Working With What Comes To Hand

Late addition not on audio: Rough week. My beloved friend the musician Glen Hansard was killed coming off his motorbike early Weds morning, outskirts of Dublin. I loved the fella. In the below post I talk about going to Samos to teach myth but that’s not happening now. I’m going to get myself to Ireland and grieve with my friends.

It’s like being right in the middle of the most brilliant conversation and your mate just nips out for a second. You have to sit in the dark for a long time before you realise they’re not coming back.

I wrote ‘Working With What Comes To Hand’ as a title for this week’s piece with no way of knowing what was hours away from happening. And now I find myself doing just that. No doubt I’ll have more to say about that next week. He was a loyal member of the Beasts & Vines parish.

Tales of our previous adventures can be found here:

You may want to give this a listen: knowing him, this, 100%, is what he would wish for your life.

Tension & Release in a Craic-less Odyssey

So I saw The Odyssey and it wasn’t for me, simple as that. Please don’t take this personally. It clearly delivered for lots of folk in the enormous cinema. I found it visually sumptuous but I couldn’t feel a jot of any kind of emotion. I don’t bemoan Nolan his editing choices, all storytellers have to do that.

Making something that feels even vaguely fresh out of such a well-known story is a Herculean (deliberate choice of words) task, and I really loved the lack of CGI. Fabulous soundscape as well. But I do like a decent script and the continual election of big visual event over characterful intimacy just wore me out in the end. His cuts were surprising, but I was open to seeing it in a new way.

But the ‘new way’ just didn’t have enough gods, romp, grief, poetry and general dream-time to keep me in any way hooked.

If you’re changing the story to that degree, why not really open up the characters of Circe, Calypso, etc.? There’s been astute reviews that go through this in forensic detail so I don’t have to. There was no craic in it (rather like what they did with The Green Knight) and I promise you there’s plenty of pluck and yes, humour, in Homer’s poem. When the film begins with the blurb: a ‘time of apparent magic’ it all started to feel a little cold blooded. Shamanic energy replaced by Vegas theatre tricks.

I’m not sure why everyone’s so deathly afraid of humour in these mythic remakes, it’s an essential staple for deepening into the storyteller’s world. When you laugh your body begins to relax, and that can open you for greater pathos.

Tension and release lads, come on. Rule No 1.

There was no appearance of Hermes on the path to Circe’s hut (without which Odysseus would also have become a piggy wiggy like the rest), all furtive appearances of the gods seem to be Matt Damon basically wrestling his conscience. ‘Gods beware, you are decorations in their poems,’ says Friedrich Hölderlin. They were barely that. English actors using American accents in a film about Ancient Greece was also a little teeth-whistling.

Anyway, enough bah humbug.

If it spoke to you, then that’s what matters.

I’m flying to Samos tomorrow, so I'm in a Hellenic frame of mind right. I’m re-reading Hesiod’s Theogony to give a little creation-story magic before a two-night telling of Psyche & Eros, right down by the sea waves. You may remember the story from a couple of months ago (Psyche & Eros: Spirit, Soul and the Business of Love).

I’ve been re-reading the huge book of Bible stories I’m working on, and it needs to rest for a minute. As usual you realise the last four pages of the book are probably what need to be the first four pages.

I was up in the woods yesterday, scoping out basecamp for the Peregrine Sit – the four-day-and-night fast in a Dartmoor forest. Likely there’s one or two of you reading this who’ll be joining me up there. Bring some electrolytes! And a camping seat if you can. For wider readers, don’t worry they have an extensive list to check. I’m excited to be back out there under the oaks.

As part of the documentary that so many of you have supported – God bless you and keep you forever – we did a little filming. I had an in-depth conversation with my brother Tom, and then the guides David Stevenson and Lucy Cooper took him up to where we hold our basecamp. It was great to have a very loved family member in this most profound of landscapes.

It’s a little cooler but the heat has basically been banging on for about ten weeks, and England’s becoming a dust bowl. I returned from Womad and the Wildfires festivals, and the hire car looked like it had been auditioning for Mad Max. Unless it’s especially significant this is likely my last summer talking at festivals, it’s hard on my tinnitus, and takes way too much time from the desk.

Ok, onwards.

I thought I’d tell a lesser-known story from the Bible today. It’s short and odd and a little violent, just so I've flagged it. It concerns two women, Deborah and Jael.