All We Fiddlers

From Edgar Lee Masters, in the Spoon River Anthology poem "Blind Jack." This is the storytellers' heaven:


There's a blind man here with a brow
As big and white as a cloud
And all we fiddlers, from highest to lowest,
Writers of music and tellers of stories,
Sit at his feet,
And hear him sing of the fall of Troy.

Quote: The Einstein Intersection

I've been reading Samuel R. Delany's The Einstein Intersection, and I'm really enjoying it. He does things with words that I didn't think were possible. It reminds me a little of Diana Wynne Jones's Howl's Moving Castle. But different. Also Gene Wolfe stories,. particularly the Book of the New Sun novels.

Here's something interesting, starting on page 20 of the 1992 printing:

"Let's talk about mythology, Lobey. Or let's you listen. We've had quite a time assuming the rationale of this world. The irrational presents just as much of a problem. You remember the legend of the Beatles? You remember the Beatle Ringo left his Maureen love even through she treated him tender. He was the one Beatle who did not sing, so the earliest forms of the legend go. After a hard day's night he and the rest of the Beatles were torn apart by screaming girls, and he and the other Beatles returned, finally at one, with the great rock and the great roll." I put my head in La Dire's lap. She went on. "Well, that myth is a version of a much older story that is not so well known. There are no 45's or 33's from the time of this older story. there are only a few written versions, and reading is rapidly losing its interest for the young. In the older story Ringo was called Orpheus. He too was torn apart by screaming girls. But the details are different. He lost his love--in this version Eurydice--and she went straight to the great rock and the great roll, where Orpheus had to go to get her back. He went singing, for in this version Orpheus was the greatest singer, instead of the silent one. In myths things always turn into their opposites as one version supersedes the next."

 

Irish Folklore: The Swine of the Gods

It's a good thing Yeats didn't call this story "The Divine Swine." I think all his literary credibility would have vanished in that one unfortunate rhyme. He might have retained it with sentences from The Celtic Twilight such as, "I have desired, like any artist, to create a little world out of the beautiful, pleasant, and significant things of this marred and clumsy world, and to show in a vision something of the face of Ireland to any of my own people who would look where I bid them." Or, "Everything exists, everything is true, and the earth is only a little dust under our feet."

The Celtic Twilight is a little book, first published in 1893 and expanded a few times before its final form, Mytholgies, published posthumously in 1959. Only twenty years posthumously. It's hard to think of Yeats living until the start of World War II, but there's the undeniable entry on the lawyer page of my edition of Celtic Twilight: 1865-1939. When I went to London in 2006, I went well out of my way to get to the British Library. I had gone to see the Beowulf manuscript, cause that's the kind of nerd I am. I also listened to a recording of Yeats reading his own work. Blew my mind. But today I discovered that there's a clip on youtube of him reading his stuff. Transcribed here. Geez.

So, Yeats included today's story in the 1902 edition of Twilight, but he gives no specific source beyond "a friend." The first-person narrator of the story is Yeats himself. When scholars talk about The Celtic Twilight (here's an example, if you've got access), they tend to ignore the swine of the gods. The book as a whole devotes lots of attention to the fairies of Irish folklore, the witching hour (or twilight, if you will) when this world and the next--always close together in Ireland, Yeats thought--are especially tight. Tight enough that a child or a young bride may be abducted and taken to the fairy lands. Enough of this; let's get to the pig...

The Swine of the Gods

A few years ago a friend of mine told me of something that happened to him when he was a young man and out drilling with some Connaught Fenians. They were but a car-full, and drove along a hillside until they came to a quiet place. They left the car and went further up the hill with their rifles, and drilled for a while. As they were coming down again they saw a very thin, long-legged pig of the old Irish sort, and the pig began to follow them. One of them cried out as a joke that it was a fairy pig, and they all began to run to keep up the joke. The pig ran too, and presently, how nobody knew, this mock terror became real terror, and they ran as for their lives. When they got to the car they made the horse gallop as fast as possible, but the pig still followed. Then one of them put up his rifle to fire, but when he looked along the barrel he could see nothing. Presently they turned a corner and came to a village. They told the people of the village what had happened, and the people of the village took pitchforks and spades and the like, and went along the road with them to drive the pig away. When they turned the corner they could find nothing.

"The Swine of the Gods" is so close to the "Vanishing Hitchhiker" that I can't stand it. If only the swine had been in a picture hanging on a tavern wall in the village... If I'm ever called upon to tell this story, that's how it will end. I tried to find images of an old, thin-legged Irish pig, but nothing of interest showed up. A google image search for "swine of the gods" isn't nearly as interesting as you think it'd be.