn!

And at the bottom the  sinuous victory of the woman warrior over the Death-Bull with her three dogs (I can’t find a decent pic of that).  I wanted to cry and laugh. There was no reason for despair! This was the cauldron of regeneration itself, famed in our old stories! It was there to tell us there is nothing dies, everything goes into the cauldron and is reborn in a new form.

Later, back in Wales, I lay on my sofa staring at the pictures in the BM book (worth buying). I wanted to investigate how the cauldron had had such a galvanising and cheering effect on me – but I didn’t want to kill the joy and physical exhilaration I could still feel coursing through my body with analysis. There is plenty of that around, no more needed.

Here’s what I experienced looking at the horned god plate, here’s what I felt in my own body: the antlers connect me with the world around, melting my usual boundaries and joining me to the beasts and plants; the snake connects me to the life force, the chi, of the natural world, the torc anchors me and makes me feel safe. Sitting in the dancing half-lotus I sense the kick of the kundalini energy rising through my body.  I feel a blissful pulsing power flooding through me… I find myself letting go of thought, of ideas of who I am and what I want, I want to dissolve into the cauldron, to just let go … in the faith that all will be well and all manner of things will be well.

This is the quality I found missing in Bowie’s videos – but which I hope he did experience when he died. The Tibetan Buddhists say we feel this intense wave of bliss when we die, when we let go of the painful and constricting coat of flesh we have worn for our lifetimes here. The great mystery rituals like the one enacted at Eleusis in ancient Greece freed the initiates from fear of death. The great silver cauldron of regeneration, made by men and women long ago who knew the truth about life and death, has risen up from its bog in Denmark is delivering the same message. It’s only on show at the BM till 31 January, then it moves to Edinburgh. You have GOT to see it: it has come through time and space to bring back what is lost.

Solstice Dancing for the Dancing Floor

Driving rain, a battering ram of a wind, red mud, sodden sheep and the common waiting balefully for someone to park on it to swallow them up – I feared the weather would keep people away from the Dancing Floor Supporters’ Solstice Gathering.  But no, they came from Manchester, London, Llangollen, KIngton, Brecon and Hay (Jo biked from Hay)…

…they took their boots and wellies off, hung their dripping coats up and got stuck in.  There was poetry, declamation, stories (mainly in English but little bit of Welsh) plus the chance to try out a bit of the secret dance from The Dancing Floor film.

BTW the cup which you see Clarissa holding in the second shot of the clip was given us by the late Cindy Davies in Orkney in 1998, when all this started.  To find out more you need to read my book Becoming the Enchanter which tells about what happened on that fateful trip.

Ruth and Wayland

Theo loads video while I wait

For me the solstice is a time to rest, play and immerse yourself in stories and music, to drop all your usual preoccupations and sink into the soft dark.  So that’s what I have been doing, helped by a spasming back (triggered by a virus) which meant I had to lie immobile on the sofa all of one day watching the wonderful Transparent on VoD.

Wishing you all should find the riches of the dark time and looking forward to the new phase of the Dancing Floor film campaign  in 2016.

 

 

An early taster for The Dancing Floor

This morning I came across a taster which I made three years ago for The Dancing Floor, then called The House of the Waters. I edited it with Windows Moviemaker software on my PC, so it’s a bit rough but it does give a strong sense of the film, and the mystery underlying it. It also has a strong ‘solstice’ feel to it and the Mabinogion connection is clearer than in the pilot. Gill and Dylan’s music is on there and sounds as good as ever. You can see it here

It shows how the ideas behind the film have developed over time – and no doubt will continue to develop.  Meanwhile we have been busy making contacts and thinking about the next phase – getting some serious finance for this microbudget film.  But we needed a break to allow the darkness of the solstice to seep into body, mind and spirit and invigorate us anew for the next push, so more news in the New Year!

Meanwhile, enjoy the soft solstice dark, soft and damp solstice dark this year.   And do take a look at the old taster – it’s only two minutes long, and share if you can.  We need to create an audience for the feature film, and your help and support is needed and appreciated.

Cinema is a magical art!

When I hit sixty I realised that if I wanted to make a feature film, I had better get going. I had wanted to do it since I was fifteen and first started to make films, with an 8mm camera you had to wind up, at the same time falling under the spell of the clever, rule-breaking ‘new wave’ movies of people like Jean Luc Godard, Alan Resnais and Chris Marker. But soon I got distracted by the excitements of a nice job at the BBC, making TV programmes and documentary films, and then, to complicate matters, I fell in with a group of seekers after truth, people investigating the meaning of life, and that became my main interest apart from work.

Charlton Heston as El Cid

But my passion for cinema still burned. It ignited when I saw El Cid with my brother on holiday in 1961. At the end of the film El Cid knows he is dying and asks to be tied onto his horse so that he can be seen to lead his men into battle, even after he dies. The emotional power of this scene knocked me out, aged 11. It took me into world of heroism and self-sacrifice which I had never met before. Since then I have always loved that feeling of sitting in the darkened cinema, watching the ads and trailers, waiting to be transported into a world of deep and strong emotion, a world realer than what we normally called the ‘real’ world.

Later I also started to enjoy the kind of films which shifted your perceptions in a shocking or door-opening way. One afternoon, skiving off work, I sat alone in the Curzon cinema in Mayfair and watched Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris. He is on a planet which manifests the material of your thoughts and memories, and at one point a woman comes crashing through the walls of the spacecraft.

It is his wife, who had committed suicide some time before. I will never forget the violent hot-cold thrill which ran through my body: I had witnessed something impossible and yet true! I wanted to do that too.

I believe that cinema is the great spiritual art form of our time, but I don’t think it needs to be the kind of out-there spirituality of – say – Terence Malick’s Tree of life (though I do love this film). A more subtle current favourite is Fill the Void by Rama Burshtein, a woman director who is also a Hassidic Jew.

Rama Burshtein, who looks delightfully unlike the stereotypical film director

I re-watched some of this the other day with cinematographer Oona Menges and both of us were entranced by the quality of light in it. Every scene, whether in a supermarket or a house or during a religious ceremony seems infused with a supernatural light, the Jewish mystics might call it the ‘Shekina’(the Glory of God, said to be feminine). There is a soft glow to the scenes showing the life of this small community which lights a beacon to the unfashionable virtue of devotion to your religion.

Still from ‘Fill the Void’

Now my film, The Dancing Floor, is not ‘religious’ in that way, but it is suffused with a particularly British or Celtic sensibility, one shared by many people, and perhaps best expressed for me by the phrase from a hymn ‘there is a green hill far away.’ When we sang this in school assembly, I always thought not of the ‘Holy Land’ but of Scotland where my family came from, and now I think of the green hills around my home in Wales. I think of the silence of remote, forgotten chapels, the calling of curlews at dead of night, the rumble of sheep or ponies thudding over the hills, all part of a kind of magical resonance where the landscape and its beings seem to reflect or echo something familiar and yet ‘other’, that otherworld which the Celtic bards wrote about, that place where our perceptions slide and slither into new shapes and forms. Or become formless.

Brechfa pool, where I live, does this in a particularly striking way: shrouded for days in fog, it can suddenly emerge shining like a new-minted shield on a 

crystalline morning, or on a frosty night when the Milky Way (called Caer Gwydion in the old days in Wales) floats above like a glittering banner, proclaiming that the external world is not separate from us, that we can interact with it in all sorts of hidden and mysterious ways, that we can change our forms and become each other, just as characters in the Mabinogion sometimes do!

For me this is all about the Celtic (Christian or Pagan, I don’t mind) sense of relationship with the creator (or the ‘creative’ if you prefer), a sense that we can participate in creation, and we can learn to do it skilfully and artfully rather than blindly or destructively. And cinema is the ‘magical art’ par excellence, hard to get right but devastatingly powerful when it hits the mark – think Avatar, think Laurence of Arabia, think 2001 – to name three which thrill more audiences than they repel.

In the Dancing Floor feature film, I would like to do for our native mystery tradition what Rama Burshtein did for orthodox Hassidic Judaism – make a window into a world which still protects and values something most of Western humanity has forgotten and dismissed, but which has the power to impart a direct knowledge of who we are, where we come from and how we might make the best of it while we are here. You could call it a mystery religion like the Eleusinian Mysteries of ancient Greece, to which all people, male or female, free or slave, were invited and which liberated its initiates from fear of death. That seems like something worth doing to me.

Our Dancing Floor crowdfunding campaign will be finishing in 3 days.  Have a look if you would like to contribute something and be part of this project.  And a big thanks to those who already have.

More on the Four Hallows and protecting the Soul of the Land

On Saturday I invited three friends for a meal. We are all singletons, independent thinkers certainly, and there were two men and two women. After we had scoffed curry and crumble and a certain amount of wine we had a jolly good argument, about the state of the world and the meaning of life. It was very animated and I for one was surprised at the intensity with which I expressed my point of view. Even Hilary, who thought she wasn’t arguing, noticed that the rest of us behaved as if she was.

Well, I reflected afterwards, that’s ‘fourness’ in action. It is a warrior number. Either the knights of the ‘Fours’ are occupied defending a cause, or fighting for it ; or they are fighting each other, albeit sometimes, as in our case, good-humouredly. Which is why fourness, and in particular the fourness of the 4 Hallows is so important as a foundation for democracy. When they (the two ‘female’ hallows are the cauldron and the stone, and the ‘male’ ones are the sword and the spear) are creating our foundation we can have vigorous debate and disagreement in the chamber of parliament, without our aggression building up into civil war. This is because the four are at the service of the principle of Sovereignty, in the case of Britain, that’s the Queen. The Queen is not allowed any executive power. She just is, emanating the spirit of our land on every state occasion.

If you have been to visit parliament in London, you will have noticed that the floor the lobby is based on the interaction of four fournesses.

So how is this foundation of fourness made and maintained? In myth you will find many interactions between the male and female Hallows and each one achieves a magical end: when Arthur pulls the sword (male) from the stone (female) we find the rightful king who will save the land. When Lleu (in the fourth story in the Mabinogion) throws his spear through a stone at his rival and murderer, Gronw, he restores the balance of justice. When the Pagans perform their ritual of plunging a blade into a cup, they are enacting the moment when the sacred marriage happens between male and female, between eternity and time, between spirit and matter. And behind this, is the moment which all the great creation myths are pointing at, when nothing becomes something!

At this extraordinary moment, which is not a moment at all because it is before time, Unity splits and 1 becomes 2 –though immediately this happens 3 also arises because of the relation between 1 and 2. This is why many creation myths feature brother and sister incest, because the ‘first two’ who must copulate to create the third – and all of creation, are intimately related. In the Mabinogion story there is a sense that the magical child, Lleu is the result of brother-sister incest between Arianrhod and Gwydion. And yet, if this ‘transgression’ does not happen, nothing will come into being. Necessity dictates that it does and so here we are, all of us. We have come out of nothing and yet we are something, an incredible paradox!

And how do we get from 3 to 4? This is the key move which turns the ineffable into the tangible, by laying down the principle of fourness. Somehow one of the three mirrors or doubles itself, so that it is the same and yet different. In the Four Hallows: the sword and the spear are two things and yet they are quite similar. Are they a reflections of this moment? And any rate the Hallows point to and yet protect the Great Secret: how the virgin bears a child/how something comes out of nothing. This is not something which we can understand with our normal mind, and yet we can grasp it, albeit fleetingly by studying sacred geometry, or by watching or participating in movements or dance, or listening to or acting out a story…

..or watching a film? That’s why I want to make The Dancing Floor feature film because I want to carry on the tradition of the Children of Don, the ‘race who brought magic to these islands’ and who gave the Four Hallows to Britain and Ireland. In this tradition the great truths about reality are embedded in symbol and story, so that they shall not be forgotten. In the midst of our crazy, image-proliferating, hyper-ventilating materialistic world, don’t you think that’s a good idea?

From the Dancing Floor pilot film

Myth, madness and the meaning of life

One of the big themes of The Dancing Floor, (which I have half-forgotten in the crowdfunding push) is mental illness. Both Sita, the heroine, and Cathy the young musician who stalks her, have ‘problems’ with it. Sita has had a psychotic breakdown in young adulthood which makes her terrified of exploring uncle Mal’s mysterious old tradition. Cathy is bipolar and treats her condition in a cavalier manner, taking drugs which may make her a better fiddler but push her into wilder highs and more grisly lows.

Sita (Renu Brindle) in the Dancing Floor pilot film

I have built these themes on experiences of my own. I have never been called ‘mentally ill’ but I have been in some very scary places – and, and this is the point, in some very illuminating and non-ordinary places – you could call them otherworldly. And this is without drugs, because I have never been able to tolerate drugs, and even had to give up the occasional spliff when I started meditating because it pushed me immediately into a psychotic nightmare place.

So I am pondering the relationship between exploration of non-ordinary reality and mental stability, especially in relation to old native traditions which encourage the taking on of archetypes, of gods, animals and elementals, the contacting of ancestors and a generally bold and imaginative interaction with ‘reality’. Is it actually good for us to do these things, to explore the experience of other beings and other worlds? Or is it too dangerous, in society wedded to ‘safety’ and a rigidly rational view of reality – except for in movies and games sanctioned by the powers that be?

In the film Sita has to travel back to a terrifying and ego-dissolving moment which she has tried to forget, before she can, with Cathy’s help, open up to the extraordinary possibilities offered by the native tradition. I wrote this section of the screenplay remembering my own moment of terror:

My mother had just died, my marriage was in a grim state and I was alone in the house of my beloved but demented dad in the middle of the night. I began to feel that I was guilty of a terrible crime (I was actually only guilty of normal idiocy), that I what I had done was endlessly destructive and unredeemable. I felt as if the core of me was exploding and shooting outwards into the void and very soon there would soon be nothing of me left. This was the inevitable punishment for my wickedness.

This was the most frightening experience of my life, worse than nearly drowning or dying on a snowy mountain. What did I do? I switched the radio on and listened to World Service while forcing myself to read a humorous book, and after a couple of hours it passed. We’d call it a panic attack, I suppose.

On the other hand I have stood on a beach in Orkney at dawn and felt arising in my own body, in my own mind, the knowledge of how something comes from nothing, the kind of knowledge you can never put into words but only treat as a jumping off point for a different view0 of reality, a new kind of exploration. I write much more about this in my book Becoming the Enchanter, but for now I just want to say that I feel it is important, for some of us at least, to know these kinds of things.

I am sure whoever wrote the fourth branch of the Mabinogion did and although there are respectable academics who agree with that, the whole point about this kind of knowledge is that it is not just intellectual – it reaches into the deepest, oldest and newest regions of our being and it changes our neural wiring. Myth is a carrier of it, because it deals in riddles which trick the mind into jumping to a new position. Once we know the ‘new position’, beyond the ratiocinating mind, many other things become possible and meditation is a way to do it safely without succumbing to mental instability or losing contact with our common reality.

In the Dancing Floor film Sita is helped through her crisis by Cathy, who is less afraid of the ‘otherworld’ than she is, and in the end they both find salvation through the re-invention of a sacred dance, that is through creativity.  The ‘Children of Don’, the family of gods who appear in the Mabinogion, were said to be ‘the race who brought magic to these islands’ (See previous post about the Four Hallows)  And magic is the understanding of the rules of creation, how something can come from nothing….which is is one reason that these mythic stories must be told and re-told in modern form. So that we don’t forget.To read more about the projected Dancing Floor feature film click here.