AVALON Blog Post 4: Tintagel

A Castle above the Sea(Origin Stories)

It is the day before the day before three days before today, which is to say, five days ago, which is to say, time is not real, I don’t think, at least not the way we pretend it is. We are in Tintagel, and it is Magic.

There is a story about a man and a woman and a wizard and a baby, and the baby’s sister, who was just old enough to watch from doorways. It is King Arthur’s origin story, and it’s complicated. Here on the far west coast of Cornwall is Tintagel, and Tintagel is the castle where it happened, they say.

This is Tintagel today:

It's pronounced Tin-TAA-jell, like this. This has taken me some getting used to, as I have pronounced it TIN-ta-gell' in my head since I was about 8. But I've come to like it. Tin-TAA-jell.

Once it was a castle. 1600 years ago or so. Then one day the middle part of it fell into the sea, the stones fell down, where rooms were was changed to only air, the whole thing became a dream of a building. A once and future castle. The English Heritage trust is building a new foot bridge, a wonder of cantilevers, which will have a tiny gap between the two sides, right in the middle. I think about stepping across that little gap, and it gives me vertigo.

Which is the point.

The marriage of past and future happens in midair, with nothing beneath our feet.

The day before all those other days—it was the fourth morning of our trip--we woke up in Glastonbury and drove to Tintagel. We hiked down the hill towards the beach, then up the cliffs to where the bridge will eventually cross. There’s an old church there—Saint Materiana’s. A mere 900 years old.

Inside is a Roman milestone bearing the name of Emperor Licinius, who died in 324. And outside is a crocus, just opening her petals in the early spring sun.

We followed the long winding shale path down towards Merlin’s cave, and the beach. We couldn’t go all the way down—the construction has closed off the path. This is what it looked like:

This is what it sounded like:

My Mom sat on a bench and drew a little bird who paid her a visit. She is such a wonderful artist. You should tell her so in the comments. I climbed the old stone steps to stand very dramatically on the hill facing Merlin’s cave

Merlin was a middle aged wizard, an old-young man when Arthur was born. A druid, a mystic, a bard, a savant, a wild man of the woods. Magician, counselor, wise man: the first wizard of them all, who gave us Prospero, Gandalf, Dumbledore, Schmendrick the Magician, if you read Peter Beagle, which you should. At Tintagel in the dead of night, Merlin gathered a baby boy in his arms, and carried him out through the cave to the sea. Climbed into a little ship and sailed away. To keep the boy safe, they say.

There won’t be access to the beach and Merlin’s Cave until the Heritage Trust finishes building the new bridge. Instead of walking into it myself, I must rely on Laura on TripAdvisor, who states: “If this cave was Merlin’s he would have made it better.”

To me it felt like a place both wild and good—which doesn’t equal safe.

Before we left the little town of Tintagel I bought a wee Cornish piskie in a wee Cornish shop. “Put me in your pocket or purse for good luck!” said the sign—and who am I to not spend £1.50 on good luck? Then we had Cornish pasties in The Cornish Bakery with Calum:

Calum made me an espresso shot for the road, and had the other half of it himself. I said to him, “You’re a bit of a Merlin, aren’t you? …I mean, you look like what I imagine Merlin might have looked like.”

He grinned. “I used to have a beard,” he said. “Then I suppose I did.”

He’s a part of a group called the Warriors of Tintagel, dedicated to dark age reenactments. They have battles; it looks quite excellent. When Calum heard why I was there, a wistful look came over him. “We just had a show, last Monday…If I’d know you were coming we could have done something today. I wish I’d known.”

Very gentle and earnest, for a possible wizard.

We said thank you and got in the car and drove. We were headed into Wales—and if you’ve read my second post, you know what came of that! But while we were leaving Tintagel, and the sun was hanging soft and gold in the Western sky, it was spirits we were thinking of, not ghosts.

The spirit of a king, of a wizard, of a small girl playing on a tiny beach, of a land, of a story, of a time.

This is what it looks like, at Tintagel, if you go:

Melody Bates
Tintagel, Now.

NEXT POST in Seeking Avalon:  DISPATCH FROM NELLIEVILLE 

AVALON will have its world premiere in August 2019, produced by Opera House Arts and staged in a site specific production at Nervous Nellie’s Jams and Jellies on Deer Isle. All text, photos, and video ©2019 Melody Bates. Learn more and support her work here.

Avalon Blog Post 3: AVALON (disambiguated)

AVALON (disambiguated)

A guest post from Judith Jerome, Production Dramaturg for AVALON

Avalon. Frankie Avalon. The Avalon Ballroom. Mists of Avalon. I’m just starting to let my brain storm. But wait, the computer is in front of me: 110 businesses, songs, bands, places, films, games, novels, boats, etc. are listed in Wikipedia as containing the name Avalon.  The Wiki heading is: “Avalon (disambiguation).”

 Yes. The disambiguation revealed is the power of the name, and behind it some felt sense, some memory shrouded in mists, a dream, lingering cultural resonance, centuries old. That place. Whatever it was.

I used to teach a class I called “Red Circle Stories.” It was about identifying and performing the personal stories we tell again and again, or even if we hold them secretly, tell them only to ourselves, we have circled them in red in our own minds. Stories of mystery. Stories we know as well as we know the backs of our own hands, and yet don’t know at all. Stories that reassure us that I am I, but also that are always on the verge of disarming us/I. Stories we tell in the hope that this time we will learn something new.  

Shakespeare’s stories are like that. They are our western European cultural dreams; that’s why they have lasted for almost 500 years. None of the history plays started whole cloth with William himself. He told stories already circling in the cultural imagination. Every telling is a new telling. What will we learn about ourselves this time?

The stories of King Arthur and Camelot are the same and, crucially, Avalon is their backdrop. The stories came out of Avalon; the world once was Avalon. Maybe.

One text behind Melody’s seeking Avalon is Rianna Eisler’s The Chalice and the Blade, which opens out an archaeological pre-history that tells the loss of a partnership social order, its defeat by a dominator model. Similar in some ways to the mists Marion Zimmer Bradley sought to lift in her 1983 novel. Psychoanalysis teaches us that the dissolutions/psychoses we fear are ones we have already been through; I think it must be the same with our Avalons, our Shangri Las, our Xanadus. Pre-historical truth or no, somewhere we know something about Avalon and long for it again.

Right now Melody is seeking Avalon in places. Geography, buildings, rocks, dirt, mosses, and trees. So much is held there, so much to learn, and some of us are just beginning to understand this different kind of learning . We write emails to trees and grant personhood to Lake Erie.

Maybe we will collect all the different tellings, with their many layers of cultural agenda, as Melody says it, as we go toward August’s performances. I have not looked these up on Wikipedia but I’ll bet there are way more than 110, and way more fun to come up with them ourselves.

Melody standing in ancient Cumbria's Pine Lake, wearing an 

"AVALON Volunteer Fire Co." shirt she found at a thrift store in Brooklyn.

NEXT POST in Seeking Avalon:  TINTAGEL

AVALON will have its world premiere in August 2019, produced by Opera House Arts and staged in a site specific production at Nervous Nellie’s Jams and Jellies on Deer Isle. All text and photos ©2019 Melody Bates. Learn more and support her work here.