Note: This will be my final post of the series considering Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the final post of 2023. Thank you all for subscribing and supporting The Whole Live Animal. I will be at a residency in PLAYA Summer Lake in southeastern Oregon in January. January’s posts will reflect that landscape. Coming in 2024 will be more multipart posts that meditate on storytelling, picture making and the role of art in the humanities. I will continue shorter pieces as well including the book stacks and reviews. Have a very Happy New Year!
It is almost upon us. The end of the calendar year. The cosmic, astronomical year began last week on the solstice but the Gregorian calendar that shapes our lives holds that day on January 1st. Tomorrow night is the end of the line for 2023. It is the time of year for accounting and remembering. What happened this year? Who are we after that twelve month journey? What promises were kept and broken? Those promises were made to our future selves in the cold dark of late December. Here we are face to face with the future and the past.
In the poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the poet says “No year ends the way it began.” After the initiatory awakening of the Green Knight’s Christmastime challenge, the holiday decorations are put away and the champagne bottles are empty. Gawain then must spend his year; from the pale green light and heavy dark of January and February to the thawing and budding of March and April to the warm blossoming of summer to the wheel’s turn back to winter in a state of suspended dread. That year, he, like all of us do, tries to act as if; hoping that by engaging in the mundane tasks of the court he will stave off the inevitable. As the time comes closer for him to set off, unease leaks into daily life. He vacillates between the joy of immersion in the moment and girding for an unknown certainty.
Gawain must go through the bumbling journey to the Green Chapel in order to be changed; to be stripped of convenience, to face death, to leave space for an ill-fitting youthful skin to slip off so that all of his tendrils and new branches of experience can unfurl. He arrives at Bertilak’s castle as a mendicant. The threadbare knight has been primed for initiation. As with our own New Year celebration a feast must commence. Lord and Lady Bertilak play their exchange game. The merry making is a prelude to the final test.
When Gawain leaves the rural castle to go to the Green Chapel he wears beneath his armor the secreted green garter given him by Lady Bertilak. She tells him that it holds protections from harm. She swears him to secrecy using him to violate the terms of the exchange game with the lord. Arriving at the moss covered rocky outcrop ready to accept the invoice due from the previous year he finds the great Green Knight resplendent in his emerald armor whetting the great ax amidst forest song.
The Green Knight readies to give the return blow. There are three attempts. The first one is stayed as Gawain flinches. The second is a feint on the part of the Green Knight. The final one is a nick on the neck. The Green Knight drops the ruse. He is in fact Bertilak himself. He and the Lady and the Crone who is none other than his aunt Morgan Le Fay are all in on it. Gawain conducted himself beautifully except for keeping his talisman hidden. Hence the nick. The arboreal giant laughs and invites Gawain back to the castle to see the New Year in. Gawain thanks him and decides to ride back to Camelot with his scar, green garter and story.
It is worth noting that in the poem and in Joseph Campbell’s retelling on the Bill Moyers special The Power of Myth that the conclusion of the garter is the treachery of women. Lady Bertilak is exposed as a temptress and Morgan Le Fay the shadow to Arthur’s light. Gawain returns to Camelot with his story; a story meant to transform and teach the court. The green garter became a sigil of shame and triumph even inspiring an Order of the Green Garter reflecting virtues such as celibacy and marriage. It is a very typical hero story. Stories, like images, as I’ve written before are wild creatures. You can break some and tame them, try to breed them, but deep bone knowledge of the wild always remains. Domestication is a two way street. The domesticator also gets domesticated. Maybe a better of way of stating it is that the act of domestication is a form of being trimmed and molded by the thing that seems to be domesticated. Underneath the very Christian and patriarchal conclusion of the poem is an old and wily tangle of roots. And they are still sending up shoots.
Morgan Le Fay is so named because she is part fairy. Not in the Tinkerbell sense but as a denizen of the Otherworld. Avalon is the place just beyond the fog of ordinary perception. She is painted in later stories as a corrupted manipulator. In some versions of the Arthurian lore it was she who imprisoned Merlin in a tree after getting him to cough up all of his magical secrets. In Gawain and the Green Knight she changes Bertilak’s form and sends him to King Arthur’s court. In a traditional reading of the story, the reason for the test is to check out Camelot’s virtue. Are they really all that? Being tricksterish means that Morgan would be just as happy to trip up the smug, high-minded Round Table as to help them right the ship. Morgan is a surviving figure from a matrilineal, magical culture. One that recognizes the reciprocal pulse of the living world.
The structure of the game in which one is beheaded and beheads in return comes from antique Celtic sources. The king was literally a figurehead who needed to be renewed yearly. Our image of Father Time and Baby New Year is an example of symbols that have morphed and survived through myriad polemics. In the old stories a young hero would come to “rescue” a princess or queen. He would need to fight a monstrous gatekeeper or defender. The beheaded old king would be reborn symbolically as the solar child who becomes the hero. The hero then goes on an adventure where he finds himself confronting the once-hero who is now the wizened defender. He who was once the supple shining star is a time hardened burl full of middle age’s contradictions and aches. The only constant is the queen who is really the great Goddess. This is her game. Renewal can only begin when the old year king is beheaded.
So as we listen for the ancient songs embedded in the medieval poem, we can reconsider the exchange game and the intent of Morgan Le Fay and the Bertilaks. I see the Green Knight’s entry into the halls of Arthur as a reminder and a challenge to the court. Wisdom comes from the wild, multivalent edges not the center of power. If it is not renewed then the court becomes necrotic and unstable, a brittle autocracy. It is no accident that the main image of the French Revolution was the severed head. The head is literally and metaphorically the capital. The challenge to the court needn’t be a storming of the castle (as romantic and heroic as that sounds. It is also the impulse of despots) This is where true mythic thinking, understanding picture making and story come into play. The beheading game is a game but it hurts. It is ceremony, and ceremony only works if the stakes are understood.
The Green Chapel is the forest. The forest in all its complexity embodied by Morgan Le Fay and the Bertilak castle is a kind of alternative society; a new model. It is a reminder of the covenant with the living world. State power is nothing if it doesn’t take into account all the interconnected and conflicting lives that hold it up in the first place. The green garter then, is not a sigil of virtue, but of the green pulse of the forest. It calls on us to behold the world not grasp it or tame it. Behold it. The green garter is a token of understanding.
As we enter into that suspended moment between the old and new year, it is worth considering what is rigid and brittle in our own court and what needs the reinvigorating removal of an old king’s head. The climate crisis is a warning. The forest is sending envoy after envoy to remind us of the reciprocal game we’re in. When it is your turn to bow your head to the Green Knight’s ax, don’t flinch, just say Happy New Year. He’s only trying to release the energy of a renewed and refreshed world.
AND A REMINDER: For anyone interested in taking the drawing and storytelling workshop Nostos: the Long Way Home at Building Five in 2024 (details below) we’ve changed the dates from the original announcement. For the month of December, the workshop will be $1600, that’s $300 off of the full price. This workshop will be a rich and deep exploration of storytelling, drawing and visual narrative. We give the story of the Odyssey lots of time to open up, expand and allow you to enter into it. Ultimately you will tell your own story about home; whether that is as a native, an immigrant or a refugee. Join me in 2024 to inaugurate this workshop. Go here to register.
The Odyssey is one of the most iconic of Western stories. We look at what the story has to say about leaving home, coming home, and being a migrant in the world. What does that longing in our stories say about our own longing? Who is a migrant, a refugee, or a native? Our stories root us to the ground and allow us to travel over great distances. How do we define home? Can we find stories in the ground beneath our feet that welcomes newcomers and honors the ancestors?
Over the course of the five sessions we dive deep into the story of the Odyssey through oral storytelling and book discussions.
This course connects one’s innate creative spark with deep-time storytelling and straightforward drawing exercises. Oral storytelling, themed readings, and image making exercises are braided together into each session. This course is for teachers, writers, cartoonists, artists, or anyone interested in unlocking their visual storyteller. This is not about technical prowess, but storytelling and expression. The drawing exercises do not require drawing skill or previous training. Participants come away having created their own story based in image and text; gaining tools for telling stories with pictures and thinking in mythic time.
Each weekend begins with a Friday night lecture.
Saturday is a full day of storytelling, drawing exercises and workshops.
Sunday is work time and presentations.
Building Five, NW Marine Artworks,
2516 NW 29th Ave., Portland, OR 97210
APRIL 12-14, 2024:
Leaving Home
The journey begins. War comes to Ithaca. What causes us to leave home in the first place. Odysseus goes off to war. Telemachus grows up with the weight of an absent father, Penelope takes on leadership and grows into her role. It is springtime. Are we setting out with excitement and possibility? With a heavy heart? With regret? We consider the traveler, the wanderer and the tourist. After each storytelling session you draw. We go from quick intuitive drawing exercises to longer more reflective pieces.
JUNE 28-30, 2024:
Out at Sea
Now that the initial excitement of setting off has settled into the day to day, how do we move through the days? Telemachus tries to be a man, Penelope fends off the suitors, Odysseus heads home and is thwarted. What does it feel like to be a refugee and cast from home? More quick exercises, we build on images from the previous session.
APRIL 12-14, 2024:
Leaving Home
The journey begins. War comes to Ithaca. What causes us to leave home in the first place. Odysseus goes off to war. Telemachus grows up with the weight of an absent father, Penelope takes on leadership and grows into her role. It is springtime. Are we setting out with excitement and possibility? With a heavy heart? With regret? We consider the traveler, the wanderer and the tourist. After each storytelling session you draw. We go from quick intuitive drawing exercises to longer more reflective pieces.
SEPT. 7-8, 2024:
Dreams of home fires
We’re right in the middle. Everyone tries to hold the line and survive. Immigrants and natives consider what home means. New materials, longer exercises after the storytelling sessions.
NOV. 2-3, 2024:
The Land of the Dead
Odysseus consults the dead. Underworld musings, ancestors from the other side of the veil come to have a word. One long project after the telling.
DEC. 13-14, 2024:
Homecomings
Odysseus comes home as a nobody. Penelope starts to waver and Telemachus gets a hint from Athena. Not all homecomings are happy. Who are you when you return after a journey? One final work session and a mini-exhibition.