Directory of Lost Causes

Just before Christmas last year, I managed to make a trip to London and met up with a friend whose acquaintance I made in Devon. Before I left he said, amongst other things, that he always enjoys catching up with Devon friends because there's that whole 'Devon thing' that the world at large doesn't know about, believing, as they do, the Devon accent to consist in farmers chewing straws, saying, "Ooh, arr!"

This reminds me of another little fragment of conversation that must have occurred at a party in London when, many members of the Devon posse all happening to be there at once, some urbanite or other remarked that there was a considerable and largely unobserved Devon diaspora in the UK, and possibly in the world at large.

Google 'Devon diaspora', and the most enlightening thing you'll find is probably this, which is as it should be. Nonchalance, Socratic irony, leaving-be-ness, general inability to take oneself seriously, animal-tracking and invisible omnipresence are some of our main weapons in the conspiracy to drink more cider in haystacks.

Famous things from Devon? There are few. Cream teas. Agatha Christie. Sir Francis Drake. Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Tarka the Otter. Part of the shared life of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. Cider. (Not The Wurzels, who are, I believe, mainly from Somerset.) Chris Martin. The geological Devonian era. Sir Walter Raleigh. Lorna Doone. Donald Sinden. The United States of America. Johnny Kingdom.

That might, in fact, be exhaustive.

Good things that are not (yet) famous from Devon, there are perhaps somewhat more. Of these, I now present the poetry of Mark McGuinness, who, if he resembles anything at all on the list above, perhaps most closely resembles Donald Sinden Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Someone told me that Algernon Blackwood made TV appearances in which he read his tales, back in the early days of television, and that he had a very wrinkled face, like Auden. Naturally, I wondered if anyone might have put these on Youtube. The closest thing (the only thing, in fact) I found was this, a clip using excerpts from Blackwood's story The Wendigo. Now, one thing that fascinates me very much is the resonance contained in certain words whose meaning you do not know. I don't know where I first came across the word 'Wendigo', but it has always seemed wonderfully evocative to me. I haven't even read Blackwood's story, but I want to, just because of the title. Now, I think I had an idea, early on, that the Wendigo was something a little bit like Sasquatch, but the very mystery of the word excited me, and I didn't want to define it too closely. In some ways it has been enough for me just to have the word and the mystery, and to know that Algernon Blackwood has written a story about it, and, oh yes, not to forget, to see this picture:



Now, whatever else I write about on this blog, this is the kind of thing I really feel at home with. Monsters. Not just any monsters, either, but monsters who stride through the snowy night with their antlers in the Milky Way and a paw full of stars. Eerie, mysterious monsters. Monsters of the blackest eldritch midnight. In fact, I don't know why I don't write more about this kind of thing - the kind of thing that whispers to us from the shadows. Well, of course, I do, but not much on this blog. Perhaps I like to keep such things to myself and those who have the gumption actually to buy my books. Even then, I don't indulge as much as I might like to, because I've told myself time and time again to go easy on the H.P. (Lovecraft) sauce. But it's been so long since I spent some time with those shapeless monsters in the cellar I grew up with, the monsters known to me at the time as Gooligars - they were not so terribly different, I believe, to Lovecraft's Nightgaunts, from The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath - it's been so long, I say, that I'm really getting quite nostalgic and homesick. I want to feel the breath of the eerie once more. But when? When will I feel it again? We shall wait, and we shall see.

Let's get back, for the moment, to the Wendigo. Another association I have with the word is a poem by Ogden Nash, which, like Blackwood's story, is simply called, 'The Wendigo'. You'll find it at the bottom of this link, here. I do urge you to read it. Nash is known as a humorist, and, being a fan of preposterous rhymes, I know that he can trot a few out when he wants (check out the title of this blog post, for a start). However, I also find this poem eerie with the same eeriness inherent in its whispering way in the word 'Wendigo' itself. It's that nursery rhyme effect, perhaps, bringing back memories of a child's fear of the dark. There's also that almost onomatopoeic quality in his use of words, too:

You loll,
It contemplates,
It lollops.
The rest is merely gulps and gollops.

Lovecraft knew how to use words in this way, and the names of his creations are masterpieces of this sort of almost-onomatopoeic suggestion: Azathoth, Yog-Sothoth, Cthulhu. Ia! Shub-Niggurath! The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young!

I looked up - for the first time - some of the details of the Wendigo myth on Wikipedia just now, and am sorry to say that the actual myth Blackwood's story, Nash's poem and the above illustration are based on was a little too corporeal for my taste, dealing as it does with cannibalism and a kind of walking-corpse spirit. I was disappointed. Still, perhaps if I dig deeper I will discover more details that furnish me with the frisson of the sinister I seek. In any case, I did notice something strange. It was this line:

At the same time, Wendigos were embodiments of gluttony, greed, and excess; never satisfied after killing and consuming one person, they were constantly searching for new victims.

I don't know why it is, but this is really tickling my deja vu-bone. I've encountered or been thinking about something with this theme recently, I'm sure, and I can't quite remember what it is. Perhaps I should sleep on it. Who knows what dreams I shall have, or what dreams shall have me.

PS:

Its eyes are ice and indigo!

That's such a great line!

It's strange how some poems come back to you seemingly unbidden. Recently Stevie Smith's 'Not Waving But Drowning' has been calling to me to be re-read. It's a very terse verse, but there's some power in it that stops it from becoming the 'old saying' that it seems always on the verge of being. Perhaps there are people out there who are familiar with the title, as a sort of idiom, but who have never read the actual poem. It's one of those. I'm never too sure about global relevance, those kind of things, but if such is needed, perhaps I could say that, even those who are only waving now will probably soon be drowning, as the 'quiet desperation' of the 'civilised world' collapses and gives way to simple desperation:

Not Waving But Drowning

Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he's dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.