Uncanny magazine issue 4.., p.16
Uncanny Magazine Issue 43, page 16
tray or aswarm, all throughther, in throngs; …
Only the beak-leaved boughs dragonish ‘ damask the tool-smooth bleak light; black,
Ever so black on it. Óur tale, O óur oracle! ‘
Of course, there’s Hopkins coming up all through the Cloudish underwood: “Margaret, are you grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving?” and “Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie.” He’s everywhere, echoed in my voice. His sprung rhythm is akin to the English vernacular, to nonsense, nursery rhymes, spells, playground chants, and charms. It marries with my love of older or eccentric Englishes, of dialects and canting tongues. When I’m writing fiction, I think all the time about the roots of words. I keep the OED open. I’d been reading William Barnes, who argued for the restoration of ungrafted Anglo-Saxon English: “starhoard” for “constellation,” “folkwain” for “omnibus.” Above all, my writing is instressed by Shakespeare, by the music of his spoken poetry. Do I imagine that I’m Shakespeare?—good grief, no! But the mother tongue of Cloud—my idiolect—is a variant of Early Modern English. Both Moonwise and Cloud & Ashes are written in what I’ve called dissolved iambic pentameter: prose with a crystalline structure, not quite poetry, but on the edge.
It’s why some people won’t read me; but it’s why some others do.
All of this came long before I had a story or characters, or even a known world: what I had was that conjunction of sibyls, patterns made by scattering, an archetypal wood, stone circles, and the sound of sprung rhythm and blank verse. Sound, for me, is a creative/constructive force, an instress: but it must have something to work on.
book crystal
I needed myth.
That’s not just a word for “old stories.” Myth teaches how a world works, how it came to be and holds together: its deep-down physics and cosmology.
“Ancient myths,” for me, are not the oldest in world time, but in memory: the archetypes I found in early childhood. What Hope Mirrlees called “the oldest songs in existence—sung by the Morning Stars when all the world was young.” I got the Scarecrow and the Witch from Oz, both from the books and from the movie, which I got to see once a year, in black and white. The transformation into color was imaginary.
George Macdonald gave me an enduring vision of the numinous: an old/young goddess at the heart/height of a labyrinth, to whom all threads return. Later, I would see her skein of silk in the ingathering of the Sibyl’s leaves.
P.L. Travers gave me Artemis, the Great Bear Mother, protectoress of the young. (“Is this a nursery or a bear pit?”) Mary Poppins was, it seems, the nanny to the Pleiades: I met Maia, skyclad, in her company, and we went shopping. She is why the cosmos—sun, moon, stars—always shows up in my own books.
In both writers, I found the numinous indwelling in the commonplace.
From a little-known fantasy, Edward Fenton’s The Nine Questions, I took away the image of an ever-winter, of the ruthless beauty of ice. (Narnia came later for me.) That book is a retelling of “Riddles Wisely Expounded,” so it’s also one of my earliest encounters with Child ballads. Another was the October poem in my Golden Almanac. Its wraggle-taggle travelling folk mingled in my mind with falling leaves: the month wears tatters. Even then, I was fascinated with the turning year, the procession of archetypal months. When October comes round again, it’s October reborn.
Come to think of it, I got those dryad children from “the scary book,” from Doré’s drawing of the wood of suicides in the Inferno.
So deep down in the archaeology of my mythopoetics I have: a vivid witch and scarecrow; goddesses who hold the world in keeping; and the turning year, on earth and in the heavens.
Ballads gave me stories.
In 1979, I heard the great interpeter and scholar of English folk songs, Martin Carthy, for the first time live. He sang “Willie’s Lady.” Child Ballad 6 tells of a witch who held her daughter-in-law in an endless labor, unable to give birth until the hidden spell is found and broken. From her childbed, Willie’s lady tells him how to trick his mother:
You must buy you a loaf of wax
And you must shape it as a babe that is to nurse
And you must make two eyes of glass…
Invited to the christening of this false child, the witch cries out,
Who was it who undid the nine witch knots
Braided in amongst this lady’s locks…?
So Willie does just that—undoes the charms—and so their child is born.
That song undid my knots.
After that, I heard Martin sing whenever I could, by himself and with his family, the tremendous Watersons (his wife Norma and her late, incomparable sister and brother, Lal and Mike). In full voice—O my goddesses!—they shook the earth. Above all and earth deep, I love their songs of ritual, the spells that turn the sky, that bring the seasons round: “we know by the moon, that we are not too soon…”
I knew rough magic when I heard it. They sang Cloud out of shadows.
And they changed its landscape. They’re a Yorkshire family: I had woods and they gave me moorlands, which I then explored. (The Riddlestones exist, those limestone pillars going down into abyss. I nearly sank into a ditch there, but that’s another long story.)
Not only the landscape but the language now was North-of-England. They gave me a vernacular. I needed that to counterweight my ecstasies, the playing-off of high and low. They de-etherealized my imagination.
The soundtrack for these books is all folk songs and ballads: Watersons and Carthys, Anne Briggs, the Young Tradition, June Tabor, and of course, the Silly Sisters. Certain Playford tunes call on the guisers. Lal and Mike Waterson’s song “The Scarecrow,” from their astonishing album, Bright Phoebus, lies at the very heart of Cloud & Ashes.
Later on, in Cloud & Ashes, the songs of ritual would become a system of rough magic. Wizards, like Stonehenge, aren’t my things. I stand in awe, but I can’t work with them. Cloudish magic is communal. Women all together conjure Ashes: drawing on their power, one among them must become her winter avatar. They turn the sky. Men play their parts in this working, crossing gender to do so. I’ve always loved the rude mechanicals in Shakespeare’s Dream; in Cloud, what the guisers re-enact is act, is living myth. If you look at the winter stars, their play is up there at the center of the heavens, wheeling round. And in Cloud & Ashes, what they play is Moonwise.
By about 1982 then, I had some inklings of Cloud: old and new, high and low, patterned and scattering.
I needed figures in my landscape.
Sylvie came first. She borrows certain aspects of a very old friend (since 1969): her singing voice, a few of her most vivid mannerisms, and two of her fascinations, antique glass marbles and playing cards.
(I should say that my friend is not Sylvie: we never invented a pack of cards, or wrote any stories together. Her spectacular imagination is quite unlike my own. For that matter, the Watersons aren’t wizards.)
Back in the thirties, “Sylvie’s” grandmother had hand-cut wooden jigsaw puzzles, and puzzles are one of my great fascinations. Of course they would be: I love making patterns out of chaos.
But then I found that all my multitudinous ideas were a heap of pieces in a battered cardboard box. I’d no notion of the picture—pictures? Just how many puzzles did I have here?
“Yet within the painted images were hidden shapes of wood, much loved: trees, stars, and crescent moons; a pair of spectacles amid the thatch; a teapot daubed with cloud; a child in the standing grass; a scythe; a ship caught in flowering thorn; a goose of reynard-colored sky; a cup in a hazel-copse; a sprawling hare, haunched with nightfall; a swan tumbled in a countrywoman’s apron; a hunchback with a bundle of wood, whose nose Thos had broken.”
What I could single out from the morass were these iconic pieces, around which scenes could coalesce, then clump, begin to come together as a book.
Was there an edge?
There is in portal fantasy. Look for a threshold, and maybe crossing it will change you.
My first idea about the plot was Orpheus and Eurydice: Sylvie is taken somehow, and Ariane (Ariadne/Arianrhod) goes after her to fetch her back. Also somehow.
So—poof—Sylvie disappeared, and I had no idea how to follow her. There’s a long section of the book where Ariane is trying to cast Cloud-finding spells and to break up ice-and-wood jams in the river, which simply shadows my frustrations as a novice writer, trying to go on.
Instead of a way forward with Silly Sisters (my working title), I got a return: a strange child lying in the snow. (A dear friend, a mystery reader, said, “Why didn’t she call the New Hampshire police?”) This alien creature seemed to be one of the dryad children of that earlier, rehearsal book.
Then I chanced upon an essay by Guy Davenport, “Joyce’s Forest of Symbols,” about the Irish alphabet, all trees. The letter for “blackthorn” is craobh. (To rhyme with “leave” or “grieve.”)
So I had Craobh.
In my reading of folklore, I had found Black Annis, an English version of the Cailleach Bheur, the blue-faced hag-creatrix-goddess of the Celtic winter sun. My Annis rules the Cloudish underworld. Isn’t that where the sun and stars of summer are imprisoned? Later on, in Cloud & Ashes, she would become an anti-Ceres, hunting down that runaway, her darkborn daughter, bearer of the spring. The tormenting witch and Willie’s Lady now would have a closer bond than in the song: mother and daughter.
But Moonwise is a book about sisters. Ariane and Sylvie. Mally and Annis.
Their dynamic—and a crucial part of my cosmology—is founded on a play on words, a hidden double meaning. In the OED, the oldest definition of cloud is “a mass of rock; a hill.” In Northern English, law means “a hill” or “a monumental tumulus of stones.” So the world and the underworld are one and not the same. Their ruling goddesses are dark and light of one moon, endlessly devouring and rebirthing one another. I had studied one sister; now the other came to me by chance.
I was at a concert. A singer, unexpectedly in glasses, was bending to consult a score, and cast shadows all over the walls and ceiling of the concert hall, of a great witch looming and scurrying.
Mally!
Malykorne
No reflection on her great original, who is beautiful and wise, but Malykorne, unlike her sister, chooses to appear as comic. Her crabby, bustling, patched persona is a cosmic joke. Numinous in commonplace.
The tinker drinks from Mally’s cup
By the way, the name “Malykorne” is borrowed from a Breton folk group. What else could she possibly be called?
After that, Moonwise took me seven years to write, working from minute handwritten notes to hand-typed pages. I hammered it all out on a manual, scene by scene by scene, retyping each leaf countless times until it felt done. For revisions of the whole, rather daringly, I got one of those egg-shaped Selectrics in duck’s-egg-blue.
SS: Can you tell me what it means in the Cloud universe to be “under Law?” Ashes spends half the year in the underworld, so under Law, under Cloud—but she’s also “under law” in another sense: required to fulfill a certain pattern, so that the sky may turn. When the women conjure her, and one of them represents her, they create a magic that feels ritualistic: it must happen.
GG: Indeed it must.
Ashes, I think, cannot be conjured. The women wandering with lanterns on a hillside say they’re seeking her; but they are sought. Ashes herself indwells in the chosen one, and speaks through her. I am fascinated by the idea of the gods glove-puppeting poor mortals and the tension with free will. I think I found this trope in Alan Garner’s The Owl Service. There, adolescents in a Welsh valley are compelled to reenact the myth of Blodeuwedd from the Mabinogion. Time and time again, it all plays out as tragedy: they make her an owl, when she wants to be flowers. There as well, I may have found the idea of a shaping pun: “Blodeuwedd” means both “flower-face” and “owl.” The eponymous owl service is literally china plates with an ambiguous pattern of owl-flowers. It is also what happens: the naive young people are bound in service to the owl; they reenact her rite.
In service. Under Law.
In Cloud & Ashes, as in Garner’s book, the myth is endlessly reified, made earthly. The kaleidoscope turns, and another triad of his lovers, another of my twofold goddesses slips into place, and everything’s a different same. As Sonya Taaffe wrote me: “everyone is a refraction until the glass is broken.” That’s when the changeless ever-changing myth turns story: when the avatars can walk out of it, on with their lives.
SS: If I’ve understood correctly, the woman who enacts the rite of Ashes is in danger—of rape, or attempted rape, or murder. Can you say more about this?
You begin with the exceptional. The ritual upholds the turning of the sky. Attacking the inviolable Ashes is a blasphemy. For Jack Daw, this encounter is his chance to break the cosmos, split the sister-selves of Cloud and Law. He knows just who this Ashes is, but not what she can do. The myth’s turned story now and here: not an O, but an arrow, and the moon’s the bow. What if an Ashes had refused to sacrifice her child? What if Ashes had a daughter?
That’s not to say there isn’t anger to draw upon for the attack. Being Ashes is a woman’s privilege. Cloudish men hold Ashes in awe—their lives and afterlives, their very souls depend on her—but they resent the empery of women. Mostly this comes out in mischief-making, in teasing and spying. (Poor Kit, pleading for a midwife, is dismissed as a prankster.) But there are Cloudish men’s cults, centered on Leapfire and Lightfast, on the sun triumphant. In their ritual play, the saturnian Lightfast fathers Leapfire, who dies in mortal combat with him and is endlessly reborn in Ashes’ lap. Jack Daw has been known to lead the guisers, in the body of a man. He’s a fiddler, and can play upon their rage, their fear of death’s-head Ashes, their misogyny. He can wake in them a lust for power—would you father godhead? He can lash them to atrocities.
Jack Daw
It happened. Or will happen. Long ago; last midnight; elsewhere, out beyond the hills you know; or at the turning of the path you’re on, between Ask and Owlerdale. “Once afore the moon was round, and on a night in Cloud.” Their tales begin there, at the crossroads of what is, what might be, what has been. “Jack Daw’s Pack” is at the midnight heart of the story. It spirals out from there.
SS: What is the myth of Ashes that must be played out? What makes women the agents of this magic in which a woman becomes a sacrifice or scapegoat? What in Cloud is Law?
GG: So. In the beginning there were the sister-goddesses, Mally and Annis, light and dark of one moon. They’re the binary code of this mythos: life, death, time. Mally, as I see her, is the goddess of quiddities, of the thisness of things. As Hopkins (if he were a pagan) might have put it, she’s the instress of the living world. Annis is above all that, empyrean—or would be. Her desire for transcendence drove Moonwise, and will engender Ashes.
But other deities come into the story. Brock is the go-between, the liminal deity: smith, trickster, and psychopomp. She is the third in marriage beds, the midwife, the meddler; she watches over lambing and laying-out, embers and ashes. Brock’s sky-boat came from memory. “Sylvie” once rowed me out at nightfall, off the coast of Maine, with humps of seals and seaweed on the rocks, and phosphorescence dripping from the oars.
Three goddesses sketch
The tutelary spirit of the land is Tom o Cloud. He is mazed, having drunk of Mally’s cup, and is lost in songs, dreams, stories, and the fall of leaves. Where he walks is hallows. The tinker in Moonwise is his avatar.
Cloudwood
And we’ve just met Jack Daw, the god of devices. Scythes, fiddles, coins and cards, and all transactions are his playthings. Like Annis, he’s ambitious.
Remember how in Moonwise, Annis ruled? She held Cloud in perpetual winter. To do this, she had torn out part of herself, and had bound it in an iron brooch. At the climax of the book, the dauntless Sylvie pierced the goddess’s throat with that long pin, and bound her under Law.
That was a mistake. Annis wants to be, if not flowers like Blodeuwedd, pure crystalline—stars, ice—and Sylvie makes her crows. Her realm is Law, an island in the undersky. Her plundered hoard is souls. She wears them braided in her hair, on every finger of her hands, as earrings, necklaces, and chatelaines. Her gowns are stiff with their embroidery. She walks on sliding heaps of them. Her knowing of them is a penetration and a torment to the dead. And their possessions—what they had treasured—fill her halls like seawrack, ruined with salt. It is a palace built of grave-goods.
Margaret under Law
I don’t know why this underworld is sea-girt, but it is. The dead wash up there. Perhaps in the wrecking of souls, there’s an echo of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s “The Duke of Orkney’s Leonardo.” I so love that story.
That embedded brooch is now a splinter self, my lady’s servant Morag, huntress of souls. “Crow” is what they call her in Cloud, but she’s much more like a harpy or a Kindly One. Her torments of the dead are less exalted than her mistress’s: she eats them.
Morag inverse
Annis’s great desire is to re-transcend herself, to be empyrean, untainted. She wants to be sublimed. So she creates a vessel for that alchemy, but in her self-conceit and carnal-mindedness, she makes it flesh and blood. A mirror-self. A girl. “My mother got me in her glass,” says Thea. Annis purposes to go into this womb and be reborn, as daughter to her daughter, mother to herself; but she falls in love with her reflection. Her metamorphosis is endlessly put off for dalliance: she keeps this flawless body as a toy.
