Taliesin and Londres

I’ve been listening to some Loreena McKennitt music lately, and also reading C.S. Lewis’s novel Till We Have Faces (which takes place in a barbaric country on the border of ancient Greece, basically). More than ever before, I’ve been struck by one thing:

Ancient Greece is dry to me.

Or conversely, my soul of souls is Celtic. (British in the older sense.) I don’t really know quite how to explain this; Tolkien strikes at the deepest part of my heart, but books like Till We Have Faces are dry, gritty, and rather uninteresting to me. I just don’t care for old Greece. (And this coming from someone who has studied Attic Greek.) I feel the same towards Rome, but Latin was used in Britain and so it has a special place in my heart.

Geographically, forests and brooks and hills — the topography of Britain, really — is like a juicy apple to me, but whatever’s down there in Greece and Rome is comparatively dull. I don’t mean that there aren’t forests and brooks and hills there, of course, but there’s some kind of substantial difference. I can’t quite put my finger on it. Britain feels more…green? I don’t know. I wonder if this is due to my culture/upbringing, and if so, which parts. (Do those in the Middle East feel for the desert what I feel for the woods?)

Let me quickly add that this is primarily an attitude toward the past, not toward the cultures of the present. And it doesn’t mean I don’t want to study ancient Greece or Rome; it’s just that they don’t interest me nearly as much as Celtic Britain. Here’s a rough ranking:

1. Britain
2. Russia
3. Spain
4. The North (Scandinavia and Germany and such)
5. Middle East/Persia
6. Africa
7. South America
8. Ancient Greece/Rome/Etruscans/Hittites/Sumerians etc.
9. Native America
10. Asia

Again, this doesn’t mean I have anything against Greece or Rome or Native America or Asia. It’s just an attempt to figure out these built-in predilections towards Britain and perhaps uncover why they’re there. (Or at least be able to define them.) And so far I’m not doing so well. :)

Maybe it has to do with one’s ancestry. Half of my lines come from Britain, so that could very well be it. But I’m a quarter Italian and thus almost assuredly have Roman ancestry, and yet I don’t feel towards Rome the way I do towards England and Wales and Ireland and Scotland.

Having written all this out, I still don’t feel like I’ve gotten any nearer the heart of the issue, other than establishing that I really, really like Britain and I don’t care so much for Rome or Greece. And I already knew that! ~sigh~ I suspect this is one of those posts that ought to be filed away for future revision, but oh well. Maybe one of you will have words of wisdom to share. :)

And now for something different. Here’s a poem I wrote back in August, by the way, entitled “Silver Tresses.”

Silver tresses wink with smile of years,
A life of joy, a road of tears,
Wrinkles left from worried fears,
Golden mem’ries, friendships dear.
A cloudless window opens, clear,
And He’s near, very near.

I understand this issue. There are some cultures I feel kinship toward and others I don’t as much. I think it may have to do with how much experience I’ve had with a culture’s literary tradition. Anglophilia, I’ve noticed, tends to particularly afflict those who read a lot and who love language. Since our literary heritage comes from Britain, we bibliophiles and linguiphiles learn to love Britain. We may not feel as much affinity for certain cultures because we don’t have as much experience with their literature. Of course, your post was inspired by your experience reading a text from one of the cultures you don’t feel an affinity for, so my theory may be utter rot after all. Maybe it does have to do with the “forests and brooks and hills.”

I’ll have to send you the essay I’m writing for my LDS literature class when I’m done. It’s all about the guilt I feel over not loving the desert. Everyone in my family has fond memories of Southern Utah, including the Dixie desert. I don’t like the desert, even though I was born in Kanab, Utah. I’m just not a fan of heat and sand. Give me the moist, salty air and thick, green foliage of the Northern California coast. There’s a thrill I get watching a thick blanket of fog roll down verdant hills that I’ve never experienced in the desert.

You really ought to watch The Secret of Roan Inish.

Taliesen . . . mmmmm. Did you see the Frank Lloyd Wright doc this last week, then?

Katherine: I’d thought of that — that I love Britain because I’ve mostly read British lit — but it doesn’t seem to be connected. I.e., the affinity or lack thereof comes before I read the literature, not after. Genetic coding, perhaps? Life’s work? No idea. :) Yes, do send me your essay. I don’t love the desert, either, and I can’t understand how anyone would want to live in Vegas or New Mexico or Arizona. Seriously. :)

e: Only the last five minutes (and I wished then that I’d seen the whole thing). I didn’t know Wright’s estate was called Taliesin — random coincidence. What I had in mind when I titled the post was Charles Williams’ Arthurian Torso, and I thought it was subtitled something like “Taliesin through Londres,” but I’m not finding anything close to that on Google. Maybe I misremembered. Oh, rats. Yeah, I totally got it wrong: it was “Taliessin through Logres.” Whoops. :) (”Londres” is the French name for London, apparently, and I mixed it up with “Logres,” which was the name of King Arthur’s realm in Britain.) Drat. :) Anyway, I suppose my post title still works, since it kind of has to do with London, sort of. ~sigh~