The Black Flower

Monthly Newsletter | Australia, July 2023

The monthly newsletters are an amalgamation of musings and two poems (one by another poet and one by me, as per a practice introduced to my master’s cohort by poet Alice Oswald). Sometimes I will alternate a poem for a song.

Please scroll down for upcoming course and event announcements.

The First Black Swans, Ainslie Roberts, A. M. P. Society

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Well, here I am, greeting you from the furthest shore. That they call it Down Under is pretty mythic, an epithet that no doubt belongs with the islands of Earth Sea in Ursula le Guin’s novels and Robert Macfarlane’s quest into the deep time of his mythological Underland.

Being here is proving to be a deeply intimate encounter. It has had me floating slightly outside of myself, my animal body rather bewildered at being so far away from home.

And yet, my soul feels a sense of homecoming. A familiarity and kinship.

This discord between my inner animal and my soul has caused some friction, no doubt. I fluctuate between feeling uprooted and utterly homed. And sometimes both are true in me at once.

Such is the contradiction of the human experience.

That I feel disorientated is only natural really. I am upside down, after all. Or, perhaps the right way up, as I stipulated to the man I came here for.

And yes, I have come to the furthest shore for love. And I am slowly heeding Mary Oliver’s council when she writes, ‘You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.’ This is no doubt a useful formula for anyone who has loved and lost and chosen to love again, the throat of our naivety slit in the battlefield of relationships past.

The fear of love’s fire is no secret. Especially for those of us who know its burn. I saw a meme the other day that said something along the lines of, ‘God grant me the confidence of a twenty five year-old life coach’ and I chuckled to myself, remembering all I thought I knew when I was twenty-five. Oh, the arrogance of youth!

A question Martin Shaw had us chewing over during our postgraduate study with him was, “What does a romanticism come of age look like?”

In the Fianna cycle of Irish mythology, there is a story that tells of initiation through love. The princess Grainne is initiated into mature love through young love. In the myth, she is deemed the only woman worthy of marrying the great-warrior Fionn mac Cumhaill, leader of the hunter-warrior band known as the Fianna. But she, still young and ruled by Eros, worried that he was older than her father and turned her attentions to Diarmuid - a young warrior and the most beautiful man in the land - and convinced him to run away with her.

Fionn and his men chased them for a great many years. After a series of altercations, hurdles and challenges, Diarmuid is killed by a wild bore and Fionn, once again, seeks Grainne’s favour. This time, she falls in love with him and, at long last, they marry.

Essentially, Grainne has to love the warrior before she can love the king. This is the story of a woman growing in mature love, until she loves the whole shape of him.

The pursuit also brings Fionn some vitality back. It wakes him up with a slap and keeps him young, alert. His battle with Diarmuid could be seen as his fighting a younger version of himself, an initiation typical of midlife. There is shame and humiliation for having being rejected, wisdom discarded for naivety. These are the initial driving forces. Not love. He didn’t love Grainne at the start of the story. It was his shame and humiliation at being left by her for a younger warrior that drove the chase. Not love. And so he has to overcome his shame and his humiliation, his battle with his inner youth, before he can love. Really love.

The wild bore has wounded all men with his tusks. And it is only through the wound that Robert Bly believes boys will ever become men.

The death of Diarmuid is the death of love in its young form. The most beautiful man in the land is killed by the dark bore. Then, love finally blossoms between Fionn and Grainne. An older love emerges. They both have scars. They are bound by experience and reverence to something greater than themselves.

When I think about it in this light, from where I’m sitting in my own life, the whole pursuit might have actually just been a courtship between Grainne and Fionn. Martin Shaw puts it this way:

This is not love through the stained glass window. This is the love of rejection and loss. This is two tough cookies, leathered and diminished, staring into the winter flames. A recognition of the most hard-won intimacy. We see consequence and weight emerge. This love comes from the etiquette of the Underworld. It is Lorca’s duende. Love that carries a black, not a red flower. That is bedded down in ashes as much as it is passion. Is this a romanticism come of age?

To bring this back to place, here, Down Under, I picked up a gem the other day at a secondhand bookshop that has quite literally offered me a source of gravity. When I was feeling particularly discombobulated during my first few weeks here, in need of weights on my scales, as it were, I came across a bestselling book on Australian Aboriginal myths.

Some five decades ago the ethnologist Charles P. Mountford collected indigenous myths during his research expeditions in Australia. Discovering his compilations of the stories, the painter Ainslie Roberts then began a series of paintings to accompany them. The myths and images were then published in what they called The Dreamtime Book, which continues to be a bestseller and which I couldn’t quite believe my luck in finding.

Every day, I read one of the stories as a means of anchoring myself here. To place. Each story is like a rock I put in my pocket at the start of each day to refute the gravitational pull my bones are feeling back to the soil that made them.

The lecturer Donna Haraway talks about “thick presence” - a term she uses to describe how to pay attention to nature and our surroundings. She uses ‘storying’ to change and re-imagine what is possible, and so develop a more intimate relationship with place. If we study a particular place, the Jungian analyst Edward F. Edinger proposes that we can get in touch with the metaphysical dream of our ancestors.¹

There are so many stories here. They throb underfoot. And every morning they’re carried on morning mist, quivering in ripples of violet and gold.

I don’t know these stories. They are foreign to me like the flora and fauna and the smells. My lens into the mythic imagination here is only through the images from back home. From what now feels like an entire continent: Europe. The tales of Romania and Italy and the Nordic Islands somehow now more mine than they were before. Now that I’m so far away.

But my animal ears are ringing; hearkening to what’s here. The songlines resound in everything and perhaps what I’m hearing is their steady pulse. I’m grateful for it. My heart is slowly but surely falling into their rhythm.

And so instead of the usual two poem format for my monthly newsletter, today I would like to offer one poem, and a story from this wondrous Dreamtime Book.

Perhaps it will come as a surprise - as it did for me - that black swans are native to Australia. And so I have chosen this particular story both because rooting deeper here means entering into dialog with the other-than-human world that is of this place - being in thick presence, as Haraway would say, but also because I’m delighted by the thought that in Roman times, black swans were seen as mythological creatures and were categorised through later European literature alongside dragons and unicorns. I can only imagine the rapture when Europeans first descended Down Under and discovered that what they believed to be mythological creatures were in fact real.

The black swan is red, white and black. These three colours appear profusely throughout myth and within medieval alchemy.

The lovers know that the marital bed of white swan feathers lays next to the grief bed of black crow feathers.

In Scandinavian folklore, the queen is given a red flower and a white flower, and she is instructed to eat the white flower in order to conceive a child. Under no circumstances must she eat the red flower. But of course, as is the nature of story, when the time comes to eat the flower, she forgets which of the two will give her a child, and resolves to eating both. The consequence of this is that instead of giving birth to a child, she bears the Lindworm - half-man, half-snake - who must remove his his skins and scales in order to find love.

In the story of the wild man, Iron John, the prince disguised as a knight rides a red horse, then a white horse, and finally, a black horse. The red can be understood to be unbridled desire and eros, the white represents law and a set of external principles, and the black is the freedom from both that comes from maturity and compassion. From having sat in the grief house.

The German version of the fairytale Snow White and Rose Red are an example of this principle in women. The two sisters represent the opposites. Snow White is quiet and shy and prefers to spend her time indoors, doing housework and reading. Rose-Red is outspoken, lively and wild, and prefers to be outside. One is governed by the domestic, the other by the wild.

Nietzsche refers to this dichotomy as the Dionysian and the Apollonian principles. One is chaos, the other order; one is wild, the other domesticated. And that which emerges from the two is what medieval alchemy refers to as the Magnum Opus, the Great Work. The black stems from having incorporated the red and the white principles.

Robert Bly uses the term “a man in black” to describe a man no longer ruled by his desires or external principles. A man in black has allowed Wendy, or his anima, to sow his shadow back onto the foot of his inner Peter Pan.

To move in the direction of love, and away from the infantile desires of the red and the external principles of the white, is to orient ourselves towards the black flower. The swan begins with a red beak and white coat. Then it is dismembered. And ultimately, it is the final compassionate, grief-soaked, sobering feathers of the crow that give life to the black swan.

---

Poetry Offering

And to change gears a little, here’s a poem by Bukowski that speaks to the maddening call that, when heeded to, sets us onto that which is leading us on more than just ourselves, the via regia or Royal Road, that vein of gold and what the Irish philosopher John Moriarty referred to as the Bright Angel Trail.

Roll the Dice

if you're going to try, go all the 
way.
otherwise, don't get into it.

if you're going to try, go all the 
way.
this could mean losing girlfriends,
wives, relatives, jobs and 
maybe your mind.

go all the way. 
it could mean not eating for 3 or
4 days.
it could mean freezing on a
park bench.
it could mean jail, alcoholism,
it could mean derision,
mockery,
isolation.
isolation is the gift,
all the other is a test of your
guts,
of how much you really want to
do it.
and you'll do it
against total rejection and the
highest of odds
and it will be better than
anything else 
you can think of.

if you're going to try,
go all the way.
there is no other feeling like
it.
you will be alone with the 
gods
and the nights will flame with
fire.

do it, do it, do it.
do it.

all the way
all the way.

you will ride with death straight to
hell,
your perfect laughter,
the only good fight 
now.

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Announcements

Upcoming New Moon Rite: July 17th

Movement can be one of the greatest sources of support, healing and transformation. Once a month, on every New Moon, we seek to return to the body in a 90 minute guided movement meditation that draws on experiential embodiment practice and the exploration of altered states through dance.

Open to anyone who identifies as a woman or with the inner womb space.
8-9:30pm UK | £22

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Upcoming Dismemberment Ceremony: July 30th

Initiatory teachings tell us that we must learn how to die to fully live. Spiritual deaths are ways of clearing the old debris we accumulate throughout life. In shamanism, a form of spiritual death is called dismemberment. Belonging to the family of “death mysteries,” it is a process of dissolution which may lead to renewal and a return “to the bones,” the essentials of being.

These ceremonies take place monthly, on the last Sunday of every month.

Open to all genders.
8-9:30pm UK | £22

1. From Edinger’s lecture The Mystery of the Coniuctio. Accessible via pdf here