SWANS, TRICKSTERS, THE LETTER S
A cob, a pen a cygnet; a Trumpeter Swan, a Mute Swan, a Black-Necked Swan: it
didn’t matter which one even though cobs were always male, pens female, and cygnets juveniles with gray plumage. When I first read “The Ugly Duckling,” I wished only that one day I, too, would be transformed into a swan. I was scarcely the first person to be fascinated by these elegant, often wild, sometimes dangerous waterfowl, dangerous because a Trumpeter Swan, when approached too closely, can beat someone to death with its powerful wings.
Is it the whiteness of their feathers; the green of their eggs; the knobbiness of their bills; the length and gracefulness of their necks; the mysteries of their migratory habits or of their ability to arch their wings and glide clear across a lake or pond that have for centuries made swans so appealing they are the subjects of countless myths and legends?
Certainly it is not their music. The notion of a swan breaking into song just prior to death is precisely that, a mere notion–despite evidence that none less than Aristotle claimed it to be true, despite the persistence of the term “swan song” to indicate all manner of farewells and last acts. The misnamed Mute Swans do make a sort of singing noise when they move their feathers in flight in order to communicate with the rest of the flock; moreover, according to a BBC educational program, they “also emit . . .quiet grunts, throaty gurgles and honks and they hiss loudly when agitated.” But no terminal melodies.
Probably the cygnet’s remarkable transformation from a dumpy gray-feathered bird to a long-necked white or black adult accounts best for the widespread allure of swans. This ability accounts as well for their associations with peril, bad omens, the mystery of death.
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Transformation to a gliding swan would rank high if I were given a chance to shift to another form, at least temporarily. But a few days as a leopard would also be appealing or perhaps as a willow tree, my long green hair swaying with the wind. Come to think of it, why not follow the path of Gluskap, a god of the North American forests, who could make himself a cloud or a water eddy, even dust-in-sunlight? Or, like the Hindu Apsara dancers, become a rainbow? Better yet, mimic the African sky spirit Annency who just for the hell of it could become not just a tiger but the yellow of a tiger’s eye; the blue of the sky as reflected in water; pure iridescence like that produced by the sun on the surface of a dew-drop.
Students of mythology call such legendary figures shape- shifters or shape-changers. Often they are creator gods as well, capable of assuming the forms of what they created, ranging from such animals as lizards, ravens, and kangaroos to grains of corn or puffs of smoke. Luke, an ancient Nordic god who existed prior to the very notion of existence, contained in his ample bag of tricks the ability to become a blush on the face of a fair young maiden, all the better to seduce her.
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If a swan were a letter of the alphabet surely in the Roman alphabet, that letter would be S; a letter whose shape suggests the rhythms of continuous motion; kin to the scroll, the universal spiral, the whirlpool, the whirlwind, the waxing and waning moon, a meandering stream. The closest Greek equivalent would be the sigma : granted such a swan would be considerably more angular than its Roman version. In the Hebrew alphabet, the lamed might do, especially for a swan who has suffered the misfortune of a lopped-off head.
Whether vertical or horizontal, the S shape evokes images of alternating phases, not only of the moon, but of the seasons, of the commingling of heaven and earth, evolution and involution. The art of ornamentation is rife with variations of the S, particularly in Persian, Turkish, and Celtic designs. And if we flip an S around, adding a little curve of a tail, we have the zodiacal sign of Leo, linked with fire, the sun, the power of the will.
Swan-maidens are abundant in Celtic and Teutonic legends. One of the best known is The Dream of Angus, in which one Angus Ma Ox falls in love with his dream vision of a beautiful girl. When he visits the lake where she lives, he sees her among 150 other young women, each connected to another by a silver chain. Alas, they alternate each year between human and swan form, and can only be loved in their swan phase. So? The astute young man learns that the ritual shape-changing occurs always at the Feast of Simon, returns to the lake at the appropriate time, sees a flock of white swans with silvery chains around their heads, and calls out the name of his beloved, who agrees to fly off with him on the condition he, too, is willing to change himself into a swan. Of course. And so the two fly off together into the Celtic sky (after circling three times).
In other versions, the swan-maiden can change her form at will with the help of a magical garment, usually a feather robe. Should her future mate find the robe and ask its purpose, she must change back into a swan and fly off forever into the unknown. Interpretations include the conflict between the swan’s desire to stay in a particularly place and the need to migrate; also a parallel between the loss of the robe and the process of moulting. In legends from Central Asia, the swan-maiden is a demon who drinks the blood of the dead.
Male versions of the motif, or swan-knights, are usually associated with boats or chariots. Well known because of Wagner’s opera, Lohengrin was such a knight, his journey analogous with legends of the Greek sun-gods. (Apollo, for one, travelled in a chariot drawn by swans). I think as I write this of the swan boats in which my children and I paddled around the waters of the Boston Common. . .
Some families of the Rhineland actually claimed descent from a swan-knight; in Brandenburg, they created the Order of the Swan. And though in the Hebrides’ Isle of Skye, swans allegedly rescued human babies, wrapping them in shawls of feathers and carrying them in “nests” of twisted nettles, swans are regarded as ominous in Scotland where they are thought to this day to embody the souls of the dead. Perhaps some of the rescued babies never returned?
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One of the most fascinating shape-shifters is the African creator-spirit Dxui. His method of creating various animals and plants involved actually becoming the created object, one object at a time. Thus he might briefly become a flower, but for reasons unbeknownst–possibly boredom–he would leave his imprint on its petals, moving on to become, say, a tiger; in turn, perhaps a rock, a bird, a grain of sand in the desert.
Imagine the implications for human creators: today I shall literally create and become the clay of a pot, the very stuff of my being coiled or shaped on a wheel, fired in a kiln, glazed, set out to dry. After a spell of experiencing the world as a pot–does it really welcome being filled with water or used as a cooking vessel?–I inscribe it with my initials and leave it behind, having decided now to create a mosaic. Not only does my flesh and blood turn gold, but I become, in turn, each of the mosaic’s luminous angels. Then move on perhaps to become each note in, say, Beethoven’s
Choral Fantasy. . .or each streak on the body of a dung-worm.
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The letter S has been associated with the shape of the lyre, with water, with thin clouds. Reversed and crossed in the middle by two parallel lines, it is the alchemist’s sign for oil; flipped onto its back and preceded by a plus sign, it’s the alchemist’s sign for arsenic. Though associated with lead in early charts of the elements, it was linked by mystics with saintliness, solar worship, and the very essence of the spirit.
Its closest numerical cousin is the number 8, whose horizontal version represents infinity. The sign for the American dollar, $, derives from its association with that number: originally a symbol for the Spanish peso, equal in value to 8 reals or pieces-of-eight, it first was shaped like a blend of a P and and 8; later the P was dropped and the 8 bordered on each side by a diagonal line: /8/. Still later the lines were superimposed upon the 8, which, according to John Fitzpatrick, author of “The Spanish Galleon and Pieces-of-Eight” in Scribner’s Magazine, was carelessly written to resemble an S. Finally, the lines were superimposed upon an S curled at each end so the new symbol resembled a fusion of the U and the S, appropriate enough for the United States of America.
An ordinary S all by itself is the official American meteorological sign for a sandstorm.
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“Swan Upping,” the purpose of which is to record the number of swans on the river and to mark or pinion the cygnets to indicate ownership, still takes place each summer on the River Thames. The ritual is linked with the swan’s status as Britain’s royal bird; all swans, even those at liberty or in common waters, belong to the Crown or to companies of the Vintners and Dyers. Sometimes the Crown granted ownership privileges to swans in common waters, but if the bird strayed, ownership reverted to the Crown in a year and a day. As royal birds, swans were prized as gifts and consumed at banquets and Christmas dinners.
After the swan was officially declared royal in 1482, “swan motes” and “Swanning Courts” were established to enforce the swan laws. To this day there is a Master of the Swans, responsible for supervising all swans in the kingdom. In the five days of the actual “Upping,” the overseers travel in wooden boats, once elaborately decorated for the purpose. Birds are removed from the river’s water in order to be marked so as to distinguish ownership, the marks accomplished by cutting or branding on the mandible, leg, foot, or wing; sometimes beak marks are cut with a sharp knife that produced a scar. Pinioning, or clipping the swan’s wings so it could not fly, was declared illegal in 1978 because of protests from animal rights groups, but the overall ritual of marking continues to this day –much to the consternation of the latter.
The eating of swan has, however, for the most part become unpopular. As far back as 1738, swan’s flesh was described as “blacker, harder, and tougher than that of a goose, having grosser Fires hard of Digestion, of a bad melancholic Juice. . .” (Peter Scott, The Swans: Boston, 1974). Apparently tastier are tender young cygnets, fattened on malt and barley; they are still consumed, seasoned with nutmeg and shallots and moistened with port wine sauce, at an annual feast by the Dyers and Vintners.
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Shape-shifters often have no other purpose than to play tricks. McLeish distinguishes between those shape-shifters who were primarily creation gods, or creative energy incarnate, who once having created something granted it a stable form, and tricksters, who continued to change forms, sometimes to help human beings but often for for the hell of it. Eventually, tricksters were associated with devils and monsters, or with the more innocuous sprites and goblins.
One such malevolent trickster is Shen Nong, one of three sovereigns of Chinese legend. Sometimes he manifested himself as a human being with the head of an ox, but he could transform himself into scorching winds that gave rise to forest fires. Slavic water-spirits, or Vodyanoi, disguised themselves as floating logs, “green-skinned, weed-slimed, and covered with bumps and warts” (McLeish, 653); at night they prowled the lakes and rivers, dragging humans underwater to serve as their slaves. In contrast, Shakespeare’s use of such tricksters as Puck or Ariel are markedly benign.
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If you’re keen about gematria (word-number correspondences) and the mystical bonds of letters with objects and qualities, S will not disappoint: the Hebrew equivalent (samekh) means a prop and has a numerical value of 60; the Greek sigma means psychopomp (he who conducts the souls of the dead into the afterlife), has a numerical value of 200, and corresponds to the human genitalia.
More lyrical the correspondence between the Runic sigel and the juniper tree and solar wheel, or the Runic stan with the blackthorn tree and sacred stones. There is no precise equivalent between the S and the signs of the Celtic Ogham alphabet; the closest is the straif associated with the thrush, but rest assured that the Gaelic suil refers to a willow tree and has a numerical value of 15. So there. In matters more mundane, S.,= Sabbath or Saint; Saxon, School, Sea; an indication to “mark” or “label” (medical); ss (in prescription)= half; ss., =to wit; namely; used in legal documents to verify place of action; abbreviation for shortstop in baseball . . .
And though S stands for sarcoma, sadism, schizophrenia, sarcophagus, satyriasis, savagery, smarmy, sulk, Sobibor, schlemiel, schmuck, streptococcus, and Schutzstaffel or SS, it also stands for star grass, sex, sapphire, saxophone, silver, Stradivarius, sauterne, sally lun, satori, shalloon. . .
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Sustaining the boundaries between self and subject matter–whether characters, images, places, actions, ideas, or feelings–is what distinguishes the writer from what he writes about. Unlike Dxui, Shakespeare never became Hamlet or Lear, even in his most intense creative moments, when he “conceived” and “gave birth” (or form) to them, subsequently entering into their minds and bodies.
As a writer, I might occasionally wish to break out of those boundaries and become one of my characters or even the tree I’m extolling in a poem, but always there’s that crucial distance between us. Always. Otherwise I’d be a tree, or psychotic, or perhaps both.
And though applying Keats’s notion of negative capability is imperative for the writer–i.e. entering into the essence of the Other–never can we be more than an occasional guest, even if the host is wholly a product of our own imagination. A pity. . .At least much of the time: how lovely it would be to shift my shape so it fits, say, the mind and body of the tango dancer, a character is one of my recent stories; to glide, as she does, with sexy elegance and grace across a polished floor in the arms of some darkly handsome Argentinian. Or to shift into a lilac in full bloom, a bird-of-paradise, the color blue, the sea itself. Of course, with my luck, even if I acquired this magical ability, I’d likely find myself transformed into a bag lady, a leper, a landfill, the color brown. . .
Peculiar fact: nearly all of the people who have been important to me in one way or another had either a first or last name beginning with the letter S. Next most popular: the letter M. Perhaps it goes back to a pattern set in my father’s family: his mother’s name began with S and his father’s with M. Each of their six children was given, in alternating sequence, a first name beginning with either S or M. Coincidence? A secret code? I’ll never know. As for the few exceptions: I discern no particular pattern though I imagine if I probed enough I’d learn that these people, too, were closely related to either an S or an M. To think those letters have become synonymous with the nasty practice of sadomasochism, of which I’m sure my grandparents had nether conscious nor experiential awareness.
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That swan sculpted from ice: I’ll never forget the first time I saw such a large, luminous thing. It was the centerpiece of the cake and pastries table at a most elaborate wedding reception. All night I kept waiting for the swan to melt; even a droplet or two would have satisfied me. But it remained intact, totally dropless, like a person with a disorder of the sweat glands that prevents him from giving off moisture on even the hottest days. Now that I think back on it, I wonder if that swan had really been carved from ice or whether it was cleverly disguised glass of some sort.
Swans are often linked with clouds since both were privileged to tow the chariots of the gods. Especially translucent clouds. In ancient India, the Apsaras, or holy dancers, sometimes were interchangeable with both clouds and swans. In one tale, someone noticed fluffy white clouds moving in procession across the sky; he assumed they must be swans gliding over water and created the legend of a cosmic lake whose water were sufficiently pure for the bathing rituals of the holy dance maidens. One reason for the swans’ whiteness was their preference for feeding on pearls.
The Black Swan, on the other hand, has always been associated with evil. Luckily, such swans are rare, a fact Juvenal thought noteworthy more than two millennia ago.
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“The future enters into us, transforms itself in us, long before it happens.”–Rainer Maria Rilke.
“Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath/And after many a summer dies the swan.”.
Alfred Lord Tennyson
“The day after that wedding night I found that a distance of one thousand miles. . . and
an irremediable metamorphosis separated me from the day before.”—Collette
“Hear the music. The thunder of /the wings. Love the wild swan.–Robinson Jeffers