OUTSIDE THE HOUSE OF BAAL

“One of the most gifted of novelists. He has an instinctive sense of the ways in which men and women are shaped by their environment, an eye for the incident that reveals a character, a deep feeling for the poetry which is a part of everyday life, the sharp and loving clarity of some Dutch master.” – Goronwy Rees

“The greatest novel of anglophone Welsh literature.” – M. Wynn Thomas “The sort of writer who would be in the running for a Nobel Prize if Wales had lobbyists in Stockholm.”  – The Observer

"To acknowledge the scope and magnitude of Humphreys’s literary career ... In terms of sheer range and ambition and single-minded dedication, there isn’t anything comparable to it in modern Welsh writing. As a writer, it seems to me nothing less than astonishing." Tristan Hughes on the occasion of his 100th birthday.

"He has chronicled over a hundred years of Welsh life, part of which – the septet of novels that makes up The Land of the Living – is a kind of prose epic of the last century.

Emyr Humphreys saw himself as a European writer, as a novelist in the tradition of the great European novelists. To be a Welsh writer was, for him, to be a European writer. His Wales did not make sense without Europe.

And indeed it is one of those very cauldrons, belonging to a witch from Bala called Ceridwen, that in a roundabout fashion gives birth to the second, mythical and folkloric, incarnation of that book’s hero – Taliesin. For Emyr Humphreys the survival of Wales as an idea depends on that shape-shifting version of Taliesin, on his genius for adaptation, for finding new forms and combinations and voices, for turning up in fresh disguises. Every time a new Albie or a new Michael or a new Iorweth introduce themselves, the corners of Wales – as they always have – will multiply."

Democracy
(Illuminations XXXVII: Démocratie)

‘The flag goes with the foul landscape, and our dialect muffles the drum.
In the Interior we’ll nourish the most cynical prostitution. We’ll massacre logical rebellions.
To the spiced and sodden countries! – In the service of the most monstrous exploitations, industrial or military. Farewell here, no matter where. Voluntary conscripts we’ll possess a fierce philosophy: ignorant of science, wily for our comforts: let the world go hang. That’s true progress. Forward – march!’

“It is the business of the very few to be independent; it is a privilege of the strong. And whoever attempts it, even with the best right, but without being OBLIGED to do so, proves that he is probably not only strong, but also daring beyond measure. He enters into a labyrinth, he multiplies a thousand-fold the dangers which life in itself already brings with it; not the least of which is that no one can see how and where he loses his way, becomes isolated, and is torn piecemeal by some minotaur of conscience. Supposing such a one comes to grief, it is so far from the comprehension of men that they neither feel it, nor sympathize with it. And he cannot any longer go back! He cannot even go back again to the sympathy of men!” Nietzsche in 'Beyond Good and Evil.'

THE EPIC TALE OF THE FUGITIVE STAG IS A CELTIC ADVENTURE, A SHAMANIC QUEST … AND I HOPE, A SMALL CONTRIBUTION TO OUR NATIVE ‘TORCHES OF BEAUTY’ – WHOSE FLAME NOW BURNS, NOT ABOVE THE GLOOM OF THE GRAVE, BUT BRIGHTLY AT THE HEART OF THE ALCHEMICAL MYSTERY OF RE-BIRTH.

IN ‘THE DISCOVERY OF THE CELT’, Holbrook Jackson recognized Yeats as ‘the chief figure of the Celtic Renaissance … the fullest expression of the intellectual Celt – poet, mystic, and patriot – expressing himself in an imaginative propaganda which has affected the thoughts and won the appreciation of the English-speaking world.’   To convey the dominant mood of 1890s ‘Celticism’, however, Jackson placed at the head of his chapter a quotation from Fiona Macleod which reads in part:

“Through ages of slow westering, till now we face the sundown seas, we have learned in continual vicissitude that there are secret ways whereon armies cannot march. And this has been given to us, a more ardent longing, a more rapt passion in the things of outward beauty and in the things of spiritual beauty. Nor it seems to me is there any sadness, or only the serene sadness of a great day’s end, that, to others, we reveal in our best the genius of a race whose farewell is in a tragic lighting of torches of beauty around its grave.”   Pushed to the fringes of Europe, the Celtic race has, nonetheless, produced artists, like Yeats and Fiona herself, whose torches of beauty light the ritual burial scene and preserve the Celtic flame.

“Reason is intelligence taking exercise. Imagination is intelligence with an erection.” Victor Hugo

“Trust me not at all or all in all” – From Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s ‘Merlin & Vivien’  VI Lovers

Many of my robed brothers in cloisters
to the south dwell beneath
 the shade of bay trees.
I see how their Madonnas
 look so utterly human,
 And dream of Titan’s paintings,
how God glows in them like embers.
 
But when I settle into my own soul
I know my God is dark
 and like a clump of a hundred roots
drinking silently.
I lift myself from His warmth;
more than this I don’t know,
 for my branches rest in the depths and
 sway gently in the winds.
 
(Rilke)

From the beautiful Dyfi Valley, our home for many decades and the Valley of my birth.

The strange broadband mystery that plagued a Welsh village – and how it was finally solved https://www.dailypost.co.uk/news/north-wales-news/strange-broadband-mystery-plagued-welsh-18972639?utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=sharebar