The Jewel Box
#3 Yuletide Edition: Good vs Evil in 1973 British Folklore, Bowie and the Winter Forest Portals, Carols I have Loved, and The Forbidden Red Berries.
The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper
I think of my life in the UK as my mirror-world1 life. Prior to the pandemic I would go through this looking glass a couple times each year for as long as I could manage, usually at least a few weeks at a time. There I would live a parallel life, with its own entire group of friends, my UK-based bands, and in my alternate-reality home cities. One of my favorite aspects of the mirror-world I quickly discovered is that places I’d always assumed to be pure faerie tale turned out to be actual landscapes. What I thought merely aesthetic convention of fantasy turned out to be just what it looks like there. Tolkien didn’t invent The Shire, it’s just southern England. Climbing roses cover thatched roof cottages in the Cotswolds. Pubs with names like The Leaping Stag or The Green Man have been open for hundreds of years, looking for all the world like dwarves might settle into the corner booth for ale. Villagers go about village business. Villages exist! I myself grew up next to a 7-11, so this was a revelation.
Travel north and the stone turns a deeper grey, saturating like the water content rising up in the earth. The countryside rolls out greener and more fierce as the train chugs along up the map. The stone keeps turning darker, sharper, steeper as you head to Scotland. Manners get less jaunty and more ball-busting, which feels more like home. Carvings of imps sass you unexpectedly from under the wooden beams of buildings far older than the Constitution. Everywhere is ornament, age, and a degree of the fantastic that we just don’t have in the US. The national animal of Scotland is the unicorn, ffs. In Wales it’s the dragon! Yes, there are plenty of Costa Coffees and the blank blight of overblown capitalism in the UK too, of course - it’s hardly a fantasy land in a political sense - but the old gods and raw history are visible in a way that startles and delights my American brain.
My contemporaries in the mirror-world also seem to have been steeped in some truly wild folk horror-adjacent media as children. I’m not saying that my American childhood was devoid of magic - I was raised on Labyrinth, The Neverending Story, and The Dark Crystal - but I don’t remember anything as frankly pagan as Children of the Stones being casually created for the major TV networks. One of my favorite things about my life in the UK is teasing out these books, tv shows, and albums that my friends take as much for granted as the actual crumbling castles they just happened to grow up next to. There are plenty of crossover hits, but I love finding the ones that didn’t make it over the pond.
The Dark is Rising (book and series) - written in the early 70s - is one key example. Maybe you, an American, read this as a kid, but I did not. Nor did the librarians of my early 80’s childhood ever made a peep about it, despite knowing my ravenous hunger for the genre. Susan Cooper, like Alan Garner, is a name that kept popping up in the fantasy references of my English and Scottish friends. I finally read this series during the formless morass that was 2020. I saved the re-reading this year for close to Yule as possible, as the story is so perfectly evocative of the best of this season.
In the haunting intimacy of snowfall, on the eve of the winter solstice, the young protagonist steps outside his cozy home into the Buckinghamshire countryside and all reality begins to morph. The palpable danger of other realms, both powerful and terrible, permeates every chapter. There is genuine menace in the good versus evil plot, and it connects to ancient religions and folklore in a way that gives more heft than most modern fantasy. There is something vast and implacable under the surface of this tale, and it moves the reader forward like a magnet under iron filings. I feel a similarity between The Dark is Rising and A Wrinkle in Time. Most details differ - Madeleine L’Engle’s world is just as New England as this one is Old - but there is something surreal, cerebral and beautifully melancholic about both. Read it if you haven’t, and read it in the dark of early winter if you can.
This Wintery Bonus Bowie Track from Low
Snow is scarce in these latter days. And sure, it can be a liability as an adult: memories come to mind of teetering under the weight of a Vibrolux amp in platform heels as I carefully try to ascend icy stairs to a dingy rock club. But up until about ten years ago we could be guaranteed a few all-out, stop-everything blizzards a year, and I miss them. There is something imprinted early in me of the joy and peace of snow. The hush, the purification. The air, so thin and brilliant: stars beam clear overhead and star-flakes falling on your face when you tilt up to look. Walking through a forest in the snow is an ancient act of prayer, Mary Oliver and Robert Frost looking down like kindly gods while you subtly settle into something less human and more stag-like. Pine and snow, like salt and ash, are portal-makers. You enter them and leave time. This is the song you hear in this other realm.
The Really Old Carols:
I was raised without religion by people who love the natural world and other humans, so I truly lucked out. Also, it turns out that bringing a pine tree inside for a month, feasting with friends, stringing up many small lights, and exchanging gifts as we hit the darkest, most potentially punishing part of the year all still fit perfectly in this framework. The one explicitly religious element I am unapologetically obsessed with, though, is the old, medieval-flavored carols. I love them so much that every year I secretly plan to start writing and recording my own. You’ve been warned. Recently I’ve been trying to do the music theory math on these tunes and figure out what mode or scale they are in, since it’s the chord-melody aspect that thrills me the most. So far it seems like Aeolian in most cases, aka just natural minor. No huge revelations there. Hmmm. If you are a music theory nerd reading this and have greater insight, please hit me up!
I am primarily referring to these bangers: “We Three Kings”, “O Holy Night”, “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen”, “Carol of the Bells”, “Good King Wenceslas”, you get it. They are so dramatic, so proto-metal, so dark and beautiful. Listening to them I think of both the Knights Templar and Charles Dickens. I think of the Italian priest chanting latin and wielding an incense censer like a flail that one time I ran into Notre Dame to get out of the rain…and stumbled into a full Mass just as it began.
It’s generally the music alone that I love in these songs but some of the lyrics play a part. “We Three Kings” is as gothic as anything Poe wrote. “Good King Wenceslas” calls us back to the silent, snow-filled forests and adds an ancient king of Bohemia giving alms to a pauper. The wine, the pine logs. The hither.
I’m still searching for the definitive or even decent versions of this genre to play once I’m done with my yearly Yule ritual of listening to Songs From the Wood2 while I bake small heaps of cookies. The versions on YouTube or streaming are either 1) goofy as hell or 2) sound like they were recorded as an iPhone voice memo from the back of a cavernous church. Please chime in if you have suggestions of additional songs and/or good recordings of them.
Holly
I believe that when we are young time feels longer because we are working in depth rather than breadth. Instead of the arcing plots we perpetrate in adult life, in which we race to achieve noticeable progress to our story each day, in childhood we are largely doing nothing for years. Yet that nothing is actually a period of taking in massive volumes of sensory data. Nowadays, when I think of the word “grass” I can immediately trigger an image of grass. Usually it’s a shallow, rapid data-point, used as one part of the complex equation of a sentence. I’m manipulating the symbol “grass" to interact with a number of other symbols to work out a complex thought. But I can zoom in on grass if I want to, and recall significant detail about it, even as I sit in my second floor city apartment not having directly experienced grass in days. The texture, the nuance of colors, even the taste: all of this was gathered in childhood by chilling out in the grass with infinite time and curiosity.
All of this is to say, there was a holly bush near my apartment complex when I was a kid. So I am something of an expert about holly. Here is what I know: holly is a dark, enamel green. Its leaves are strong and shining like a buffed leather of a green lizard, but perfectly smooth. The leaves have sharp spiny points like a throwing star. The red berries are true brilliant red, enamel red. They are the nail polish shade for an evil Stepmother. They are not for eating, much like the enamel red of Snow White’s apple. This is was taught young. Do not eat these berries. They are only to be enjoyed as the perfect platonic ideal of red against green. They are not for you.
They are for the birds who swoop in, breathtakingly swift through the thin and spiny air, and dart polished-horn beaks to delicately snatch their own yuletide feast. Then they fly away, vanished into the all-white sky.
I owe this term to William Gibson, from his excellent Pattern Recognition
Jethro Tull, that is. This is the perfect modern (ish) album for Yule, in my opinion.