Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Courting the Wild Twin
    Courting the Wild Twin
    Courting the Wild Twin
    Ebook131 pages1 hour

    Courting the Wild Twin

    By Martin Shaw

    5/5

    ()

    Switch to audiobook
    Read preview

    About this ebook

    ‘Fabulous.’ Dan Richards, author of Holloway

    ‘Terrifically strange and thrilling.’ Melissa Harrison, author of All Among the Barley

    'A modern-day bard.' Madeline Miller, author of Circe

    This is a book of literary activism – an antidote to the shallow thinking that typifies our age. 

    In Courting the Wild Twin, acclaimed scholar, mythologist and author of Smoke Hole and Bardskull, Martin Shaw unravels two ancient European fairy tales concerning the mysterious ‘wild twin’ located deep inside all of us. By reading these tales and becoming storytellers ourselves, he challenges us to confront modern life with purpose, courage, and creativity.

    Martin summons the reader to the ‘ragged edge of the dark wood’ to seek out this estranged, exiled self – the part we generally shun or ignore to conform to societal norms – and invite it back into our consciousness. If there was something we were meant to do with our few, brief years on Earth, we can be sure that our wild twin is holding the key.

    After all, stories are our secret weapons – and they might just save us.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherChelsea Green Publishing
    Release dateMar 11, 2020
    ISBN9781603589512
    Author

    Martin Shaw

    Martin Shaw is Emeritus Professor of International Relations and Politics at the University of Sussex and Research Professor at the Institut Barcelona d'Estudis Internacionals. He has written widely on global politics, war and genocide.

    Read more from Martin Shaw

    Related to Courting the Wild Twin

    Related ebooks

    Anthropology For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Wardruna

      Dec 31, 2020

      Spirit-walking and deep mythology with Norwegian animists. At first glance, you’d be mistaken for thinking that Norway only represented black metal, burning churches, restaurant prices that will make you drop your dessert spoon, and, naturally, Vikin

      2 min read

    • Article

      Biophilia

      May 6, 2020

      Biophilia
      4 min read

    • Article

      Deep Ecology

      Aug 20, 2014

      Deep Ecology
      3 min read

    • Article

      A Path Through the Woods

      May 30, 2023

      A Path Through the Woods
      3 min read

    • Article

      Spell

      Apr 25, 2018

      Spell
      4 min read

    • Article

      TWO ESSAYS from FINGER EXERCISES FOR POETS

      Nov 1, 2022

      Russian Formalists have a word, “ostranenie,” which means constantly attempting to discover new ways of looking at everyday things. There are almost always two realities rubbing up against one another in every poem, whether they are specified or not,

      10 min read

    • Article

      Librarians of the 21st Century: Worst Story Time Ever? (Or Best?)

      Mar 14, 2017

      Librarians, at cocktail parties and at work, are often asked whether anyone uses libraries anymore. This oblivious question has led many in the profession to insist, in marketing campaigns and in interviews, that libraries are “more than just books.”

      4 min read

    • Article

      10 Literary Witches To Hex Trump

      Mar 24, 2017

      In case you hadn’t heard, witches across America—including Lana Del Rey—are uniting to take down Trump via a binding spell, which calls on the spirits to keep the President from doing harm (it already seems to be working). Covens, communities, and so

      5 min read

    • Article

      Two Poems by Phillip B. Williams

      Dec 15, 2017

      The masters are yet dead. Wanting to be human,I tried to rewrite The Waste Land. The canon’s reachcasts ruinous light. The masters’ pens breachthis page where, above, my own hand spectates. Babylonrisen, exorcism in reverse, whose nature upended now?

      6 min read

    • Article

      Wisdom for The Future

      Dec 20, 2021

      Wisdom for The Future
      10 min read

    • Article

      Water Believes What We Cannot

      Nov 1, 2020

      I wrote this love letter in the spring, when there was pandemic, which was news, and weather, which was not. Now pandemic has been superseded by police brutality, the American presidential election, and wildfires. The unknowns, the unknowable, accumu

      19 min read

    • Article

      All This Blood and Love

      Nov 22, 2017

      All This Blood and Love
      6 min read

    • Article

      The Inventions of Witches

      Oct 30, 2017

      The Inventions of Witches
      7 min read

    • Article

      Blue Minded

      Apr 3, 2019

      Blue Minded
      30 min read

    • Article

      From Our Readers

      Jun 4, 2020

      From Our Readers
      4 min read

    • Article

      The Time for Art Is Now

      Mar 22, 2018

      The Time for Art Is Now
      4 min read

    • Article

      AUSTRALOPITHECA1 & STARMAN2

      Sep 1, 2019

      The countdown to you begyns with me, deere Starman, when I wander, dumbly, deep into a space hospittable to Hunger. Now, all’s desert. No milk in syte. Just pitifull sand, what shushes as it slydes through your hande to rejoin itself. I’d join myself

      7 min read

    • Article

      Worlds Of Ink And Paper

      Nov 22, 2022

      As a young girl, I still remember my dear mother, smile on her face, curled up with Family Circle magazine in her lap. She was engrossed in an article titled “Butternut Wisdom,” written by Gladys Taber. At my age, it didn’t mean a thing to me. But as

      6 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Courting the Wild Twin

    5/5

    8 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Courting the Wild Twin - Martin Shaw

      THE CONDITION OF WONDERING

      Someone Wants to Talk to You

      The business of stories is not enchantment.

      The business of stories is not escape.

      The business of stories is waking up.

      Imagine, if you will, looking up into the dark and naming a star. You could be crouching in the moonlight outside a Dordogne cave, or peering up from a balcony in west London in the middle of a party as the music pumps, pumps, pumps. But for some reason we commit to gazing. And something happens when we, maybe rashly, give ourselves utterly to the turbulent luminosity of the universe. We start to gabble in love speech.

      So there you are, looking at the star.

      You could call it something like:

      Flint of Whale Bone

      Dream Coin of the Moon

      Pale Rivet of the Sun’s Own Spear

      White Bridle of the Black Riders

      This condition of wondering is still absolutely intact in us. It is. Amongst the loaded shopping trolleys of Walmart and Tesco, the fluorescent tech hubs, flicker-screens and finger-beckoning apps, it’s still there. This raw, imaginative, holy thing.

      There’s an audacity to it, but it’s what we’ve always done. We did it on the plains of South Dakota, we did it in the muddied byres of Shropshire, we did it on the vampiric tips of snowy Carpathian Mountains. And here’s the thing: we did it to claim not ownership but connection. There’s a swoon in this, a bearing witness, a startled affection growing to an awe. There is no flag planting, no home improvement planned, just giddy, magical naming. And maybe the star just named itself and used us to do it. Maybe it spoke through us for a moment. There’s a health to this.

      Much has been written about the human impulse to daub its spray on every living thing, to bellow the decree of its franchise, but what happens when the earth itself gives a little pushback? When it’s not us lacing a brocade of dominion-speak into a voidal dark, but that actually the words themselves may be the return journey of longing from the thing itself. That there’s a scrummage of inspiration that is not only human. This is a reality that has been articulated from Amazonia to Renaissance Italy, from the Yakut to the Aborigine. That words can have fur and light in them. Words can constrict, words can liberate.

      Bad storytellers make spells.

      Great storytellers break them.

      This, now, is mostly an era of spell-making. Of tacit enchantment, of stultified imaginations and loins inflamed by so much factory-fodder lust, our relationships malfunction in their millions. We are on the island of the Lotus Eaters, curled up in the warm sleepy breeze of a Russian fairy tale as the robber steals away the Firebird. How do we wake up?

      I will give you a little plot-spoiler right here. Sounds so very deceptively simple. The secret is relatedness.

      Relatedness. Relatedness breeds love, and love can excavate conscience. Conscience changes the way we behave. Relatedness is how we wake up. But I am going to take a long and sometimes diffuse route to say it in the fashion that such a notion deserves. As I will repeat before the end of this book, be sceptical of the quick route. It’s truly what’s got us into a thousand unruly messes. And not the kind the poets praise.

      There are stories about living without relatedness. They don’t tend to end well. Without relatedness we dwell in a place the Inuit call the Moon Palace. The Moon Palace is a place that appears perfectly safe: we have a great view of the earth and its goings-on, but we touch nothing. We can spend years and years up there. Heartbreak will get us there. The cool of the Moon Palace is a very dangerous place to be. Likely there comes a point where you want to come back down. The old ones say the earth is only three steps down from the Moon Palace, but we have to keep our eyes open as we descend. If we are unconscious we become spiders that cause webs to trap everyone around us. In other words, we cast spells.

      The three steps down from the Moon Palace are instigated by longing to connect, for heat, opinion, passion, the dusty market square of life. Relatedness is the way back, but doing it with awareness.

      So. I want to know if the earth will still reveal its secret names to us. The only way we can know is if we as a culture take those three steps.

      This is a book that makes a case for a world that still seeks our eyes on it. Our admiration. Our care. Our artfulness. And from that comes a particular kind of hope.

      Amongst the clear-eyed of us, hope is becoming a word laced with some doubt, and rightly so. At least from a certain point of departure. When I speak to the climatic conditions of our time through the voice of a pundit, philosopher, attender to the seemingly divinatory crackle of ‘the facts of the matter’, I feel a blue note of utter sorrow that I can’t come back from. But I do not choose to look at the conditions of our times only through those prisms; there is another, more ancient device. Story.

      Of course, myths speak of the endings of things, of any number of ruptures and rebirths, and are often thoroughly drubbed with grief and the tragic. Ragnarok or Revelation is always at hand. Some beast is always slouching towards Bethlehem. Everything falls apart. The child crawls into the snow and is not seen. But over time a shoot will emerge from a heap of ashes. A girl will walk back from the forest speaking a language no one has ever heard. This is less optimism, more observation.

      I should reveal my hand here.

      I don’t believe our prayers always land this side of the river. I believe in a receiver. Even though what may wind its way back to us is in some costume we never expected. Stories can actually be a kind of praying, a back-and-forth between us and the earth and its myriad dimensions. This is absolutely not the same thing as a wish list to the heavenly.

      If you think you’ve only got yourself for company, you are on the quick road to crazy.

      I’m not telling you what to pray to, the celestial-or-otherwise shape of the thing, but find something to adore and keep talking to it. It’ll regulate anxiety at the very least. It won’t remove grief, not useful remorse, but the grind of chronic or acute fear can find its expression as an alchemical progression, not a final destination.

      Stories worth their salt don’t tell us to get cranked up with either naive hope or vinegar-tinged despair. Stories tell us to keep attending to the grace. Keep an eye on the miraculous. It is not for us to blow the candle out; only the gods can do that. You simply don’t do that as a storyteller. You have corrupted yourself at that point, broken covenant with magical possibility. You have forgotten your tribal function, your metaphysical directive.

      So for a moment, I ask us to entertain possibilities, that’s all. Put down the podcast or latest gut-churning piece of will-draining bad news, and let’s crouch by the fire in the old way that is forever new. Somebody wants to talk to you.

      So, the old ones say, the old ones say, the old ones say:

      To cast the language of relatedness, you have to know you have a wild twin.

      The earth has scattered many clues around you so you pick their scent up.

      But who are the old ones?

      They are your invested dead, the ones who wrap foxglove round the pale horns of cattle and push back the very gates of dawn just so your dreams can claim contact a little longer. The old ones inhabit the

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1