Shakespeare and Alice

I once read a novel called Mythago Wood in which a forest was a sort of otherworldly zone from which mythical figures occasionally emerged into the everyday realm. The main character saw this happening and kept trying to cross the barrier that kept ordinary humans out of the mythical space, which turned out to be a tough go. The idea of the forest as a sort of zone of the unconscious is a familiar one to most of us, so the existence of a patch of woods next to our local arboretum may help explain why walking there is often such an imaginative exercise.

Then, too, I've seen a number of Shakespeare plays produced in the arboretum in the past, which probably helps explain my penchant for peopling the park with his characters. I once had the idea that it would be fun to have a free-roaming theatre company enact scenes in various parts of the park instead of on a fixed stage, so that playgoers would stroll from one scene to another. Since the idea occurred to me, there's been no looking back. I'm sure this would entail a lot of logistical headaches, but just think how much fun it would be.

You might stage the beginning of A Midsummer Night's Dream in the parking lot to represent Athens, then move the bulk of the action to the park itself, with lovers, fairies, and rustics continually stumbling onto one another under the trees. Think how magical it would be on a summer's night to eavesdrop on the fleeing lovers in one leafy corner of the park and overhear Titania quarreling with Oberon in another, as the fireflies winked and the moon rose over the trees. I've been living with this idea for so long that I sometimes stage scenes in my head when I'm walking, picturing the mortals waking up in this particular grove, Puck flitting about behind that oak over there, and the rustics enacting Pyramus and Thisby using that low wall as a prop.

And why stop with A Midsummer Night's Dream? There's an open grassy area in back where I occasionally imagine Richard III stumbling about, calling out for a horse. That quiet corner with the arbor would do admirably for Friar Lawrence's cell, while the gazebo works for Juliet's balcony and bedroom. A patch of hilltop trees sheltering a shaded path translates in my mind into the gloomy corridors of Macbeth's castle, and over there, behind the hedge, is Ophelia's pond. That bowl-shaped meadow is plenty big enough to represent Agincourt and the meeting of Henry's army with the French. The garden, with its series of outdoor rooms, is the perfect spot for staging Much Ado About Nothing, while Julius Caesar could meet his murderers on that narrow walled court down by the roses.

Probably, the nature of the park itself--an open space of trees and fields shaped by human hands and filled with paths--situated next to a small but thickly wooded forest--contributes to my tendency to see it as a stage. It's part nature and part human and has, as a place set apart for no purpose other than leisure, a bit of a liminal feel. Your mind wanders as your eye roams over broad vistas punctuated with many intimate spaces, and there are numerous ways to explore aside from staying on the main path. Paths into and out of the woods provide access to a deeper imaginative realm. It's a writer's and an artist's dream.

The park tends to be well populated these days (see my post "Is That Really Necessary?") and much noisier than it used to be. It strikes me that the increased noise works to decrease the park's liminal qualities, making it harder to imagine Athens, Rome, Verona, or the English countryside. It's more of a neighborhood circus many days than a "thin place," but if you cultivate mental self-containment, it's still possible to have stolen moments of reverie, which gives walking there a sort of fitful charm.

I often encounter rabbits in and around the park, which takes me in a different but related direction, making me think of Alice drowsing on her river bank on a summer day--a subtle reminder that the world of the imagination is never far away, if indeed, there is really any distance at all. (Alternately, it's a reminder that any time spent in a public space these days, from the park to the shopping mall to social media, carries the possibility of falling down a rabbit hole--but let's accentuate the positive.) With the busy outside world surrounding the arboretum on all sides, the park still manages at times to fill the important function of providing room for imagination and untrammeled thought. For that, I thank it.

Thin Places

I've been thinking about an article I read yesterday by Jungian analyst Jerry Wright called "Thin Places and Thin Times." The title refers to the Celtic belief that there is but a curtain separating the everyday world from the world of faerie. The otherworld is the realm of the Tuatha De Danann, the magical people of legend in Ireland. Although Celtic spirituality holds that the everyday world is interpenetrated with spirit, some slight separation occurs, largely for practical reasons. It's said that because mortals found the constant mingling of the visible and invisible worlds distressing, the curtain was created long ago to separate them.

This curtain is really an illusion, since the two worlds always coexist, but the division reduced stress among the mortal folk, who must have been a little bedazzled by constantly bumping into mythic personages in the pre-curtain days. They wanted someplace a little more solid in which to carry on their everyday affairs, and they got it.

Still, there are certain places where the curtain is especially sheer and the passage between worlds is particularly easy. Certain wells, shrines, or crossroads, certain "fairy mounds" in the woods, are known to be "thin places" in Ireland. (There are also "thin times," like Samhain, which we call Halloween.) All kinds of wonderful things can happen in and around these thin places and times; one is apt to go for a walk and encounter a god sitting on a stile or be kidnapped by the faerie people and end up living for years in the otherworld.

Although the faerie people are often benign, they can be dangerous, especially if not given their due. In Jungian terms, the otherworld corresponds to the unconscious, so a particularly fluid connection to the unconscious corresponds to a Celtic thin place.

It might have been thinking about thin places that made me restless this weekend. I was walking through the neighborhood yesterday, enjoying the weather and the flowers and the blue sky, when I had the urge to go somewhere. I was a little frustrated when I couldn't think of a place that seemed right. I thought of driving to the Abbey at Gethsemani, where I have sometimes gone to sit and think, but in the end, it seemed too far to go.

Without putting a lot of thought into it, I ended up at the cemetery, which sounds like an odd place to be on a pretty April weekend, except that the cemetery here is beautiful in early spring. It's like an arboretum, with ponds, geese, tulips, flowering trees, and birdsong. A cemetery certainly is a borderland between life and death and would be considered "thin" by any standard -- not that I encountered anything there except sunshine and mild breezes.

Sometimes you can walk into a thin place without knowing it. I visited a bookstore last week, on a little street where Santa Monica and Venice come together, a few blocks from the sea. I had been there two years ago, when I bought a used copy of a novel by Kate Mosse called Labyrinth, Jorge Luis Borges' collection of writings called Labyrinths, and an anthology on Jung in literature. I liked the coziness of the small, crowded space and the kind, low-key manner of the proprietor, who exuded a sort of counterculture faerie king persona with his flowing hair and sage manner.

Last Saturday, when I walked in, the proprietor was sitting in the same place as before, and he greeted me in the same calm way. As I drifted toward the poetry section, I was startled to hear the opening chords of a moderately obscure pop song from the 1960s that carries a special weight for me. At the cash register, when the proprietor pointed out that one of the books I was buying was signed, I opened it to the inscription and saw my own name: "For Mary, wishing you bliss." The book, which I bought largely on the strength of the title, is called Bliss, Danger & Gods: Quotes of Risk & Passion, and it was signed more than 20 years ago.

Synchronicity, a little slippage between the visible and invisible in a liminal place, the curtain blown aside by a slight breeze from the sea? Or mere coincidence, a little trick of the mind to pass the time? The Irish say that when you have a numinous experience, a visitation from the gods, the appropriate thing to do is bow. So here is my bow, acknowledging a bit of bookstore magic on a sunny afternoon by the sea.