leading to many unexpected places … Un cerf s’invite dans une église / Deer in a church https://youtu.be/KP6ayYZ-17s via @YouTube

Here’s hoping it leads me soon to an encounter with an exciting film director and/or producer …

Popular misconceptions about Shamanism – and Druidism – is one thing, but reducing my native spirituality to this inane marriage of slapstick and camp comedy and, at times, amateurish acting, is beyond the pale. Blasphemous. I had expected something better-worth (Butterworth*! Spot the subtle play on words!) than this, but it is possibly the worst bit of TV I have been witness to in my lifetime.

I know that these words by Macbeth are out of context, but maybe they best sum it up – ” it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” .” Let’s hope that it is but a “brief candle” and that there will be no ‘Fool Britannia’ III. Yes! Yes! “Out, out, brief candle.”

Hugo Rifkind best sums it up (The Times 8 November): “When the first series began, almost two years ago, I thus honestly wasn’t sure whether it represented a) a brilliant popular reinvention of British ancient history, or b) exactly what they were taking the piss out of …”

It is truly dreadful. I am a big fan of many of the cast, and I suppose from the point of view of paying their bills, it is a success. Series I may have started with 1 million viewers but 90% had turned off by the final episode.

‘Fool Britannia?’ – Maybe Shakespeare should have the last word: “Die, frantic wretch, for this accursed deed! (Titus Andronicus)

(*Award winner Jez Butterworth is the writer)

O loveliness fugitive! Whose glance has so suddenly caused me again to live,

Shall I not see you again till life is o’er!

(from Baudelaire’s ‘To a Passer-by’)

Words capturing some of the dynamics in the opening scene of The Fugitive Stag’ …

Tthe Fugitive Stag tells the story of what happens when history and myth become embodied in a single form, that is both goddess and woman … something new … something altogether new …

A world where the Shamanic and Mystical heritage of the Celtic Fringe meets the Exotic World of Global High Fashion and Beauty and a Religious Orthodoxy ‘Hell-Bent’ on winning its Holy War against Goddess …

I bet the C.7th St Hubert never thought that he would metamorph into an early C.21st movie hero! I never thought I would be the temporary guardian of a St Hubert carving from the 1500s …

What a theme tune! And oh so ‘modern.’ Pick it up at 22:50 to 26:00 and enjoy the musical thread of The Fugitive Stag.

Richard Strauss: Eine Alpensinfonie Op.64 (An Alpine Symphonie) (Karajan) https://youtu.be/ji6_6soqtNk via @YouTube

The great Russian born conductor Semyon Bychkov writes – The core of The Alpine Symphony is human life and what one goes through in it, with the joys and the sorrows and struggle and achievement. So, it is deeply existential. Doesn’t it happen in life all the time? How many detours every one of us makes in life? Think beyond that actual physical experience of going through the bushes (eg), think of it as a metaphor.

We spend our lifetime trying to figure out why we’re here.  Bychkov believes the Alpine Symphony offers some answers. “I can’t live without it. It tells me about our world, our reason to live. It is a guide to life for sure.” Hear! Hear!

It was Richard Strauss’s ‘Thus spoke Zarathustra’ – inspired by the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche – that was used as the theme tune for Stanley Kubrick’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey, way back in 1968!.

Much more about the ‘fugitive stag’s’ musical score in future blogs.

From W B Yeats ‘Hound Voice’ –

“And in that terror’s name obeyed the call, And understood, what none have understood, Those images that waken in the blood.”

But ‘Stag’ is a celebration, even in death, of Medb’s (Medusa) power and beauty, and of the battle that looms on the horizon … the Feminine Apocalypse.

As in Blake’s ‘Vala’, or The Four Zoas (1797 …) and Shelley’s poem on the Medusa (1824), the opening scene turns Medb’s death into an apocalyptic event, distinguishing the forces of heaven and earth, of light and darkness.

But it is an Apocalypse where opposites are not in opposition but are struggling to attain balance. Medb’s beauty heals but it is a healing that entails embracing the reality of death and destruction, in order to transform a violent and corrupt form of civilization. She demands a total contemptus mundi and challenges us to look within and place our faith in that unknown divinity, our own buried lives.

is an epic ‘questing’ film, with mythical elements, set in an apocalyptic ‘near-future’ – in a world very similar to ours.

is not ‘arthouse’ neither is it a high concept film, and yet it has elements of both, in that characters and their struggles are integral to the drama of a ‘goal-driven story’.

The Fugitive Stag … on getting it out there – ‘an amalgam of disparate influences and elements‘ …

Powerful art is never the product of logical reasoning, conscious manipulation, or thought-driven endeavours. Memorable works of art have always been the result of non-rational impulses and unplanned intuitions, not of reason or calculated construction.

In artistic productions reason can at most play a secondary role, a role that amounts to the modification and re-arrangement of the primary and primeval material.  The greater the non-rational powers of an artist – the artist’s feelings, intuition, or imagination – the deeper and more substantial the work that results.  The more an artist relies on conscious reasoning or clever calculation,  the shallower the resulting art work will be.

My unconscious mind – The Mystery, as I prefer to call it – will always yield much deeper truths than the conclusions of rational thought. I do not live in my clear-thinking head: I dwell in the depths of my body and my unconscious ideas and passions. To think that I can ‘get my fugitive stag ‘out-there’ in a rational manner is a patent illusion.

A folly!