Dragon Hunts

As a young knight I began each day wearily, overwhelmed by the distance I would have to cross, not knowing what I should expect to find within that distance. And each day, in my mind I fabricated dark corners of the world, hidden niches to seek out, and distant mountains to ascend. I would lose myself within the fantasia of this mental forest, jumping between entangled trees of thought, braving the landscape’s most perilous cliff or cave, becoming lost in a world become labyrinth, a delirium of darkness and shadows, inhabited by dragons of the fiercest kind.

In this world the most glorious of all possessions one could hope to have was that of the carbuncle. A carbuncle was a precious stone, a deep red ruby that is found buried in the brains of dragons. To obtain it, you had to do battle. If not taken fresh from a still living dragon, and in the complete absence of light, the carbuncle would dissolve into thin air. And if you were in possession of a carbuncle, if indeed, you dared to do battle with dragons in the dark, the stone would give you good fortune and everlasting magical power.

The hunt for dragons was always dangerous. The most cunning of warriors, even those who had traveled from the Far East, have been laid to waste by such merciless beasts. For small boys like myself, who were generally known at the time to be virtually invisible to even the keenest sighted dragon, the task was made no easier. Dragons often fed their young the tender meat of seven-year-olds, and unlike small girls and other people, little boys were very tasty. Thus the fact that dragons could not see a little boy meant close to nothing: dragons could still smell their sweet flesh and dragons could still hear their tiny feet like they could hear the breathe of butterflies, even as they slept.

Ambush was feeble. Confrontation was inevitable.

To do hand-to-hand battle with a dragon was the bravest thing you can do. It meant fighting the gnarly and the impossible, gnarly because the battle was always fought in the dark, and impossible because no one else saw the dragon like you saw the dragon. In doing battle with that which is unseen to others, as with doing art that is actually art, the best you can do is interpret the enigmatic; that is, you can only adjust yourself to it. And to interpret the enigmatic is to take a leap into an abyss, a leap from the material into the spiritual. It is awesome, and it is immeasurable.

The removal of a carbuncle was the trickiest of all procedures. First, the conditions had to be prefect if a carbuncle was not to vanish. The smallest intrusion of light, even the faintest flicker of starlight, into the deep regions of the dragon’s brain instantly dissolved the stone. Second, you had to master a remarkable craft. The stone was to be removed while enveloped between two of the dragons scales, both from the very top of its skull, a protective case tightly sewn together with the creature’s own whiskers. And once removed, if removed at all, a carbuncle could continue to exist only if properly kept safe in its case, safe from greed, safe from one’s own vanity, and safe from the disbelieve of others.

You never saw a carbuncle. You believed in it.

The very first time I heard about carbuncles, I was maybe five. The story was told to me by an old sailor of the Lough Foyle, like so many other stories I heard as a little boy. I’ve always considered this to be one of the most rewarding aspects of my short life history, that is, having grown up as a very young lad in the Northern Irish countryside, just east of Londonderry, and being told tales upon tales by old, bearded seafarers as they worked with their nets at the piers. They would leave early while the morning fog was still breathing, and by evening, if they hadn’t gone as far as Stranraer or even Oban, they would return with the most fantastic and curious stories about their encounters of water monsters, the lure of magical seals, the lurking of sailors taken by the sea, and, of course, they would tell unforgettable stories about dragons.

I especially loved the stories about dragons, and I believed in their existence right up to the age of eleven.

By that time my family had already moved out of the Irish country to inhabit an English country cottage some miles northwest of Carlisle, on the Scottish border at Kielder Water. It was there that I learned from my uncle that there is no such thing as a dragon, and certainly, dragons did not slumber in the forests surrounding Kielder Water as I had insisted. Doing battle with another dragon no longer seemed possible. The carbuncles I had collected in their cases were broken open, and they were exposed for what they were: valueless stones encased in seashells.

And I guess, too, that was the biggest difference about living in the countryside of Northern Ireland and living in the countryside of northern England. That is, in Northern Ireland I was told stories and they excited me; they did more than excite me, they made everything inside of me live for living. When I used to sit at the piers waiting for the return of the boats, with my oversized head and wide black eyes resting between the wooden rails and my feet dropped over into the water, I noticed the beauty of the fog and rain before I noticed the attempts of art. I lived for the feel of the waves against my legs and I would imagine the pull of their movements to be all the ocean’s currents twisting around my angles in play. In Ireland’s winter along the northern coast, the water is like ice, and I mean just that, cold hard ice that grips your feet with such force and power that you can only helplessly enjoy it, its sharp bite between skin and bone, its curious ability to remind you that you are a living, conscious being and that, without the ability to feel poetry in the moment and without the ability to remember, imaginatively, that very feeling of poetry, then life becomes nothing more than a list of historical facts.

In England, certainly, I still heard wonderful myths and aspiring legends, but they were told to me as if they were wonderful myths and aspiring legends, nothing that directly quickened my heart. Do you see what I mean? Dragons no longer slumbered in the woods nearby, and I knew this before my uncle told me then, like I know it now. But I also knew, like I know now, that though dragons don’t exist, carbuncles do, and their powers of imagination did come from dragons somewhere.

And to that end, throughout the forests of Kielder Water, a little boy battled as many as a hundred dragons in a single day.

I can still remember it like it was this afternoon. Perhaps I remember it so well because I’ve forgotten it so well, because, in the short history that is my life, I’ve been able to replace the bare facts of life with something so much more important—memories, the kind of memories that are like lies, but better. They are like lies because no one can remember with perfection, and they so they happen like stories, but they happen in the unseen world of the truth, and they continue to transform with each moment of history. They are no less real or unreal than the facts of life, so that, in spite of what Oscar Wilde writes, there is no need to make distinctions between art, life, and memory. Yes, art lies, and to be good it must abstract from life and history—as Nietzsche writes, history is harmful if it cannot further life—so that life becomes like art rather than art becoming like life. To this day, even after having to attend boarding school in Bristol, then private school in Germany, even after having to learn history, that greatest of inventions from the nineteenth century—that literary urine of knowledge and perception, as it was once described to me—even after reading Borges’ tale of carbuncles and magical beasts for myself, when I write, I write memories from throughout my history, memories which express fleeting sensations of poetry from one moment in history to another moment, which is right now. It is always a short history of my life, and a short history is just that, one that isn’t long. It’s like a glance, a short moment between two blinks. It has no bibliography, no annotation, no corroboration, no listing of primary and secondary sources—it’s anecdotal. It has no guarantee of authenticity. It doesn’t need one—how else could a glance at history weave the multiple threads it has to weave if it is also to have citations and authentications? Corroborated, a simple thing would be equal to three thousand pages and as emptiness as a secret.


Downs - Copyright © 2005