Dark Cloud Country: Introduction, Of Brides & Clouds

"This is also a book of woodland dancing, of whispers from beyond time, which grow thick and opulent and merry with age, like good wine."

This is the “Introduction: Of Brides & Clouds” of my newest book, Dark Cloud Country: The Four Relationships of Regeneration. You can buy the book here.

INTRODUCTION: OF BRIDES & CLOUDS

History becomes written when we become literate—that is, conscious but unknowing. We read of the past so that we learn what we have forgotten, and we forget the past because we have the ability to read of it. Literacy emerges when communities and their traditions dissipate and history grows into the art of remembrance.

The ancient tribal societies of the Southern Slavs had the Volhv, or “Guslar” in their language, whose principal role was to preserve their history by performing their mythology. In the streets, the Volhv would enact the intelligible mask of their culture’s mythological enigmas, riddling but never revealing, acting but never orating. Their instruments were symbols and symbolic metaphors, and the surrounding children were left to unbend the mythic mortuary mask of their ancestors. Slav is not a racial term but a linguistic community, rich in local variations and cultural nuance—a community of peoples whose people community made buoyant.