Dylan Thomas and the Bardic Consciousness - Bob Cotton 2020
Radio and the Bardic Consciousness
Alex Williams from A Painted Under Milkwood 2023 - 800 or so oil-sketches illustrate passages from Dylan Thomas' famous 'play for voices' from the original recording by Richard Burton and cast from 1954
I first heard Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood back in the Sixties (it was re-broadcast by the BBC in 1963, when I has just 17, and just as I was starting at Art College). Richard Burton was described as ‘having the voice of a poetic boxer’ (though I can’t find the source quote now), and the resonant power of his reading of UMW was stunning, and Thomas’ powerful poetry seeded itself through the entire ‘play for voices’. Later this triggered the image of the Radio play as a perfect medium for the Bardic consciousness. (I guess what I mean by this is based on Jung’s idea of the ‘collective unconscious’ - the shared collective memory of the human experience as parsed and illumined by the Poet or Bard).
Also, sound is an immersive medium, you can let your attention meander, but a good story-teller - especially when accompanied or mediated by a good sound-engineer - can create worlds of imagination for you to float away within.
Also, BBC provides consistently great 'talk radio' - with a wide range of intellectual appealing documentaries, and emotionally gripping audio-dramas - I was introduced to Philip Pullman's Dark Materials through the brilliant BBC4 sound-play. You're truly on your own with the radio-drama experience - it absorbs you, immerses you in the aural-sensual holo-world of three-dimensional sound, refreshing it second-by-second - ' you get the best pictures on the radio' - and it's a distant, resonating echo of the primordial 'camp-fireside story-telling' experience we grew to love millennia-ago. So Under Milkwood, Journey into Space, Foundation and Empire and other great stuff - like especially The Goon Show (from 1951)
Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers and Harry Secombe in Milligan's Goon Show (from 1951)
And, in the 1950s - from 1951 to be exact, we had been doused in radio comedy by the surreal and subversive Spike Milligan in his fabulous Goon Show which really explored the creative potential of radio:
listen to the very first episode:
And, later in the series, this adventurous exploration of the 'virtual-audio space' of radio, was explored still further with the help of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Listening, you were carried away to Goonland - and enjoyed being immersed in the surreal adventures of Neddy Seagoon, Eccles, Minnie Bannister, Count Jim Moriarty, Bloodnock, and all the rest. The Goons expanded the audio-theatre-space for Under Milk Wood a decade later.
James George Frazer: The Golden Bough 1890
Albert Lord: The Singer of Tales 1960 + Epic Singers and Oral Tradition 1990
The Singer of Tales is a book by Albert Lord that discusses the oral tradition as a theory of literary composition and its applications to Homeric and medieval epic. Lord builds on the research of Milman Parry and their work together recording Balkan guslar poets. It was published in 1960. (wikipedia)
What had also helped trigger this image for me, of the Radio as an oracular medium were four books: The Golden Bough (1890) by James George Frazer,The White Goddess by Robert Graves (1948), the ethnographer Joseph Campbell’s Primitive Mythology (1959) and Albert Lord's The Singer of Tales (1960). All these inspirational works - the idea of a universal primordial goddess as a poetic muse - were to fire my imagination, and viscerally, intellectually and spiritually inspire me for decades - they still do.
The Albert Lord book has a helpful CD of some of his audio-recordings from the Balkans...
Robert Graves: The White Goddess 1948
“T h e function of poetry is religious invocation of the Muse; its use is the experience of mixed exaltation and horror that her presence excites.” (Graves).
“The test of a poet's vision, one might say, is the accuracy of his portrayal of the White Goddess and of the island over which she rules. The reason why the hairs stand on end, the eyes water, the throat is constricted, the skin crawls and a shiver runs down the spine when one writes or reads a true poem is that a true poem is necessarily an invocation of the White Goddess, or Muse, the Mother of All Living, the ancient power of fright and lust—the female spider or the queen-bee whose embrace is death. Housman offered a secondary test of true poetry: whether it matches a phrase of Keats's, 'everything that reminds me of her goes through me like a spear'. This is equally pertinent to the Theme. Keats was writing under the shadow of death about his Muse, Fanny Brawne; and the 'spear that roars for blood' is the traditional weapon of the dark executioner and supplanter.” (Graves)
“Sometimes, in reading a poem, the hairs will bristle at an apparently unpeopled and eventless scene described in it, if the elements bespeak her unseen presence clearly enough: for example, when owls hoot, the moon rides like a ship through scudding cloud, trees sway slowly together above a rushing waterfall, and a distant barking of dogs is heard; or when a peal of bells in frosty weather suddenly announces the birth of the New Year. Despite the deep sensory satisfaction to be derived from Classical poetry, it never makes the hair rise and the heart leap, except where it fails to maintain decorous composure; and this is because of the difference between the attitudes of the Classical poet, and of the true poet, to the White Goddess. This is not to identify the true poet with the Romantic poet. 'Romantic', a useful word while it covered the reintroduction into Western Europe, by the writers of verse-romances, of a mystical reverence for woman, has become tainted by indiscriminate use. The typical Romantic poet of the nineteenth century was physically degenerate, or ailing, addicted to drugs and melancholia, critically unbalanced and a true poet only in his fatalistic regard for the Goddess as the mistress who commanded his destiny. “ (Graves: The White Goddess)
OK, so this is what I admired about Graves’ inspired ‘Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth’, there are similarly inspiring passages later in Graves’ book; and many equally vibrant passages in Joseph Campbell’s Primitive Mythology. Now I can see I was conflating these different ideas, but I’m trying to give you a sense of how my 18-year old inquisitive brain was working.
The Golden Bough of course will be familiar to most readers - it's Frazer's study of the origins of magic, religion and myth - the golden bough is mistletoe of course, familiar to the Celtic bardic tradition as the semen of the Gods:
"WHO does not know Turner’s picture of the Golden Bough? The scene, suffused with the golden glow of imagination in which the divine mind of Turner steeped and transfigured even the fairest natural landscape, is a dream-like vision of the little woodland lake of Nemi— “Diana’s Mirror,” as it was called by the ancients. No one who has seen that calm water, lapped in a green hollow of the Alban hills, can ever forget it. The two characteristic Italian villages which slumber on its banks, and the equally Italian palace whose terraced gardens descend steeply to the lake, hardly break the stillness and even the solitariness of the scene. Diana herself might still linger by this lonely shore, still haunt these woodlands wild.In antiquity this sylvan landscape was the scene of a strange and recurring tragedy. On the northern shore of the lake, right under the precipitous cliffs on which the modern village of Nemi is perched, stood the sacred grove and sanctuary of Diana Nemorensis, or Diana of the Wood."
"...The lake and the grove were sometimes known as the lake and grove of Aricia. But the town of Aricia (the modern La Riccia) was situated about three miles off, at the foot of the Alban Mount, and separated by a steep descent from the lake, which lies in a small crater-like hollow on the mountain side. In this sacred grove there grew a certain tree round which at any time of the day, and probably far into the night, a grim figure might be seen to prowl. In his hand he carried a drawn sword, and he kept peering warily about him as if at every instant he expected to be set upon by an enemy. He was a priest and a murderer; and the man for whom he looked was sooner or later to murder him and hold the priesthood in his stead. Such was the rule of the sanctuary. A candidate for the priesthood could only succeed to office by slaying the priest, and having slain him, he retained office till he was himself slain by a stronger or a craftier. The post which he held by this precarious tenure carried with it the title of king; but surely no crowned head ever lay uneasier, or was visited by more evil dreams, than his. For year in, year out, in summer and winter, in fair weather and in foul, he had to keep his lonely watch, and whenever he snatched a troubled slumber it was at the peril of his life. The least relaxation of his vigilance, the smallest abatement of his strength of limb or skill of fence, put him in jeopardy; grey hairs might seal his death-warrant. To gentle and pious pilgrims at the shrine the sight of him might well seem to darken the fair landscape, as when a cloud suddenly blots the sun on a bright day. The dreamy blue of Italian skies, the dappled shade of summer woods, and the sparkle of waves in the sun, can have accorded but ill with that stern and sinister figure. Rather we picture to ourselves the scene as it may have been witnessed by a belated wayfarer on one of those wild autumn nights when the dead leaves are falling thick, and the winds seem to sing the dirge of the dying year. It is a sombre picture, set to melancholy music—the background of forest showing black and jagged against a lowering and stormy sky, the sighing of the wind in the branches, the rustle of the withered leaves under foot, the lapping of the cold water on the shore, and in the foreground, pacing to and fro, now in twilight and now in gloom, a dark figure with a glitter of steel at the shoulder whenever the pale moon, riding clear of the cloud-rack, peers down at him through the matted boughs." (Frazer: from The King of the Wood part 1-1 The Golden Bough 1890)
There's a magic in Frazer's writing still - and indeed in all those who have tackled this primordial quest for understanding magic, myth and religeon. More recently Marina Warner has done this brilliantly in her short work Once Upon A Time - A Short History of the Fairytale 2014.
"Once obscure, the field has become quite a crowded one, with Sara Maitland's Gossip from the Forest and Philip Pullman's Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm published recently, but Warner's book is a little gem. What makes her special is her way of phrasing insights into the nature of the genre and into particular stories; her scholarly knowledge is not just worn lightly but presented with a flourish. 'Imagine the history of fairytale as a map, like the Carte du Tendre…drawn by Parisian romantics to chart the peaks and sloughs of the heart's affections,' she begins, captivatingly In 10 succinct chapters, she gives us an overview of pretty much all that we need to know about past and current thinking, from Bruno Bettelheim's influential Freudian insights to Philip Pullman's stating that "there is no psychology in a fairytale." (Amanda Craig, The Observer, 2014)
There's also J.R.R. Tolkein's On Fairy-Stories (1947)
And what is really interesting here (at least to me) is the explosion of fantasy literature around the 1930s and 1950s, with Tolkein's Lord of the Rings (from 1937 to 1949); C.S. Lewis: The Narnia Chronicles (1950-1956); Mervin Peake: Gormenghast 1946-1959), and E.R.Eddison: The Worm Ouroborus (1922) and his The Zimamvian Trilogy (1935-1958). These fantasy novels examine in imaginative fiction some of the dilemmas of Fascism, Nazism, and Imperialism and other aspects of our real world in the 1930s and 1940s, as if psychologically, in the grand adventure of Life, we desperately needed reassurance that 'good' would overcome 'evil'...
To continue: And the 1963 re-broadcast of Under Milk Wood also coincided with the publication of Herbert Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media (1964), which became essential reading for any student of the arts and media. Understanding Media followed McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) - his analysis of the impact of the movable typeface and the printing press on culture - and on our sensorium - . He writes of Radio: “Radio provides a speed-up of information that also causes acceleration in other media. It certainly contracts the world to village size, and creates insatiable village tastes for gossip, rumour, and personal malice. But while radio contracts the world to village dimensions, it hasn’t the effects of homogenising the village quarters. Quite the contrary. In India, where radio is the supreme form of communication, there are more than a dozen official languages, and the same number of official radio networks. The effects of radio as a reviver of archaism and ancient memories is not limited to Hitler’s Germany. Ireland, Scotland and Wales have undergone resurgence of their ancient tongues since the coming of radio, and the Israeli present an even more extreme instance of linguistic revival. They now speak a language which has been dead in books for centuries. Radio is not only a mighty awakener of archaic memories, forces, and animosities, but a decentralising, pluralistic force, as is really the case with all electric power and media.” (Marshall McLuhan: Radio: The Tribal Drum in Understanding Media 1964 pp 326.) And it was artists - poets, playwrights, musicians, painters - all artists - who were the first to recognise this impact of radio, and to examine it in their work.
The idea that our primordial narrative culture – our myths, folk stories, legends, and ancient poems – survived in oral traditions well into the 20th century was appraised by several authors in the last 100 years or so – the keynote ones for me being James George Frazer: The Golden Bough (1890), Vladimir Propp: The Morphology of the Folk Tale (1928); Robert Graves: The White Goddess (1948); and Albert Lord in his important The Singer of Tales (1960), on the more general origins and survival of myth and religion, the best collection is by the mythographer Joseph Campbell in his tetralogy The Masks of God (from 1962). It was Albert Lord who followed Milman Parry’s journeys in Yugoslavia in the 1930s, recording poets who still recited (and reformulated) the ancient verses according to what Parry called the Oral Formulaic Hypothesis – essentially that the transliterations (the written forms of ancient oral verse) took only one ‘snapshot’ of the surviving original, and that each time these stories and verses were reiterated, the living poet transformed them by means of not just oral performance, but oral composition too. (Bob Cotton: Grimm’s Fairy Tales in MediaPlex Volume 1 1800-1900 2018)
The verity of Jung’s idea of the Collective Unconscious was affirmed for me by the opening passage in Joseph Campbell’s Primitive Mythology:
“The comparative study of the mythologies of the world compels us to view the cultural history of mankind as a unit; for we find that such themes as the fire-theft, deluge, land of the dead, virgin birth, and the resurrected hero have a worldwide distribution—appearing everywhere in new combinations while remaining, like the elements of a kaleidoscope, only a few and always the same. Furthermore, whereas in tales told for entertainment such mythical themes are taken lightly— in a spirit, obviously, of play—they appear also in religious contexts, where they are accepted not only as factually true but even as revelations of the verities to which the whole culture is a living witness and from which it derives both its spiritual authority and its temporal power. No human society has yet been found in which such mythological motifs have not been rehearsed in liturgies; interpreted by seers, poets, theologians, or philosophers; presented in art; magnified in song; and ecstatically experienced in life- empowering visions. Indeed, the chronicle of our species, from its earliest page, has been not simply an account of the progress of man the tool-maker, but—more tragically—a history of the pouring of blazing visions into the minds of seers and the efforts of earthly communities to incarnate unearthly covenants. Every people has received its own seal and sign of supernatural designation, communicated to its heroes and daily proved in the lives and experience of its folk. And though many who bow with closed eyes in the sanctuaries of their own tradition rationally scrutinise and disqualify the sacraments of others, an honest comparison immediately reveals that all have been built from one fund of mythological motifs—variously selected, organised, interpreted, and ritualised, according to local need, but revered by every people on earth.”
And I believe that Dylan Thomas was tapping into this primordial source - in his works for Radio - of Welsh Bardic poetry, of the White Goddess, of the ur-themes and images that Campbell researches. I believe that Dylan understood the potential of the truly 20th century medium of radio, and of the power of the play for voices on radio - the BBC had featured their first radio-play (by Richard Hughes) in their first year of broadcasting. Frances Gray describes the attraction of radio: “Like a bedtime story, it whispers in our ear. Without visual distraction, the smallest subtleties of the voice become apparent and seize the imagination, a snatch of song and the rustle of leaves takes on a significance impossible in the theatre or on film. As soon as we hear the word in a radio play, we are close to the experience it signifies; in fact the sound is literally inside us." (Francis Gray in John Drakakis: British Radio Drama (1981)
But even by the early 1950s the methodology of live broadcasting had not changed much - we hadn’t developed the technique of recording and mixing the radio drama before broadcasting it, nor did we have easy-to-use consumer tape-recorders, nor were tape-to-tape mixing techniques, let alone multi-track mixing desks. In these years before Digital recording, the analogue techniques we used meant that every time we copied a recording it deteriorated in quality a little - the tape iron oxide and therefor the sound quality got worse with each over-dub - each edit. In 1953 the BBC had the use of the first generation of tape-recorders, manufactured at EMI - the BTR-1 and BTR-2, but tape editing - where it existed - was still a razor-cut and glue technique. So Under Milk Wood and other contemporary radio drama had perforce to rely on live studio recording. In their socks for quiet, actors could move to and fro around the microphone to add to the spatial-sonics of the production
Effectively this meant that all the actors, and sound-effects engineers, were in the same spatial studio-space, presumedly positioned around the microphone and standing or sitting to provide the spatial effects the producer found most satisfactory.
Alex Williams: A Painted under Milkwood - a film made by my friend Alex Williams in 2023 -hundreds of oil-paintings illustrating the famous Richard-Burton version of Dylan Thomas' 'play for voices' -
I had the pleasure of writing some background notes for Alex - it got me thinking about the Bardic Consciousness, about Albert Lord's Singer of Tales and his theory of Oral-Formulaic composition how poetic epic originated in ancient times...