The Limyth
It is Branwen (a character who slips between the Branwen of the Mabinogi, as well as Lamia and maybe even Eve, but not on a heavy level of over-association) who first tells Ember to find the place of the limyth – where owls fly and roost with the bats – and start again from there. Not a beginning that wishes to forget the past, in the hope of pretending there never was one, but a beginning that tells and hears all the stories; with order but not control, with both respect and irreverence. No-one’s story should be ignored or left out. And with the people who come to her and join with her, they will invent and write the myths together:- no singular voice, no finished stories, no authoritative history, only their ongoing stories…
The Limyth, as understood by the Clegyrheli community:
Lilith was a creature emerged from the clay and soil, earthy and materialist from birth. A partner creature named Adam formed from the clay alongside her, but he refused to accept her equality. He wanted an inferior, not an equal, because he believed himself to be in a position to dominate, since he’d mistaken for a weapon what was intended as a connecting cable…
Lilith refused and rejected Adam’s advances, which damaged his pride, and he became angry and called her a whore, even though she hadn’t had intercourse with anyone. But the misnaming brought with it a magic that was hers to use. It gave her the will to expand and stretch her limbs: to reach, bursting with plumage, flexing her neck so that she might twist round and see who is stabbing her in the back, and the Lilith creature took flight at dusk.
First he denied and tried to hide her existence, allowing Eve to believe that he was first, and she his one and only, but when eventually this failed Adam spread lies about Lilith, declaring her gone with devils to be succubus and temptress and mother of demons. She did join with demons, and gave birth to the lilim.
The first to hear the limyth from Ember is Tammy, when Tammy gets spooked by an owl hooting from the branches of the big tree that marks the entrance to the homestead. Ember explains to Tammy how the owls are alone in knowing all their names and what their names mean.
When they meet in the lake, after Ember follows the stag to the deer, Branwen tells her that if she were superstitious and really believed every detail of the old myths, she would say that what is currently happening in the world is the realisation of Adam’s curse: that because she left him, one hundred of Lilith’s children must die every day (at the hands of the adamim?). After all this time he is finally seeking vengeance, since “although Adam’s lips said Eva, his soul always echoed Lilith”.
The limyth is not a religion with rules by which the community live. There are no gods to be worshipped: no rituals or hierarchies. There are festivals which mark time and season changes, but no tales of retribution, no damnation promises: no heaven and no hell.
The limyth helps the unsettled world take shape(s) without confining it, restricting it, or repressing its residents. Its people are encouraged to shape the world their way through their own stories and process of continually telling their altering and alternating stories. It also names things and people more purely, and allows for complexity without falsifying acts of life. For example, through the story of Lilith mating with Lucifer to form one androgynous being sexual intercourse becomes understood as a moment of equality between all creatures, regardless of their ‘original’ sex. Gender is important as a configuration of individual variation and diversity, but is not a division upon which power is based.
I have my first full character (one of many, but still an achievement. I’m pleased anyway…):
Name: Tammy Lianakos
Birthdate: 27.09.1997 (so will be around 16 when the book catches up with events taking place around 2013) Star sign: Libra
Clan/Tribe: Clegyrheli
The daughter of either academics or diplomats – one parent from Lebanon, the other from Iran – the family, who identify as Jewish, moved with her two older brothers, Jonathan and Omar, to one of the smaller Greek islands when Tammy was a tiny baby, to take up roles offered them by the Greek government, and to return to the ‘homeland’ of Tammy’s paternal grandparents, who were Greek, not Iranian. She remembers only the island, and considers it her home and a crucial part of her diasporic identity.
Around 2005 Jonathan is conscripted, while the war is still in specific ‘controlled’ locales. Life on the island continues largely unaffected by the world’s wars, although in some less direct way her parents may have some involvement on a research or administrative level. That remains to be seen… their work might be useful later…
But by three years later, when Tammy is 11, the war has persisted and increased to such an extent that the age of conscription has lowered in attempts to make up the numbers. So Omar is conscripted, and from that point the war feels much closer – as it in fact spreads around the Mediterranean, surrounding neutral countries and closing in on them. The town is fast decreasing in numbers, as more and more residents are recruited: men and boys to combat army positions, and women to other war-effort positions, which as the war worsens, also become combative positions.
Around 2010 is when the war has widened enough to expose the islands as vulnerable. The island is raided for the first time when Tammy is studying on the beach. She and around 20-25 other children are taken from her home-town-suburbs. No-one older than 14-15 is taken, and mainly girls. They are kept on the pirate ship for 6 weeks while the raiders make their rounds of other Mediterranean countries, including the south of France, which is where they abduct Anouk from, and it is how the stories of Tammy and Anouk become connected. The ship winds its way out of the Med and into the Atlantic. It’s thought that the ship intends to make its stop in Britain, where it’ll make one final raid before returning to Turkey with its cargo, for dispersal and sale. But the raid on the Welsh coast is intercepted by the Clegyrheli community, who manage to disrupt the raid and prevent the pirates from taking anyone from the local region, and they also manage to rescue Tammy and Anouk, but not the others. The ship makes a hasty retreat after its thwarted mission, and presumably continues its intended journey back to its port of origin.
There could be an extended story here, with someone else from the same boat later turning up in the other commune in the middle east.
Tammy’s Community Roles:
She is business-minded and good in managerial positions: she is largely responsible for logistical production and budgeting of the community’s food produce, as well as the water and fuel monitor.
She is also creative and a primary inventor of games and craft activities, into which she involves herself wholly and enthusiastically.
Character:
Tammy is assertive and very confident. She is full of optimism and dislikes negativity. She will always see the positive in any situation. She can be extremely warm and affectionate, but also fickle and moody, and will blow hot and cold in most relationships. She does, however, like to be liked – she needs to be liked – and will install herself as the creative innovator in most social scenarios in order to be the one in control of social dynamics – not necessarily in order to be the centre of attention, but so as others will remember who it was brought them all together. She forms a few close friendships, which she will invest in on a personal and emotional level, but is in her element in larger social groups.
An extract from Tammy’s story (so far unedited):
“When I played on the beaches until well after dark my father told me I was naïve and my mother told me I was brave. I’m sure they knew something was coming. I had friends to play with at school – there were many of us – speaking many languages – Greek, Hebrew, Lebanese, Italian and English – we were diasporas even then, even though that’s where I was born and where I grew up, and the only place I’d known as home. And it felt like mine – it did not feel like I was not rooted to that place – my history was a story washing in and out with every wave, but leaving its stones upon my beach. My stones. On my beach. It didn’t matter to me that this sand was foreign to my parents, and even to my eldest brother who wasn’t born there as me and my other brother were…
… Omar left that night. The train from town would take him to the main port on the other side of the island, and a boat from there would take him to the mainland. We hoped that there he might be united with Jonathan, but we could never know for sure. Mother wanted to drive him to the station in town, but he wouldn’t let her. He left the house alone, as he did every morning for school, and walked off into the darkness. Sometimes I like to believe that he never went to town, never took that train or boarded the boat, but went to the beach and disappeared into the dunes, where the world was un-peopled and quiet of voices, except for those of the wind and the waves and the gulls. But if that had happened there would have been an enquiry from the military, which never came, so he must have gone with them in the end…
In the speed of it, and the silence – because I did not scream and he was not shouting – we were for a few seconds embracing. His embrace pinned my arms to my sides and had lifted me off my feet. I was looking directly into his eyes. There was nothing and nowhere between us. We were transported, the two of us, to a place where the histories that had brought us to this moment were washed away, and we were equal and unified. In each other’s eyes we saw a different future to the one that was trying, all around us at that moment, to be realised. But he looked away. He would not hold my gaze. And that future was gone, and my home, and everything I’d ever known or understood…”
Clegyrheli Cliff-Edge Community
If I could find names for the main story locations then it might be a bit easier – at least less vague – but I have no ideas at all yet. So I’m going to find some temporary names: my cliff-edge community is in South Wales (UK!), I know this much, and what I should have done is pack my book of Welsh place-names and their meanings before leaving for Angola – and it’s a tiny book and I had a good idea that I’d set this part of the book in Wales, so I don’t know why I didn’t think of it… I guess I had too much to think about – I was bound to leave something behind… So, this place will do while I wait for my next chance to get hold of my place-names book, and the cliff-edge community will be Clegyrheli. (I think it means ’saltwater cliff’, or something close…). It fits for now, anyway.
Clegyrheli Community, Clegyrheli, South Wales
Population: 25
Settlers: Original Founders: Amber, Duncan, Caitlin, Paige, Skye, Trudy, Marshall, Thirzah, Harper, June & Flora
Location: On top of a cliff, on one side of a protruding ridge, at least a mile long. (Inspired by a place on the Gower, where a shipwreck protrudes from the sea). The beach is long and wide, and the sea mostly rough. Many birds, mostly gulls, nest and roost in the long, steep rock-face that leads down to the caves beneath the rock-face, and about two hundred metres into the sea the large wooden shards of an upward pointing ancient shipwreck. When the tide is out the wreck is almost completely exposed, although most of it is buried deeply in thick, always wet, sand. The bank up from the back is sharply steep, and covered in thick gorse-bush land. A deserted white house sits in its midst. A steep stairway cut into the rock and brush-land lead up to the community homestead from the beach.
If Ged Quinn did coastline paintings, then the community would be based inside one of his fantastically dark, brooding landscapes. Even without the ocean, his paintings are impressed deeply, like seeping spilt paints seeking out all the gaps and crevices, in my imagination.
The location was chosen for its isolation and hostile weather and living conditions. The more difficult, and unappealing it is, to find, the more likely it is that the settlers’ will be left alone. They don’t want to be found. There is very little chance that they will be discovered by inland raiders, armies, groups of bandits or spies, because of their extreme location, teetering on the edge of the continent, hidden by and protected by barricades of rain, ferocious wind, storms, and extreme inaccessibility.
The community’s vulnerability is that in its desire to be as far out on the extremity of land as possible, it is, therefore, at risk from the sea: not necessarily from the elements of the ocean itself (although that is a daily danger for the residents who must use it for cockling and fishing), but from sea-ported armies and ocean-raiders.
Community logistics: this will be a process of learning about self-sufficient small communities, but for starters:
Food: vegetable plots: potatoes, carrots, onions, beans, lettuce, tomatoes (need glass-houses), blackberries, gooseberries, rhubarb, pumpkins, sweet potatoes, wheat (?) for bread, apples, pears, herbs. They do not eat meat, but they do fish. Cockles and mussels also. They graze a few goats for milk, not for meat. And a few chickens for eggs, again not for meat. From the milk, basic yoghurt, cheese and butter can be made. What do they do for sugar? (Salt will be extracted from the sea… need to find out how…!). Can sugar-cane be grown in a cold climate? Maybe during part of the year – since climate change is making the summers much hotter (and the winters much colder…?)…
Drink: milk from the goats. Initially they boil and cool water from the fresh-water well, and later find a way to bring running water into the homestead. They find a way to make tea, and they drink vegetable and herb juices, but there is no coffee, or chocolate…
Cooking: initially done over fires in an external but sheltered part of the homestead, eventually external and smaller internal wood-burning stoves/ovens are installed. These same stoves/ovens fuel the water tanks, once installed, to heat the now internally running water.
Toiletries, cosmetics & medicines: initially small groups venture out to raid the nearest villages (the nearest is five-six miles away) for leftover stock, and since most of the area is untouched after the deaths and desertions, this keeps the community going for a while. Meanwhile, others are making research (once electricity is installed and they are able to use internet via hyper-extended wi-fi), into homemade concoctions and herbal remedies. They are able to make basic soap and penicillin this way (need to find out how…).
All jobs are done by all community members, on rotations, although there are members who specialise, or choose to be apprentice to specialists, in certain areas. For example, Anouk specialises in fishing and Tammy specialises in account and data keeping (of food stocks and wood consumption, for example).
Philosophy and origin stories: these are not adults who have made a considered and reasoned decision to live an alternative lifestyle. These are children and young adults who have no choice but to do so. The world they’ve crossed out of – or which has crossed out of them – has not served them well: its philosophies, politics, religions, and origin myths have resulted in a decimated and desolate world. Of the people there is very little left, but of the environment – the unpeopled world – there is still very much of it, and it is biting back with a vengeance, taking advantage of the weakened and depleted population to assert itself and determine the world’s future. So the few that are left – maybe spared by their environment – must learn to live in absolute synchrony with their environment if they are to survive. Perhaps that is why the world largely left children untouched, since they have time still to learn. They also learn to create empathetic technology, so that people, of the human, natural and technological kind might live in some kind of harmony.
So the religions and myths of the old world are largely abandoned. The only one which makes a reappearance, though in moderated form, is the story of Lilith. Although, ‘her’ sex is never alluded to – ‘she’ is not necessarily female – they eventually declare themselves to be lilim (children of Lilith, in Hebrew), perhaps, for them, more literally in connection with the flower than with the myth, and perhaps these flowers are found at the same time as an owl is seen… Ok, going to need a separate section for the origin stories of the commune…! Above everything, the important thing is that the origin myths do not favour humans over any other life-form, and certainly do not promote the male over the female, and do not insist upon heterosexual connections between humans and animals. The myths also involve little to no ritual, since rituals cannot be trusted not to create rules and impose hierarchy.
I also need to look more closely into Welsh myths and legends and see if there is something (beyond the Holy Grail and Arthur) that can be of use to the people growing into this new world (maybe in the Taliesin?).
Another very strong aspect of community history-weaving and myth-making, is the telling and documenting of its members’ stories. Each community resident must write or tell their story for the others, and in this way each one of them and their histories forms the fabric of the community’s narrative history and textured foundations. No-one’s story is given precedence over another, and they are all important to a social understanding of the community. Their diversity and skewed timescales (since it’s very difficult to combine the tales with any kind of accurate chronology) rearrange history, and the way that history is recorded. No-one has any authority over it – it somehow tells itself in the order it desires, since time has lost a lot of its meaning, and the personal tales of ordinary people, telling the tales of their lives (and not of their gods) forms the patchwork storytelling myths of this new society.
Chapter One
I’ll state my intentions, for me more than anything, to keep me focussed: I want to keep this blog for writing projects. Not necessarily the same one, but I certainly intend to use it for my current large writing project: a scrap-book for ideas and images: a notepad for character developments and plot structuring. I think this could be really useful to me: to see ideas take shape, and to see writing in print before its point of no return: to have something fluid and lucid, flexible and changeable. Exactly how writing should be… And if anyone out there happens to accidentally stumble across this blog, then I might even get some input and ideas from outside… and help make this writing project the textured patchwork quilt I can only at present imagine… while it awaits realisation…
I don’t have a name or title yet for my current book, so I’m not sure how I’ll refer to it. It’s in the realm of the speculative or utopic/dystopic, splitting an already split world to tell the stories of two communities; one in each split: the first are the survivors of a first world who form a commune on the Welsh coast. The other is a commune living amidst the random structures of a war-torn city in what would be second or third world (maybe the middle east). But this is not a binaric world of polar opposites, so there will be plenty of storytelling in margins, plenty of travel tales between each world, and plenty of third spaces. At the same time the two worlds will unravel and reveal the ways in which they are two sides of the same coin.
My writing is my own, but in the back of my mind, whispering their own quiet stories, are the works of writers such as Ursula Le Guin, Marge Piercy and Margaret Atwood. So I’ve chosen as the first picture for this digital scrapbook, a picture I found in DeviantArt that reminds me of many of Ursula Le Guin’s worlds. I think it’s too green and lush to be a visualisation of any part of my climate-ravaged world, but still, there’s something there, perhaps in the lone figure, that evokes a feeling that equally lonely characters in my world might also feel…
Meanwhile, in its own way, this blog is going to be its own little world, and I hope its languages will be multiple, and its colours explosive, and its cultures diverse… Isn’t this what digital story-telling is all about…?
