With respect to Faulkner’s home, named Rowan Oak, I found it interesting that there is plainly what I would assume to be a Druidic circle in his very large front yard. There is a tree in the middle of several circles of stones, with a circle of trees–a la Stonehenge–on the outside. The tree in the middle does not appear to be an oak. It is quite small, and appears non-deciduous (doesn’t lose its leaves; my botanical knowledge leaves much to be desired).
Clearly, Faulkner would not have been a druid. Wiccanism is a recent creation, sparked it seems in no small measure by the inordinate amount of time many of its practitioners seem to spend in front of computers.
Yet, this myth may have appealed to him. The Rowan tree was sacred to the druids, and he plainly drew from this myth in renaming his home.
An interesting historical fact about the Druids was that they practiced human sacrifice. They hung their victims from the trees, strangling them. So did the Vikings, who seem to have been influenced by them.
One wonders what actual mythical complex he was accessing, and to what extent it was conscious. I feel, perhaps erroneously, that he felt some need for something old, some old structure or form, that could anchor him in his modern formlessness. Something readily observable on a daily basis–such as his home, and a symbol of his home.
I had intended this for another post, but will say it here. It seems to me that there is a fundamental conflict in our world between love–the coming together of souls–and sacrifice, which creates meat out of death. Literal sacrifice–of chickens or goats or sheep or other animals–is still practiced by Muslims, by some Hindus, by some Africans, and others. What is the purpose of this?
It seems to me there is an evil in this world, which is recognized and temporarily marginalized by acts of violence. Sacrifice–act of the sacred–is a socially sanctioned outlet for violence.
In Judaism, you had priests in robes and funny hats slitting the throats of sheep on altars built for the purpose, while chanting to Yahweh.
To assume a social role is to submit to violence, to some extent, particularly to the extent you were not able to choose that role. Social activists point this out, such as gender roles, marital roles, the differences between classes in access to opportunities, the difference between nations in power and capabilities. They see this, and call, in effect, for violence against those roles. They say you should be able to do whatever you want, whenever you want, if it doesn’t hurt someone else.
Yet something is missing. It seems to me our primitive minds and souls need violence. We need to be led, by traditions; and if not by traditions by people. We need that submergence in something larger, some oceanic field. This is the root of Nazism, which created for its adherents a sense of paradoxical freedom in their conformity. They were free from solitude, from the anxiety of freedom, and free to exercise violence against others.
Communism does not work quite the same way. It is access to violence, but the violence does not have a redemptive quality, since it is always justified. The Nazis just said “we are the best, and we deserve more stuff”. This is an old social message, for which we are genetically ready.
Communists sublimate (I don’t like Freud, but will use one of his words here) hate while preaching love. The Big Lie is at the very heart of their activity. This means that they cannot acknowledge openly their own aggressive impulses. That means they never do get that oceanic feeling, in an actually Communistic society.
Where they get it is in FREE societies, that they are trying to subvert. In that case, they can imagine utopias, they can pretend they are not acting out of violence and hate, and can without immediate cognitive dissonance speak of love and revolution in the same breath.
But this is a romantic instinct, and as such trending to death. Such cannot be said of Nazism. Had Hitler won, he would have built the cities in the Russian plains he imagined. The Germans would have lived lives of luxury, waited on hand and foot by slaves. One can readily label this as evil, but it is not a lie. Communism is always a lie. The Nazis never claimed to be helping anyone but themselves. Communists do, yet they kill more people.
What is this evil that underlies all of this? It is a wind, blowing through our world. The countervailing wind is that of love or Goodness. It is like the two are in a wind tunnel, blowing at one another. Or a good mythic metaphor would be in the Harry Potter books, when Harry’s wand connects with Voldemort. Their relative wills meet, and go back and forth.
I feel this in me sometimes. I have interesting dreams, which I can generally control fairly well. I feel there is a battle in this world. This is a Manichean outlook, but certainly one that comports well with Christianity and Islam, at least.
Clearly, there is evil in this world, that I represent as sacrifice, as intentionally killing things to avoid larger violence, and to reinforce rigid social institutions. Christ himself may have been implicitly recognizing this in offering himself as a final sacrifice, to be commemorated with ritual cannibalism. He may have seen that in the fallen world he was looking at, the people who spred his Gospel may have needed that as a crutch. On the plus side, you introduce the idea of unconditional Love, even for cultural Others. On the minus side, you have to keep a link with the evil of the past.
Few thoughts. I’ve taken too long already. How I manage to pay my bills is anybody’s guess.
Postscript: it is interesting to speculate, too, on whether Faulkner had in mind, too, the lost colony of Roanoke. As someone whose life was taken up with language, the homophone–or close to it, depending on how one said it–clearly would not have escaped him. Faulkner himself may have spoken about this, but I’m not going to take the time to research it.