Not Exactly AtF...

So another week passes without After the Flood. I’d apologize, but I’m not particularly sorry. The last couple weeks I’ve mostly felt like I’ve been trying to judge flung handfuls of monkey crap in order to get out of the way without finding myself covered in it. Oh, and there’s been some phenomenal storytelling. So that part was good. However, I am extremely worn out right now. And the idea of delving in to Bill Cooper’s insanity while worn out seems like a bad idea. Also, I’m starting to tire of the whole blogging thing, honestly. Last spring kind of gave it a new lease on life when I started talking about leaving Christianity, but I’m tired of talking about it. I feel, too, that I keep using it as a crutch, where I feel like I should write something, so I slap up a re-written version of some random crap I already said two months ago. Then I have to go and incorporate Her in order to make a point even though she could be lying dead in a ditch for all I care and I’m right back where I started from. I want to write about history. I want to write about storytelling. I want to write about art and Lawrence Weschler and the random people I meet as I travel down my road of life. But I don’t know if I can do it in this forum. I feel like I’ve written myself in to a corner. That and the fact that there are only so many things I can do with my day. If I pick one thing up I have to drop another. I barely get enough sleep as it is. And I’m starting to feel that life’s too short for blogging. It’s certainly too short to waste reading Bill Cooper’s shitty, shitty book only to find out that a sizable chunk of the readership of this blog apparently thinks it’s not worth reading. Not the book, mind you, the posts that I write about it. There have to be better things I can do with my Sundays, right? I mean, today I went in to the city and saw some friends at the storytelling tent at Celtic Fest. That was a much better use of my Sunday than Bill Cooper. He’s trying to turn Celtic myth in to history. Megan Wells told Celtic myth as it’s supposed to be and I can pretty much guarantee I got way more out of the latter than the former. Although something interesting did occur to me while I was there. Judith Heineman and Dan Marcotte told the legend of the two dragons. It starts five hundred years before the birth of Merlin. Two dragons, a red and a white, were terrorizing the countryside. The king convinced them to fight each other, which only made things worse. Eventually they got the pair drunk and trapped them in a cave. A few (five, to be precise) centuries later there was a new king, a usurper named Vortigern. He tried to build a castle above the cave in which were trapped the long-forgotten dragons. They were still fighting, however. And as they fought they knocked the king’s castle over. Well the king was pissed. So he had his wise men come up with a plan and they said to sacrifice a powerful young boy. That boy turned out to be Merlin, who had a much better idea. He said he knew that there were two dragons fighting beneath the mountain one which the castle wasn’t being built. So they dug up the cave and released the dragons. The red finally got the upper hand and killed its rival. Vortigern offered Merlin a place in his court. Merlin declined, saying that Vortigern would soon be dead and that his successor would be receiving the wizard’s services. That successor’s name was to be Arthur. Judith and Dan stopped there. This is where the storyteller illuminates that which the historian cannot. But this is also where the historian steps back in to understand the story. See, the red dragon is preserved today on the flag of Wales. So we can understand this story as an allegory. The red dragon was the Britons, who were at that time being beat back by the Saxons, represented by the white dragon. The fighting amongst the Britons had ravaged the land. The invasions of the Saxons had ravaged the land. But part of the reason the Saxons were there in the first place was because they were invited. By Vortigern. At least, that’s the way it worked according to the legend. So this story had nothing to do with two actual dragons who were destroying crops and consuming livestock. The marauding creatures were men. The massively destructive fight was the series of wars and raids that were slowly draining the land of its vitality. And, of course, the Arthurian legend was of the king who could unify the Britons. Arthur, son of Uther Pendragon. You know, Chief Dragon. Possibly a red dragon, for all I know. But Nennius did not tell the story of a king with a bad sense of friend and ally. He did not tell a story of endless war and the attempt to drive the Saxons from the shores of Britain. He told the story of two dragons that was taken from the Mabinogion. This is why historians can discredit Nennius. There were destructive creatures traveling the lands of Britain. But they were the same destructive creatures we see so often in so many places: men. And that’s our lesson for the day.