DUNAWAY BOOKS
NEWSLETTER FOR THE MONTH OF OCTOBER
***
Beauty has a tarnished dress,
And a patchwork cloak of cloth
Dipped deep in mournfulness,
Striped like a moth.
Wet grass where it trails
Dyes it green along the hem;
She has seven silver veils
With cracked bells on them.
She is tired of all these--
Grey gauze, translucent lawn;
The broad cloak of Herakles.
Is tangled flame and fawn.
Water and light are wearing thin:
She has drawn above her head
The warm enormous lion skin
Rough red and gold.
--Elinor Morton Hoyt Wylie, October
***
Greetings
to you all in this rusty ragged month of October. The season for
long walking has just begun, when one can eat up distance with one’s feet for
hours while thinking long thoughts and continually being refreshed by the
lively air. As the small creatures begin
rushing to lay in their winter stores, the trees that
make up their own cities seem to be as full of secrets as they are acorns and aromatic
seeds and bits of cat food and whatever else Ratatosk
the squirrel can lay his tiny quick hands upon.
To the rambling autumn observer, houses and apartment buildings begin to
acquire a similar appearance of indwelling mystery; both bark and bricks are
full of faces, obscure messages, hints of tales just out of immediate reach. After a long out-of-doors summer, the rhythm
of life turns around and begins to do its work within. This is the month leading up to the honoring
of the dead in many cultures, to celebrating the ancestors and acknowledging
their legacies. Many believe that cracks
open in the world of our perception that allow other realities to reach us in
this time. Perhaps it is true, even if
only that in this pirouetting of the season we see things ordinarily hidden,
and in that the transient spectacular phenomena of autumn shake us out of
complacency and force us to confront inevitable unpredictable Change. The leaves’ leathery fire waits all summer in
green to be released and blaze briefly before austere November extinguishes it
to gray. Ordinary houses on an orange
and gold-strewn street appear different in the light of that fire. Stories flicker within human-built
structures, sparks in cupped hands, little candles in a gourd. The painted particles of color cladding their
external surfaces shift to a different frequency, and everything sheds a little,
revealing inner layers and depths. A glorious raiment of scales and scabs trails down and
around organic things, and husks and shells flutter down to earth like petals
or discarded wings.
Among the fading gardens and
before the doors of homes, other things pop up:
shrouded lamp-posts with tied-on arms and masks, pumpkins where no
pumpkins were before, and eerie tableaux of all imaginable varieties. At a time when both the dead and other assorted
spirits are said to be able to better get our attention than during the rest of
the year, effigies and masks serve both as acknowledgement and
prophylactic. The ancestors, the fey or
good folk, and less pleasant entities all begin to
blur if one digs far enough back in folklore, and it is traditionally best to
make sure all angles are covered. A
twilight stroll will show that the hands of both adults and children have been
busy in welcoming this time leading up to Hallowe’en,
a night “noted for mummers or guisers, figures found
at winter festivals in general but particularly appropriate to a night upon
which supernatural beings were said to be abroad and could be imitated or
warded off by human wanderers. In
Ireland costumes were sometimes associated with the people who went about
before nightfall collecting for the feast…The traditional illumination for guisers and pranksters abroad on the night in some places
was provided by turnips or mangel wurzels,
hollowed out to act as lanterns and often carved with grotesque faces to
represent spirits and goblins. They were
common in
‘It’s Spunky Night, it’s
Spunky Night,
Gie’s a
candle, Gie’s a light.
If’ee don’t ‘ee’ll have a fright.’
…The lanterns made from
vegetables were known elsewhere in the early twentieth century, for example at Wyke Regis, on Dorset’s Isle of Portland, and Whitwell in
central Hertfordshire. In eastern
(--from Ronald Hutton, Stations of the Sun)
Many of the ‘divinatory
practices’ mentioned dealt with the prediction of marriages; sometimes it was
known as ‘Nut-crack Night’, after the practice of throwing marked chestnuts
into a fire to see which caught fire first.
Families in the British Isles, the Ozarks and the Appalachians held (and
may still hold) ‘dumb suppers’, silent meals honoring the dead; sometimes performed
backwards and served on black dishes, the meal not only fed and comforted the
ones thought to be on the other side, but inquired of them regarding the young
women at the feast and their coming prospects.
Folks back then were nothing if not practical! This window of overlapping traditions and
observations is somewhat fluid; as with the phases of the moon, the special
time fades in and out rather than flipping on and off again like an electric
light. Activities often continue beyond
one day and night; after Halloween comes All Saints’ Day, and All Souls’ Day,
and further south, the exquisitely artistic and phantasmagorical Dia de los Muertos,
continuing the festival of remembrance and celebration through November.
We have tried to spread a
little of the seasonal energy around the front of the shop, as you may have
noticed if you’ve stopped in this week.
We have also finished filling the areas behind the front desk and in the
back above the bench with sets, with more to come out in time. The Religion and Philosophy sets will still
live in their respective sections, but all other sets will be together. Some are leatherbound
and quite attractive, while others have interesting provenance: one, a 7-volume Fitzgerald set, belonged to
Henry Cabot Lodge! There is a Burton
Arabian Nights with a bold and very Victorian slanted title design on the
spines, a rare twenty-volume George Sand, and a Flaubert set, for those who
want lurid classical gore, hard social realism and mysticism all in one
package. One of the pleasures of having a
set of an author’s works is the experience of charting their evolution as
thinker or artist throughout their lives and eras; quite different than the
seeming absolutes of one work, produced at one point in time. The journey a writer makes is often as
important as the individual places visited, and is sometimes where the real
relevance to society and culture is to be found. Our intellectual ancestors were as human as
any of us, and as frail and fallible, and that comprises an important part of
their gift to those who face the future.
We would like to extend a thank
you to all who came out to see Thollem McDonas when he performed with Darin Gray and Eric Hall on
Sunday, the 2nd of this month.
Our normally quiet lower level filled up with chairs, equipment,
attentive listeners, and the sounds of a pure and intense modern virtuosity.
And so to all of you, we wish
you a happy Hallowe’en, Samhain,
Dia de los Muertos, and simply a happy Beginning of Autumn; may the
quick air invigorate your limbs, stir your memory and mind, and sharpen your inner
vision. May your
earth-born lanterns burn bright.
May the bogeys keep from your door, and if they insist upon persisting,
sweeten them up with a sugar blessing…
***
The wood is full of shining eyes,
The wood is full of creeping feet,
The wood is full of tiny cries:
You must not go to the wood at night!
I met a man with eyes of glass,
And a finger as curled as the wriggling worm,
And hair all red with rotting leaves,
And a stick that hissed like a summer snake.
The wood is full of shining eyes,
The wood is full of creeping feet,
The wood is full of tiny cries:
You must not go to the wood at night!
He sang me a song in backwards words,
And drew me a dragon in the air.
I saw his teeth through the back of his head,
And a rat's eyes winking from his hair.
The wood is full of shining eyes,
The wood is full of creeping feet,
The wood is full of tiny cries:
You must not go to the wood at night!
He made me a penny out of a stone,
And showed me the way to catch a lark
With a straw and a nut and a whispered word
And a pennorth of ginger wrapped up in a leaf.
The wood is full of shining eyes,
The wood is full of creeping feet,
The wood is full of tiny cries:
You must not go to the wood at night!
He asked me my name, and where I lived;
I told him a name from my Book of Tales;
He asked me to come with him into the wood
And dance with the Kings from under the hills.
The wood is full of shining eyes,
The wood is full of creeping feet,
The wood is full of tiny cries:
You must not go to the wood at night!
But I saw that his eyes were turning to fire;
And I saw the nails grow on his wriggling hand;
I said my prayers all out in a rush,
And found myself safe on my father’s land.
The wood is full of shining eyes,
The wood is full of creeping feet,
The wood is full of tiny cries:
You must not go to the wood at night!
--Henry Treece,
The Magic Wood
***
Tell me what you see in it :
The pine tree like a Rorschach-blot
black against the orange light :
Plant an orange pumpkin patch
which at twelve will quaintly hatch
nine black mice with ebon coach,
or walk into the orange and make
a devil's cataract of black
obscure god's eye with corkscrew fleck;
put orange mistress half in sun,
half in shade, until her skin
tattoos black leaves on tangerine.
Read black magic or holy book
or lyric of love in the orange and black
till dark is conquered by orange cock,
but more pragmatic than all this,
say how crafty the painter was
to make orange and black ambiguous.
--Sylvia Plath, Black Pine Tree in an
***
I SPOT the hills
With yellow balls in autumn.
I light the prairie cornfields
And I am called pumpkins.
On the last of October
When dusk is fallen
Children join hands
And circle round me
Singing ghost songs
And love to the harvest moon;
I am a jack-o'-lantern
With terrible teeth
And the children know
I am fooling.
--Carl Sandburg, Theme
in Yellow
***
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