Echoes in a Hollow Space

This post is long and a mixed bag of things. If you're only interested in Hellier, you can skip everything past the picture of The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns, and Fairies.

I did a marathon watching of all ten hours of Hellier Season 2 on Friday—as after cooking two large meals that week and housecleaning, I wasn’t up for much more than viewing and eating leftovers. It’s currently available for free on Amazon Prime (as is Season 1), and in a couple of weeks will also be available for free on YouTube.

I rather wish I had watched it at a more leisurely pace because I got rather tuckered out there at the end. I’m still trying to process it (and have been rewatching it slowly for the past few days) and I might have processed it better if it had been in smaller chunks. Or maybe not.

I did manage a brief Amazon review:

Season One of Hellier was a perfect little gem of high strangeness, evoking that tumbling feel of falling into a storm of the synchronicities. That storm continues in season 2, tumbling harder and stranger. It has the authentic feel of lived experience rather than staged paranormal TV. We ride along with the participants, feeling their puzzlement and insecurities, their disbelief and belief, and watching as things shift and shift again. If you are looking for pat answers and highly manipulated content, this may not be the series for you. But if you have realized that asking questions is the most important thing, Hellier will give you that thrill of late-night discussions with friends trying to figure out the mysteries of the Universe.

My head's so full of Major Stuff that I can't talk about because, spoilers. I may post again in a couple of weeks after people have had a chance to watch. For now, I'll just say that at the end of episode 9 I used some sweetgrass oil, just in case, and drew a protective sigil on my TV screen before watching episode 10. Also, as soon as those damned tones started I got nauseated. You’ll know the tones I mean if you watch it. The same thing happened with a recent “Haunted Salem Live” sigil experiment done by Greg and Dana Newkirk. So. Mass initiation or suggestibility? I'm still not sure. And that's in the true spirit of Hellier, I think. Questions are more important than answers.



There are very mild spoilers in the following. Skip to *** if you don’t want even that.

I will say this, and with all due respect to Tyler Strand, I do believe the carving he saw on the tree was not a green man but Odin. Which suggests an entirely different focus of worship in North Carolina than in...that other place. And does nothing, of course, to negate the strangeness he experienced. And speaking as a geezer, if some odd young man showed up at my door going on about strange things in the woods, I might also have called the police. It doesn’t mean abominable practices were going on there, just that whatever or Whoever they worship, they probably figured it was none of his gods damned business.



***Okay, it’s safe now.

After viewing Hellier 2 there were many books I wanted to read and reread. I already had, and had already read, many of the ones they recommend: Passport to Magonia by Jacques Vallee, The Trickster and the Paranormal by George P. Hansen, Daimonic Reality by Patrick Harpur, The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns, and Fairies by the Reverend Robert Kirk (written in the 17th c. and widely referred to in paranormal circles), and others. I thought it might be time to reread Kirk again, since it’s really just a tract, not a long book, and it fit in with some of the research I’ve been doing lately for my current novel. Somewhere in this house I have a 1991 reprint of Kirk edited by RJ Stewart but of course I couldn't find it. I once had a very neat filing system for my books, but that was before the chaos of the last house move and the caregiving years that followed, alas.



I notice that you can even buy this Andrew Lang edition as a Kindle book now. I love living in the digital age. But since I spent beaucoup $ in the 70s xeroxing this at the UCLA Research Library, I don't think I'll spend anymore money on it. I'd forgotten that I'd filled it up with pink highlighter. It was interesting to see that I didn’t find all those passages relevant anymore, although some overlapped.

Back in the ancient days when I was a student at UCLA, they had two original copies of The Secret Commonwealth, the original 1815 imprint from his 17th c. manuscript, and the 1893 Andrew Lang one, in the open stacks of the Research Library—a holdover from the days when Thelma Moss ran a paranormal research program there. Research libraries were the only places you could find these back then.

I've thought about those books since and wondered if anyone had the sense to put them in the restricted access area of the library or if, Rev. Kirk-like, they have subsequently been kidnapped by the fairies. Or other beings of more malicious intent. Somebody I know may have mentioned their rarity to one of the librarians, who didn't seem that interested. Probably thought that someone a pedantic busybody or just another arsehole student trying to tell her what to do. I appreciated having easy access to them, but also know it's a very sharp 2-edged sword: not even the Library of Congress can protect against theft, individuals deciding their wants are more important than access to that cultural heritage for the rest of us.

Ah well.

Below are some notes and quoted passages from the current reread. Some are relevant to Hellier 2, some relevant to my current research, but I thought someone might find them interesting.

• The Rev. Kirk says that females rarely have the second sight. That's a 17th century male elite conceit, I believe. If women spoke of having second sight back in that day they would likely be burned.

Random quote of the day:

“When I sit down in order to write, sometimes it’s there; sometimes it’s not. But that doesn’t bother me anymore. I tell my students there is such a thing as “writer’s block,” and they should respect it. You shouldn’t write through it. It’s blocked because it ought to be blocked, because you haven’t got it right now.”

—Toni Morrison, Black Women Writers at Work, ed. Claudia Tate

 

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Lucy and Ethel, Justin Bieber, or the Kardashian Klan. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

 

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

Random quote of the day:

“In a creative writing class of twenty people anywhere in this country, six students will be startlingly talented. Two of those might actually publish something by and by. [What distinguishes those two from the rest is that] they will have something other than literature itself on their minds. They will probably be hustlers, too. I mean that they won’t want to wait passively for somebody to discover them. They will insist on being read.”

—Kurt Vonnegut, interview, The Paris Review, Issue 69, Spring 1977

 

 

Disclaimer:  The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

 

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

Random quote of the day:


"When you're a law student, they tell you that if you can't argue the law, argue the facts. They also tell you if you can't argue the facts, argue the law. If you can't argue either, apparently, the solution is to go on a public relations offensive and make it a political issue...to say over and over again "it's lawful," and to think that the American people will somehow come to believe this if we say if often enough."

—David Cole, Georgetown Law Professor, on a speech by Alberto Gonzales



Thanks to merebrillante for the quote.

( Illustrated version. )

When I was twelve or thirteen a teacher gave me a book because she thought I might like it. The book was The Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliff—and the teacher was oh so right. It followed a young Roman officer, Marcus, on his first command in the frontier fort of Isca Dumnoniorum, present day Exeter in Britain, circa 129 A.D.. The larger story was about him trying to find out what happened to his father, a centurion in the infamous Lost Ninth Legion, whom legend said marched into the wilds of Caledonia never to be heard of again.

I ate that book up, and started scouring all the libraries in the area for other books in the series, all set in Roman Britain and the Dark Ages, and tracing many generations of the same family as they lived through the chaos and war of those years. I never found them all and back in the day there were no used book dealers all hooked up by the Internet so I rarely found one in stores.

I remember what a huge sense of victory I felt when I actually did find a Sutcliff book in a store: The Shield Ring. I can't remember now if I found it in a new or used bookstore. Another big moment came when I browsed the bookshelf of a neighbor and found Sword at Sunset, Sutcliff's version of the Arthurian saga. It was a nice hardcover edition and I had to beg for weeks before she'd let me borrow it. I didn't immediately tear into it like I wanted to. I had a sense that it might be amongst the last of Sutcliff's books I'd be able to lay hands on because I really had wrung out all the libraries and I wanted to savor it. In point of fact, it was the last Sutcliff book I read.

Many years flowed under the bridge of my life and I'd occasionally think about those Sutcliff books I'd tried so hard to find and never did. I always remembered The Eagle of the Ninth with a special place in my heart: it became one of those primogenitor books for me, one that burned like a steady light in the back of my imagination. My character from The Making Blood, Caius Cassivellaunus, was a kind of tribute to those books. Because of them I was fascinated by Dark Age Britain and always wanted to write something about it.

Writing about Caius, I think, is what finally prompted me to remember Ms. Sutcliff and the profound effect she'd had on my imagination. I started looking for those books online. I didn't have to look far. Amazon had a newly published copy of Eagle and some of the others. I immediately bought Eagle and when it arrived, I put it in the To Be Read Pile...and never read it. I was afraid to read it, truth be told, afraid that it wouldn't be as special as I remembered, and then that luminous place in my heart would be tarnished. It must have sat in that pile for four or five years until last week when I came across Rosemary Sutcliff again while researching something else on the Net. It was time to take a chance, I thought.

I'm thrilled to report that I love this book as much as I loved it all those years ago, that practically every page tells me just how much of Ms. Sutcliff's style and worldview I internalized, how she taught me so much about telling a damned good story with heart. I owe her a great deal.

I owe the teacher who gave me that book so many years ago a great deal, too. Rarely do teachers ever find out how far the ripples spread from their good deeds, from those they teach and out into the world. Teachers create a little piece of eternity inside their students when they do things like this, the ripples spreading on in little and big ways, as long as someone remembers and shares what they remember with the people they know.