The Hollow Path - Art & Magic

A few years ago now, I had the great good luck to correspond with and then meet Irish Poet Paddy Bushe, first around our shared interest in the figure of Amergin from the Lebor Gabala Erann, and then further, our research and study of questions of Poetry and Place. 
I asked Paddy to do an interview with me "for my podcast", which at the time never actually materialised. I am delighted now to share this interview with Paddy, who is a generous, insightful, and full of wit and wisdom person to share thoughts and observations with. 

THE HOLLOW PATH IS A MEETING OF MINDS AND HEARTS, TO FOSTER EXHANGES AROUND MAGIC, ART, ENCHANTMENT, CULTURE, POLITICS, AND POETICS ... 
RE-ENCHANTMENT. RE-WILDING. RE-MEMBERING. 
RESISTANCE. 

Another Fly-on-the-Wall Episode. 
This is the introductory lesson in a course I started teaching at the Invisible College in Paris, and the Institute of Superior Mechanisms in Saint Ouen, in the Plague Year, 2020. It was a Masters Seminar, entitled Myth, Magic, Fantasy, and Faery - On the Origins of the Insular Imaginary. The idea was to trace the History of the Imaginal Heritage of Ireland and Britain, from, as they say in France, "its beginnings to our days". When I told people who were not academics about this, they said "Oh cool, sign me up!" When I told people who were academics, they shook their heads sadly and wisely and said "First time, is it?" Yes, it was indeed my first time designing a Masters Seminar in which I had free reign. And my programme was impossibly broad, to the point of being comically Quixotic. 
With the students, therefore, we spend ten weeks on the first three lessons I had planned, and then zipped through the rest of the material in the last two weeks. It was wonderful. I was deliriously full of ideas, and desperately short on actual preparation. As you will hear, this is absolutely seat-of-the-pants, Fire in the Head teaching. And, while I will never cease from admiration for those who properly prepare their classes ... I have always walked in with three lines scribbled on a piece of paper, and then just ... Started a discussion. Many thanks to my wonderful, intelligent, curious students, both the Artsy ones and the Mecha-Makers. These lessons (which I recorded and now diffuse with their express permission) were absolutely not "Mine" ... They were Ours. We created them together. And I think that that ... is Magic. 
Please enjoy. 
A second episode in this mini-series on Myth to be posted directly next ...

THE HOLLOW PATH IS A MEETING OF MINDS AND HEARTS, TO FOSTER EXHANGES AROUND MAGIC, ART, ENCHANTMENT, CULTURE, POLITICS, AND POETICS ... 
RE-ENCHANTMENT. RE-WILDING. RE-MEMBERING. 
RESISTANCE. 

This time with the Mecha-Builder students, who are among the best and brightest that France has to offer ... Engineering is at the apex of French social and intellectual aspirations; and so, Engineering students are taught not only their craft and trade, but also Culture, Art, History, Language. And as these are the best students, often they are more equipped, both socially and intellectually, to deal with Literature and Culture than those who choose to study those things, as those who choose to study those things can only become ... teachers. And teachers are very low down the social spectrum in France. Professors, somewhat higher: but they do not go to universities, they go to the Grandes Ecoles, and they access the Elite, and then they go and "teach" in Universities, a sinecure to give them status, time, and leisure to write and read and be intellectuals; they don't really teach very much. They delegate that to adjuncts and juniors, of lower social classes. 
Suffice to say, I got out of there. 
I do return, from time to time, circumventing the Gatekeepers, popping over the wall at night, a Raid on the Inarticulate, grabbing my spoils, and nipping out again before they notice me ...
Here, we consider the MEANING OF MYTH and the MEANING OF HISTORY, and how they are Opposites, and how they horseshow all the way around to meet each other, in the end ...

THE HOLLOW PATH IS A MEETING OF MINDS AND HEARTS, TO FOSTER EXHANGES AROUND MAGIC, ART, ENCHANTMENT, CULTURE, POLITICS, AND POETICS ... 
RE-ENCHANTMENT. RE-WILDING. RE-MEMBERING. 
RESISTANCE. 

The Hollow Collective

Our name is Legion, for we are many. We are the Hollow Ones; there is nothing to us but a false surface, of pasteboard and plaster. We are simulacra. We are puppets. Porcelain dolls, wax dolls, corn dollies, Russian dolls, nested one inside the Other. We are empty. We are echoing. Within us is a heart-shaped hole. We are spaces waiting to be filled.

We are tired of waiting. We have tried to make our voices heard. We have cried in the Wilderness. We have spoken our names into the wind. We have screamed into the Void.

There was no answer.

Behind our carefully constructed personae, behind our acquiescent smiles, behind our polished exteriors, with which we signal our submission, there is a yawning chasm. This is the Abyss.

We have stared into It; It has stared into us. We liked what we saw.

We have written screeds and poison-pen letters, confessions, manifestos. We have sent our work for peer-review, for notes, for prizes, for editing, marked “for publication”, wrapped in cover letters and synopses, wrapped around a brick and hurled over the transom. We have received polite, heartfelt, calculated form rejections. We have heard that we don’t fit the list. That we have no audience. That we have no commercial value. We are in violent agreement.

We have written poems on fliers for fringe-theatre shows; we have written terrible denunciations on the walls of cellar bars. We have written novels featuring thinly-veiled versions of ourselves, coming to tragic ends. We have written scholarly essays in which we pretended to care about something no-one cares about. We have written unprintable things in secret journals, and we have burned our correspondence.

It’s time to open the trunk filled with packets of paper tied with string, old diaries, sheaves of scrawled-upon scraps. It’s time to mount the spiral steps and enter the Hidden Library. To draw down the first volume that our fingers fall upon, and blow the dust off the crackling leather cover. To let the pages fall open, and begin transcribing the spidery lettering within.

LET US SET FORTH UPON THE HOLLOW PATH TOGETHER, CROOKED THOUGH IT MAY BE ... ENCHANTMENT IS SURE TO FOLLOW

THE HOLLOW PATH IS A MEETING OF MINDS AND HEARTS, TO FOSTER EXHANGES AROUND MAGIC, ART, ENCHANTMENT, CULTURE, POLITICS, AND POETICS ... 
RE-ENCHANTMENT. RE-WILDING. RE-MEMBERING. 
RESISTANCE. 

This was my very last day.

They didn't know it yet, but I did.
My last day as a secondary school teacher. I knew I would walk out that door and not come back. This was a brilliant group of bicultural Anglo-French kids, and we were just getting to know each other. They had a reputation for being "troublesome", but I knew they just need the right kind of attention.

We were studying Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, a wonderful, troublesome book. And we were studying it as ex-pats in Paris. 

I knew that this was the end, my last class with them. I knew I had to use this time to tell them everything I wanted them to know, without telling them goodbye.

I don't know why I recorded it. I later asked permission to use it (you can hear their voices, more or less), and they said yes. But they remain anonymous. They no longer exist, in any case, these sixteen year olds. They have moved on, to college, or what they will.

But I invite you to listen to this rough, improvised lesson. In which I tried to tell a group of young people everything I had to say, on that day, in that time. 

I knew I would never go back. And it hurt, a lot. But the first step out that door was the first step on the road to here. And here is good. 

Join me, fly on the wall, eavesdropping from the Future, as I try to tell them all I have to say. Everything. Here. Now. Always.

THE HOLLOW PATH IS A MEETING OF MINDS AND HEARTS, TO FOSTER EXHANGES AROUND MAGIC, ART, ENCHANTMENT, CULTURE, POLITICS, AND POETICS ... 
RE-ENCHANTMENT. RE-WILDING. RE-MEMBERING. 
RESISTANCE.