A blue dog howling at the moon
Lists, poems, prayers and memories
Introduction
By Steve Thorp
Over the coming months, I’ll be featuring features and guest posts from friends, acquaintances and artists that are broadly themed around Musical lives. There will be interviews, conversations and features and, as in this case, a guest essay by my friend and regular Unpsychology1 contributor, Toby Chown. Toby has just published a new book of poetry entitled Into The Dreaming Dark; much of his work, life and writing has music at its heart.
Toby’s book is being launched at the Rose Hill Arts Hub, Brighton on Wednesday 29th January 2025. Tickets are available from Ticketsource by clicking on the button below:
A blue dog howling at the moon
By Toby Chown
Prayers to ward off darkness
When the band started playing I had to fight for my life. The crowd surged and swirled around me. The band was loud, tight and hard, the drummer’s drumskin pulled tighter than skin over a skull, the guitars sharp as knives. I was lifted over the heads of the crowd, my twisting teenage body penetrated by the textures of hard rock, in lyrics and riffs that transformed intense isolations and anxiety into wild exultation. I landed over the silver metal barricade, towards the black stage, surfing the crowd, pulled into a small gap between by security, ejected back through a metal barricade corridor to the back to mosh, struggle and spin over the crowd’s heads all over again. I’d never experienced anything that fierce before. I was 13 years old. I felt as if I had been reforged in a kind of furnace of rock music.
27 years later, I spent four days and nights alone in some ancient Devonian woodland. It was a part of Martin Shaw’s School of Myth’s Wild Land Dreaming. As the slow dreaminess of the fast kicked in, surrounded by the tangles of bramble and holly, tufts of ash, tracks of beetles and enormous beech trees, I began to enter into a deep life review. As I did this, some of the songs I had written over the 27 years began to replay in the transistor radio of my mind. The songs began to transform from artefacts to entertain others into slivers of the living process of my life.
Music was once again was at the heart of a kind of renewal. This time, the transition was into midlife, not adolescence. I sang some of my old songs to my wild audience. As the vigil deepened, thinning the veil between self and wild, it seemed at times as well as the music that I had written and sang, there was a kind of music to the old woods themselves. Not the unmistakeable din and sweat of a gig, but a kind of call and response within the different patterns of life within the wood, one that blended into a deep subtle kind of music. One that played the keys and notes of life and death, of beauty and horror.
These are some of the threads that I’d like to develop - music as a kind of renewal of the self at a key moment. Actually, I’d say that music offers a kind of psychic renewal quite often, unlike any other for its immediacy and medicine. I also feel it offers one of the best metaphors we have for understanding nature, the wild and our place within it. So perhaps this idea can help burrow a little further into how to approach the innate wildness of our own psyche.
I’d like to join together, in words, the visceral experience of listening and playing live music - the sweat, joy and vibrancy of bass, drums, hips, the electric currents of other bodies, with this other kind of music that comes from solitude in nature, with its skeletal winds, and scurrying animals, hidden feathers and murmuring plants.
Music shows us in a way we instinctively understand how people when they come together in the right way become more than the sum of their parts. By listening to music we expand our sense of self far beyond the narrow confines of our immediate experience. We open a doorway to the imaginal, until the bland suburbs of East Croyden give birth to the Cure, or the postwar ruins of Liverpool or Dartford crack open to reveal the Beatles and the Stones. Music isn’t abstract, it comes from places, it’s located within moments in our lives, the life of the artists and the places these moments happened within.
When I was a teenager listing the names of bands was like a rosary, a prayer to ward off darkness. Lists of band names are the stub of a poem. The name of each band, if I were to give it more attention could be opened up to reveal a world, like the box of delights that when opened in the cold heart of winter pours out light and reveals the green woods in summer. Inside each name a different world:
Therapy? Faith No More, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Rage Against the Machine, Sonic Youth Fugazi, Metallica, Nirvana the Jesus Lizard, Slint, Jacob’s Mouse, PJ Harvey, Babes in Toyland.
Threshholds
As I walked into school on the threshold of adolescence listening to Wu Tang Clan’s 36 Chambers, I became a chess-playing shaolin, black gangster ruling New York City. I absorbed all the lyrics to Ice Cube’s Cave Bitch and Enemy (from the album Lethal Injection) without question. Aged 14, I merged unreflectively with the sonic expression of his militant anti-white sentiment, his deep distrust of white masks - the patronising attentions of white women and white liberal culture, just as I merged into PJ Harvey’s complex sexual desire, scorn and need when I sang along with her at the same age – “look at these my ruby red ruby lips/look at these my child bearing hips”.
Music gives us access to emotions, feelings images and knowledge beyond our immediate experience. It does this through a moment of merging, in the moment the listener becomes the band. That I was not a militant black rap superstar from Compton, Los Angeles, nor a fiercely creative, sexually liberated female Dorset rock poet, but a teenage boy from the outskirts of London was something I knew, but did not account for, in the intoxicating expansion of horizons that listening to the music gave me.
Years later, as I walked through the ancient woods during my vigil, as if in a dream, I glimpsed my own mind and it’s colours and patterns. In the liminality of the fast, as my psyche began to review itself in the light of the wild vessel it found itself in, the songs I had sang came back, and they seemed less communications that expressions. They were not messages I wanted to get through to a particular person, even the love songs that seemed to be definitely about someone and addressed to them. They felt like doorways. Opening that doorway through song became an act of reverence that enabled a kinship with the more than human world. To sing is not that same as to know, observe or explain. To sing a new song is to merge with and resonate with a feeling such that the unexpected spills through from it into song.
In this sense, creativity is often the greatest surprise to the artist, who learns as much if not more from their song as the audience. When I listened to the Wu Tang Clan or PJ Harvey, I merged with the emotional core of their music and it enlarged me. The experience of entering the woods, and later exploring the South Downs at dusk enlarged me too. Although the experience held up a mirror, it was a mirror framed with ivy leaves and pine cones. It showed not only my face but a web of shadows, animal tracks, bones and seasons in the silver space behind me - and luminous traces of their origins. So, here is one facet of song - song is a kind of reverence. Even when it’s irreverent, rude, or rough, even though it can be twisted to base purposes or made anodyne, corporate and bland there are sparks of this reverence to a greater or lesser extent in the act of singing.
After the fast, I took this through into the creation of my poetry project and book, Into The Dreaming Dark, which became an exploration of the liminality of the natural landscape that surrounded me. I wanted to dig deeper into what it meant to belong to a place, and I wanted to do this through exploring how music, poetry and story can be influenced by a sense of place and foster a sense of belonging to it, a kind of reverence that can be both holy and rough, as Peter Brook once wrote of the theatre.
I wanted to keep the connection to this relationship to creativity, in which expression is more than just communication and has elements of expanding a sense of perception. Just like listening to music aged 13 or 18 expanded I began to explore the world at the fringes of the city that I lived, the South Downs around Brighton, and particularly the time of twilight, sun down. Music on the whole is lunar, a silver shadow of the day world, a beautiful mirror of the working day. Musicians tend to work at night, audiences go to see music at night. Here are the names of some of those places:
Blackcap
Ashcoombe Bottom
Devil’s Dyke
Chanctonbury Ring
Juggs Lane
Castle Hill
Stanmer Great Wood
Ashdown Forest.
The newness of a place brings renewal, breaking as it does the repetition of daily life. Yet the return to a place brings a sense of belonging, and places are new each time you return to them, just as twilight. Listening to live music means giving it attention - this vivifies it and in return it vivifies you. Singing new songs also does this, because when a person improvises a new song, they must reach deep inside themselves and allow something to flow out. So attention is given to the song as it emerges. It’s a deeply wonderful and wondrous process - you open up the gates and something almost always comes through. The Chinese word for nature Alan Watts told us, 自然, ziran, literally translated means something like ‘self so’ or ‘that which happens of itself’. It doesn’t need us to do anything. Art is like that, and singing too - improvisation is not really the construction of melodies and lyrics but the permission to let them sing.
In my brief time immersed in the wild land dreaming, the difference between day and night felt very real, mythic in its realness - the entire atmosphere of wild places change at night. A kind of wild calm permeates the woods, punctuated by the chance of a kill; the nightly scavenge and the nightly hunt. It’s all happening of its own way, as indeed much of our own perceptions are.
Into the cauldron
In the years following, I took my guitar out and for a period of years only ever played it when I had found a spot in nature that I loved. There, I would sit and improvise a song. Songs, although we consume them as entertainment, are deeply strange in the way they arrive and make their mark on the world. They mark moments in life and are deeply bound to memory, to remembering things that otherwise would turn to chalk and stone and fade away.
When I played, I felt at times as if I were submerged with the landscapes that surrounded me. To allow a kind of belonging. I set myself certain rules - I only touched my guitar after I had found a spot in the woods that I liked. I would play and sing for as long as I felt I wanted to - not to practice, repeat or edit a song, but to create a song in one go. Many songs emerged in this way. It felt very different from the ways I had laboured to make songs before for an imagined audience - writing choruses, melodies, constructing different sections. The songs may have been simpler but they flowed just like the stream I sat beside in Ashdown Forest. The songs were not necessarily about the places they were made in. Just as in dreams, the content of an improvised song can’t be predicted, although it is imbued with the emotional atmosphere of the day it was made. As I prepare for the launch of my book, Into The Dreaming Dark, the songs come back to me. There were songs of loss, of joy and sometimes of the process itself. Here are the words to one of those songs, composed at Blackcap, East Sussex.
You said Yes I sit on the hillside Chanting the wind in the leaves I ask “Where are you?” And I ask “What is my name?” Who would open the book? Who would take a closer look? Who dares disturb the bones, Cased in alone? She walked towards me Only the wind on her lips She is the flower on the mountain Her body is a kiss When I am in her presence Like a hole in a storm I put my arms around her waist We both start to take form Maria, like the wind Dark grows on the horizon We want to speak of other things Raking up the bodies Raking up the bones of the past Somewhere, an eye on a treetop Wants to give its last gasp Who? Are you? How? Now I hold your crown of flowers It looks like a cheap plastic toy I see with the eyes of a boy I have the hands of a man In your quicksilver smile You said yes You said yes, You said yes You said yes.
I’m not making any claim for these lyrics and the song they are taken from other than they are natural, like dream or a badger’s skull. I don’t think it’s the best of the many songs from the dreaming dark years, or worst but lyrically it gestures towards mystery, togetherness, affirmation and the visceral.
Songs of course are much more like dreams than explanations. Like twilight, They have a mythic quality, that drops a plumb line down from the everyday to the mythic deep. They ask questions, but the answer could really only be another song.
Hey fire
Hey fire, come by…
You drawn down the sunlight from the sky…
And you formed it
Into your flesh…
And when it burns up and the fire burns bright,
Would you bless?
Hey -
Don’t you know
Your song
Takes a long long time?
It feels fine
Like a slow time wine goes
And the snow fall on windows
And the leaves turn gold to brown
And all is hidden
In a blue tinged day
In a blue skin dress
And the pain of a caress
Hey fire
Would you come down from the sky?
Don’t make it too moist
Don’t make it dry
A blue flame calling out
Your name and it’s number
My heart is Joe Strummer
Like a drummer
Make a kingdom in the back yard
Don’t make it too hard.
Don’t work me too hard
There were other kinds of song that came up too. At a certain point I stopped bringing my guitar, and the songs that came simply from voice and some percussion had a far more chanting, primordial quality. Working back through the material I discerned different themes from these chants. There were songs about crossing a bridge, of searching for a name, of breathing underwater and of the blue flame of heartbreak and the brittle silver of the moon. There were poems of mythical ecology - that is that places take on a mythic perspective when dipped a little in the psyche. I wrote a section called “Elemental Praise” for the poems which were named and praised things in chains of images - hearths, twilight, stillness, fungi.
There were poems about the heart letting go of its obsessions, becoming tender and blue. Of entering the perilous realm - the place where images merge with their surroundings and take on a reality of their own, where souls can be lost or dazzled. All of these constitute a process of renewal. Renewal involves a kind of dissolving of what’s become fixed. Creative processes thrive on this kind of dissolving. It’s akin to cooking something in a cauldron. Jung liked to speak of alchemy, and the long slow application of a certain temperature of heat. A creative process is like that too, applying heat to something you are passionately interested in, and have placed in the cauldron of yourself.
Into the jungle
When I came to Brighton aged 18 to study as Fatboy Slim was in the ascent. He dropped Brimful of Asha in a nightclub in Brighton and it dropped all the way from the wooden dancefloor at Big Beat Boutique to Top of the Pops and number 1. I bounced around the clubs with my friend Lucy who would always find her way to the front and had a kind of irresistible ability to navigate the chaotic surges of nightlife, to find the golden threads of the night in the shining faces of the people finding sanctuary in the dance, and the night, the joy of the dance the urge to connect.
In these adventures, just I was crossing in the lunar landscape of night-clubs from the fierce loneliness of adolescence into an adult world of carnivals and pleasure . Now, bit by bit, I was crossing away from adulthood into mid-life. That’s a different journey, one that involves letting go of the dreams that have dominated the first half of life. For me, this midlife journey has been a complex process that has meant looking deeply into where I have been driven and where stuck in my personal, creative, professional and spiritual life. A journey into the dreaming dark.
When I was a teenager, Jungle music hit, and the dress code was different to indie punk, smarter clothes, Yves Saint Laurent shirts and designer jeans, Timberland jackets, Reebok classics. In a punk rock mosh pit people like a bouncy ball into a continually opening and contracting circle of joyful skittles. I learned more from mosh pits then and now than I ever could from a psychology class. To go to jungle and drum and bass clubs, however, you had to wear smart clothes and make shapes alone in your own space, as the drums skittered over enormous bass lines, punctuated by strange samples with MCS chanting rhymes over the top. It was moody music, that projected confidence within solitude rather than channeled wild emotion outwards.
I spent time nodding my head in bedrooms listening to the glitchy drums and heavy bass, while friends tried to mix two records together. But I loved the flow of the MC’s and the strange samples, taking in everything from near death experiences “felt like as if I was in a long dark tunnel” to “rhythm is fundamental to the spirit/like the beat of a tribal drum”.
I can list the names of the DJ’s and MCs and once again they sound like a poem or a prayer.
Grooverider Fabio Jumping Jack Frost Kemistry and Storm Micky Finn DJ Hype DJ Randall MC Stevie Hyper D MC Brockie MC Det
Here were two different kinds of merging, ecstatic hurling of self into other, and trancelike hip shaking shapes of bass.
The dreaming dark
I passed through both doorways. Now, approaching 46, to be renewed means something else. It has meant to bring together different worlds and ways of being - the defined body shapes of Jungle and the ecstatic wildness of a moshpit - with something that contains and is greater than both. Something with root hairs and moonbeams. I think both of these urban forms of music originate in the dreaming dark, from which all rhythms and melodies and lyrics flow.
The ‘dreaming dark’ and nature are not confined to wild or natural places - that’s our construct, the separation. Yet in places where nature has been allowed to mature the subtle but very real vibe persists and renews at the level of feeling. Places have atmospheres. When a bass player puts down a pattern, and the drummer responds, when the guitar slices through the interlocking rhythms, travelling between riff and melody, it invites the voice to add the raw sound of human experience. Each allows each, something emerges more than you could bargain for. A loss and a renewal. Ecosystems, wild places are like this, the relationship between the oak and the cattle, the fungi and the moon. In the old places, where you can feel a little trace of our ancestors who danced 4,000 years ago (and more), I get a trace of this.
So the book launch of Into The Dreaming Dark is also about the voice, as much as it is about words, about celebration and loss and being touched by the mythic. It’s a performance space of song, story and poem, incanted, told, sung and spoken, of a movement between fairy tale images and everyday life. I’d love to share it with you.
Note: You can find details of Toby’s book, Into the Dreaming Dark, and the launch event in the footnotes below2
And while working with these poems in the last year or so, I listened to a lot of Sufi music. I think if I were to pick one song that has been a reflection of ‘dreaming dark’ it would be this incredible piece of music by Dhafer Yousef - whirling birdsong ceremony - highly recommended beautiful video. 3
To finish, I’ll share this poem from visiting Nine Ladies stone circle in the Peak District, one sunny summer day:
9 ladies dance In the birch breeze sun, And the birch leaves rattle like a bead filled drum Arms, hips, spines Entwine like snakes Face to the sky, Hairs on the nape Of her neck go thrill To the taste in her mouth Sun to the east, birds flying south Drum was a dark cloud Gather in the crops A rhythm started once Only change never stops 9 ladies dance on the old stone moor, Turned to stone deep as bone make a stone deep door 7 for the sirens 5 snaking tracks 3 gold hairs on the devils back 2 for the lovers 1 for the world Placed in the space Where the stone meets the earth 9 ladies dance for a sorrow That’s released A dark bird flies And a tremor underneath All that was lost Isn’t all that’s been found 9 ladies stand by the glade Near the mound
Dreaming Dark book and book launch:
Toby Chown’s book of poetry Into the Dreaming Dark : 33 poems of imaginal ecology collects together 7 years of explorations back and forth across the thin bridge into the dreaming of place, ancient woods of Dartmoor, the ceremonial landscape of Avebury, the chalky woodlands around Brighton. It travels into the heart of the blues, where everyday life and excursions into the perilous realm criss-cross like the stitches on the hem of a cloak. You can find further information on the book at https://tobychown.com/into-the-dreaming-dark-33-poems-of-imaginal-ecology/ and buy it HERE on Amazon. You can buy tickets for the launch event, at the Rose Hill Arts Hub, Brighton, at https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/imaginal-doorway/into-the-dreaming-dark-book-launch-event-poems-music-and-stories-from-the-imaginal-realm/e-vkamav
Bonuses: Toby writes: While I was putting this collection of poems together, I was, of course, influenced and inspired by a number of artists. I'm not quite sure what would represent inspirations musically for dreaming dark - I wasn't really listening to things in the same way. I listened to quite a lot of middle aged David Bowie and Leonard Cohen....I think the Lazarus and Blackstar videos might come close but to be honest the Blackstar video is so deeply affecting it would need a whole book. Likewise Bjork’s Ancestress:
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