I’ve come to the party a bit late with Martin Shaw. Wolf Milk is the first of his books I’ve read, though I was familiar with his wonderful piece ‘We Are In The Underworld And We Haven’t Figured It Out Yet’ which finally said something soulful about the profundity of our global situation. It was on the back of that read I purchased Wolf Milk' and I have to say I wasn’t prepared for the way this book affected me. Dr. Shaw uses the village and the wild to convey what in witchcraft terms might be described as crossing the hedge. His discussions on the process of going and returning would be very relevant to my readers and anyone interested in hedge crossing.
As a writer I sometimes find other writers who are fellow tributaries to the same deep-water lake as myself, pilgrims following the same archaic story trails. Though they might have not yet met up they are heading to the same place, without ever sensing the numerous other subterranean water sources unknown to each other until they find their parent lake. These are the people who I’ve never read before that people tell me ‘your work reminds me of…’ It’s not a great mystery as the lake we are heading to is a collective possession, a parent-pool of myth, a grandmother story all storytellers are trying to both get back to, and sending forth nourishment from whenever we arrive in moments of grace.
It was the fact that Dr. Shaw seemed to know this about himself and his own voice that charmed me about this book. There is not much space for a big ego in a true storyteller, those just get in the way of the great allowing, of the process of becoming multiple others. They just clutter up the place and wearing them smooth becomes as much an aesthetic decision as anything. Wolf Milk is held together by the key theme of the wilderness fast a four-day opportunity to empty yourself of your preoccupation with yourself and learn how to listen to the land. Here I enjoyed the storyteller’s voice all the more. It can be no nonsense at times; betraying the toughening and honing of the soul that solitude and time spent outside the hedge can bring to the dedicated. He can be amazingly lyrical at times. One part that stands out to me is this:
“The storyteller Robin Williamson – Chief Bard of the order of Bards, Ovates and Druids- once sat in my house with a harp and talked for six hours straight on the four branches of the Mabinogion. What became clear was how unfitting the word voice was for what came out of his mouth. After seventy years on the planet, it is at turns raspy, angelic, guttural, and melodic. It makes jumpy turns at unusual moments. It is a gravel creek bed that the salmon of insight lay eggs in.
So check your cadence out, your accent, your vocal dance. If young, don’t beat yourself up about it being lively and high; life will rub that off, there is no need to hurry. Mythtelling points towards the vitality of the elders- something unfurls with age that we can’t ignore. So we could be like Finnegas waiting for the salmon by the Boyne, with patience and good humour, abiding in the music of what is.”
I may have let out a little yelp when I read about the gravel creek bed and the salmon eggs. It made me want to book an immediate flight to Britain and turn up on the doorstep of the Chief Bard begging to be told a story! It’s not only Shaw’s lyrical moments that capture me though, but his tough and clever words too. The almost deft harshness of ‘life will rub that off’, is honest in the way the wild is honest. The way he flips the script on our society’s preoccupation with youth by passing vitality, the hidden vitality of the wellsprings of the soul, to the elders, telling young people ‘not to beat themselves up about it’ is nothing short of masterful. At the end of the paragraph it feels like he’s rearranged almost nothing. and yet everything has changed.
He had me from the moment he informed the reader he had once let a story cook inside him for fifteen years before he dared tell it to anyone. Like me he is a fierce, unabashed, but never sentimental Romantic who is comfortable with this breathless sort of expression:
This is the place of gravel beach and swollen black winters and crackle-tag lightning storm, hunting the bowhead whale for forty-two days under the blond coin of eternal grinding sunlight, harpooner aiming at the death space of the bow god’s foaming heart as furry starving men chant praise in the archaic sobriety of their highest ritual, butchering till the ice becomes too rotten to support their weight, to feast on soured raw meat – gut, liver, heart, tongue – three days in the eating.
But he can also be firm when he talks about the return to the village after the time in the wilderness:
It’s called counterweight… Maybe your mother is back there somewhere, lonely for you. Maybe there is a debt needing to be repaid. There could be a mess to clean up somewhere in your life. Make a call, show up. Pretending to be badger, a trapper from the 1800’s, or the Jackson Pollock of the northern wastes is all fine, but not if you are on the run from your own morality. You’re not a salmon, a thrush, or a boar. You are a guy called Joseph and you need to get your shit in a pile.
Yeah, Joseph…
Dr. Shaw explains how we should make a space for stories, both inside ourselves and materially in our lives. He operates from the animistic assumption of stories possessing spirits, personhood: that we should feed them, so stories always know where they might come to find a safe house. There might have been something in my eye when I read that part, because I have sometimes been vulnerable to the thought I was the only one who thought like that, or did that sort of things for the stories I play host to. Also, when I write I always hope I’m making someone out there cry. So, nice work, Dr. Shaw.
I guess what really gets me with books is authenticity. There are a lot of people out there claiming to have done a lot of things, from heroic fasts to epic entheogen sessions in the jungle, but a lot of the time you can’t feel or hear how the experience authentically changed them, what they brought back to the village from it. The reason I can tell Dr. Shaw has walked his talk and let it change him is that he’s not promising any quick fixes via wilderness immersion, any peak experiences or easy wisdoms. He has nothing to offer you but loneliness, silence, durance and the slow-rub wear away of what stands between you and really hearing the more-than-human life around you. After all I imagine there is nothing like multiple experiences with sitting and starving in the wilderness for four days with no human contact to take away much of the bullshit in a man. I instinctually trust this story of going and return, in its simplicity, in its focus on the wild as teacher, and its lack of big flashy promises. I will be going out to read the rest of his books now, and to spend even more time sitting alone in the woods practicing the nearly lost art of listening.