As You Like It and Mythology

Since yesterday was Valentines and I am still having lovey dovey hangovers (the butterflies in my tummy have five-O'clock shadows and genitalia drawn on their foreheads), I thought I would celebrate the holiday in my own way by writing about love, love, love in Shakespeare's woods and how that all mixes together in this overly long and whimsical sentence full of capricious fancy, verbal diarhea, mixed metaphors, overuse of the word 'and', and meta nonsense. Hmmm.. Okay, continuing on now. The Green World, Arden, the woods, are mythological mainstays. They function as a binary to the city--the civilized world governed by the law of man. The magical woods, on the other hand, are ruled by women, places where boundaries break down, and chaotic--of magic, mystery, and love, ungoverned by patriarchy. There are no boundaries, no dividers, no lines, or fences, or roads, there is only the faeries. Titania, the mother goddess, and Oberon (presumably the dying-and-rising spirit), rule here. Puck turns trespassers' heads into an ass-face. Orlando lives in the trees, reading them like books, more happy than he ever was in the city. Every tree, every flower, every bush, shrub, and mushroom (especially the mushroom) is in its place--not a place defined by man, a perfect location just the same. The wood is holistic. A sense of the unconstrained cosmos, that is why the bulk of the action is the forest, and why we journey here to fall in love. Sexual boundaries begin to collapse. Ganymede. Rosalind. Aliena. Celia. blah Because we can fully meld with someone like Spock with an irrate whale or something, we become one. We mesh with the green arena. We recognize the fallacy of the individual.

I wrote this about the greek God of wine, Dionysus, for a paper last semester. In it, I discuss theater and the woods, almost as if I was trying to preempt the class. Anyway, here it is:

Dionysus was also the god of masks and the theater—essential to he that is a symbol for insanity. His morphing appearances—“a girl, a man, a woman, a lion, a bull, and a panther” (Gyrus)—plays into his psychedelic aspect and also his wholeness of being. All of us are wearing personalities, as believed by Judith Butler, and delving even deeper, we are all manifestations of earth; however, we are slowly losing knowledge of this. Before man was cut off from the natural world around him, “the divine and the mundane were one and the same, embodied in nature” (Gyrus). Like many ancient cities, Rome itself was “born in the forest, according to its mythic origin tales” (Windling). Romulus and Remus were abandoned in the forest where they were suckled by a wolf and raised by a brigand. When Romulus emerged from the trees, he cleared a hill and founded Rome. However, as the great empire expanded, slowly the forests were destroyed. Windling quotes Robert Pogue Harrison’s book, Forests: the Shadow of Civilization, and says, “‘the forests were literally everywhere: Italy, Gaul, Spain, Britain, the ancient Mediterranean basin as a whole’” (Windling). Modern lament of forest clearing is nothing new. Plato “wrote with grief [...] of the barren hills surrounding Athens as grove after grove fell before the plough of the ship-builder's axe” (Windling). Here we see the tension between the ordered and the structured universe described by Nietzsche as “Apollonian” and “Dionysian”. Apollonian is described as thinking, self-controlled, rational, and logical, human order and culture—essentially, it represents civilization. Dionysian, on the other hand, represents feeling, passion, intoxication, wholeness of existence, and chaos. The closer you get to nature, the closer you are to Dionysus, the Green Man, and Satan [and the breaking of the illusion of 'the theater']. The culture of the Celts is intimately linked to nature and Dionysus, while the Normans and Romans were approaching the culture of Apollo. As mankind’s civilization encroaches on the spirits, the faeries, and the dryads, it transforms the unordered to structure. Just like Wallace Stevens’ jar takes “dominion everywhere”, so do imperial highways, aqueducts, and bridges divide up the forest.

Dionysus is a chaotic God--like the forest represented in Shakespeare's plays. He is the breaking down of walls, himself transforming into many shapes. He is the god of mushrooms, of the forest, of destruction, and of sparagmos and omaphagia.

The forest (especially orchards) are often depicted as paradise in mythology. King Arthur had his wounds remedied in Avalon, (Wikipedia: "probably from the Welsh word afal, meaning apple), an island inhabited by faeries. Hercules, in Eurystheus' eleventh labor, had to steel apples from the garden of Hesperides, which was patrolled by the monster Ladon. He tricked the titan Atlas into getting the fruit for him. In another tale, this time from Scandinavian mythology, Loki is hoodwinked into stealing the apples that make the gods immortal. And the most famous of all, the fruit in the garden of Eden eaten by Adam and Eve. These are Northrop Frye's Green Worlds, a place lost to us as we moved into towns and cities. We set out to tame the wildlands and are eternally terrified that we will lose them. I read a really strange essay by Robert Graves last semester: http://www.math.uci.edu/~vbaranov/nicetexts/eng/mushrooms.html

He wrote:

I have eaten the Mexican hallucinogenic mushroom psilocybe Heimsii in Gordon Wasson's company, with the intention of visiting the Mexican paradise called Tlal6can to which it gives access. The god Tlal6c, who was toadheaded, corresponded exactly with Agni and Dionysus. I also wanted to know whether I had been right in supposing that all religious paradises except the Christian (which is based on a first century Eastern potentate's court), such as the Hebrew, the Sumerian, the Indian, the Mexican, the Polynesian and the Greek (known as the Garden of Hesperides) were not only very much alike but corresponded also with the individual paradises seen by such mystics as the English poet Henry Vaughan, the Silurist. The word paradise means 'orchard' in the Semitic languages; an orchard-garden of fruit trees, flowers and running water. Yes, I had guessed right, though there are, I believe, certain dissimilarities: for instance, elephants appear in the Indian paradise and in others the inevitable serpent, familiar to readers of the Paradise chapter in Genesis, may appear as it did for me, as an intricately patterned gold chain. A bright snake-like formation is, by the way, a common symptom of a cerebral deoxygenization induced by hallucinogenic drugs; and seeing snakes is a common occurrence among alcoholics, saints who starve themselves, drowning sailors and sufferers from meningitis. My experiences included not only an orchard Paradise where one can see sound, hear colours, and watch trees growing leaf by leaf, but a paradise of jewels like that described in the Book of Ezekiel XXVIII, 13-14.

Is paradise really just a psychotropic illusion created by shaman? The fundamental aspect of all religion is the rupturing of this lifelong daydream. To have an apocalyptic moment and emerge with knowledge on what the world really is.... So what is reality? What is illusion and myth? The woods appear to be a hammer in which we can chip a "chink" in the wall and stare through. A place where sex and gender become confused. A place of ataxia. We are transported to a green kingdom where the rules and regulations of man no longer apply. We can run naked and free, and talk to faeries, dryads, and centaurs. We can become animals. We can find true love.