Fortean Times – September 2019

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LETTERS

Nijinskywalrus

While readingThe Diary ofVaslav

Nijinsky, I noticed thefollowing

rathermystical pronouncement:

“You are he and I am he.Weare

we you are they.” I was struckby

how similar thiswas toJohn Len-

non’s wild, declamatory opening

lines to ‘I am theWalrus’: “I am he

as you are he asyou are me and

we are all together...” Nijinsky’s

line is the opening one of a poem

• a collection of sonic puns that
  read like arock lyric from 1967,
  rather than 1919, when itwas
  actually written.This coincidence,
  perhaps minor in itself, is then
  compounded.Twenty-five lines
  later, ourVaslavexclaims: “You
  are gu gu gu gu gu...” This is star-
  tlingly close to Lennon’sfamous
  cry of “Goo goo g’joob.” So then,
  twoWhitmanesque barbaric
  yawps a half century apart... in-
  teresting, but perhaps not too sur-
  prising given the counterculture’s
  propensityfor mining congenial
  outsider texts?
  Yes... but Lennonwould only
  have had access to the 1936ver-
  sion of theDiary, heavily edited
  by Nijinsky’s widow Romola


• and shorn of all its wilder pas-
  sages.The unexpurgated edition
  was only published in 1999.While
  switching off his mind,relaxing
  and floating downstream in those
  heady days, did Lennon have a
  precognitive interlude? Or did he
  consult the Akashic Records?
  Mervyn Gale
  Macclesfield, Cheshire

Faulty wiring?

Myfather once knew someone

(one of his academy lecturers,I

think) whowas smashed up ina

horrific car accident. He managed

hive mind; theywould suddenly

all waddle towards you on the vil-

lagegreen (next to the pond) and

surroundyou, quacking loudly. It

was like something out ofVillage

of Damned. On another occasion,a

local moorhen joined in when the

duckgroup hive mind surrounded

me.

I oncecycled withmygirlfriend

and her cat, upfor his holidays

and in his cat box strapped toa

bikerack after being picked up

with me from the nearest station.

Wetook a quick break aswe

cycled throughWestleton. Itwas a

short while before theWestleton

duckgroup hive mind started sur-

rounding our cat in a box on the

back of a bike. Our normallyvery

bold tomcatwent nuts, he totally

panicked. Sowe cycled out of the

village quickly.

Then oneyear all the ducks

were suddenlyweird-looking

mallard/khaki Comptonhybrids.

(My late mother told me that

variety of duckwas called khaki

Comptons – dark brown witha

whitechest.)Theydidn’t seem

particularly fertilehybrids; there

were only a few small,weird-

looking black ducklings that

year. The nextyear, by contrast,

they had many ducklings, most

of whom survived.The Westleton

duck colony still does itsweird

rallies and parades across the vil-

lagegreen, but it’smuch calmer

now; it doesn’t seem to surround

passers-by somuch. The strange

assortment of different breeds of

duck (and the odd goose) seems

to have left the colony too. It’s

now mostly the standardised mal-

lard/khaki Comptonhybrids.

• Eric Hoffman’sreview ofUn-
  explained[FT381:61] asks what
  “theevents at Skywalker Ranch
  [tell us]about the nature of
  reality”.The events at Skywalker
  Ranch, California, home of direc-
  tor George Lucas’s Lucasfilm
  and the production basefor the
  StarWarsfilms, probably consist
  mainly of making films, especial-
  ly in theStarWarsfranchise.This
  should have been Skinwalker
  Ranch, Utah, home of all sorts
  of High Strangeness. Could an
  overactive spell-checker be the
  culprit?
  Matt Salusbury
  Dunwich, Suffolk

to get himself back together and

startedworking again, but he

acquired the tic of interjecting the

word ‘tråden’ (‘the thread’) into

his speech atrandom intervals. He

himself had no idea what thiswas

supposed to mean; itwas justa

wiringfault.

Nils Erik Grande

Oslo, Norway

Folk Horror

I thoroughly enjoyed Gail-Nina

Anderson’s brilliant feature on the

‘Folk Horror Revival’ [FT381:36-

43 ]. Here are some furtherrecom-

mendations to anyreaders new to

this genre.

The first point that struck me

about the idea of a ‘revival’ was

that the images and ideas offolk

horror have never goneaway

in some genres ofmusic, most

notablyavant garde andweird

folk, with lines like streams of

the maypole flowing outwards

from Comus, the Incredible String

Band andPaul Giovanni and

Magnet’sWicker Mansoundtrack,

to the output of bands like Cur-

rent 93 (thinking of albums like

Earth Covers Earth), Nature and

Organisation (who covered ‘Wil-

low’s Song’ as ‘TheWicker Man

Song’) and Alasdair Roberts, who

having carved hisown niche asa

folk artist is now a part of David

Tibet’s Current 93family. Every

now and again such imagery slips

briefly into the mainstream –I

think particularly of ‘TheYoung

Knives’ and their Mercury-nom-

inated album,Voices of Animals

and Men– and I note that theFat

White Family, whose new album

Serf’s Uphas beenwell received,

have produced a videoverymuch

inspiredby folk horrorfor their

song, ‘When I leave’.

Wealso see

folk horror in

modern literary

fiction, with An-

drew Michael

Hurley’sThe

Loney(2014)

andDevil’s Day

(2017): the

former includes

someverymen-

acingexamples

of pace-egging

andmummery,

while the lat-

ter draws its horror from afolk

legend that casts a long shadow

down theyearsfor a small rural

community. While any director

seeking to adapt these books will

struggle to capture the atmos-

phere that the writer so skilfully

evokes, I hope that some brave

souls will film them inyears to

come.

If we needreminders of the

“oldways”, the BFI’sHere’sa

Health to the Barley Mowis a

fantastic two-disc documentary

record of Britishfolk traditions,

includingsword dances, the obby

oss, the burry man, andmuch,

much more. Ifwe wish to consider

the symbols and motifs offolk

horror, this collection provides

much to draw on for writers, art-

ists, filmmakers andmusicians.I

think of films like BenWheatley’s

Kill List(2011), which – while on

the outer edges of whatwe think

of asfolk horror – borrows some

of its tropes and images.

And whetherwe have a ‘r evival’

or not, Gail-Nina Anderson is cer-

tainly in tune with thezeitgeist:

as I write this letter, Ari Aster’s

much-promoted Sweden-based

folk horror filmMidsommarhits

the cinemas, and the newspa-

pers areveryexcitedby the Sky/

HBO collaboration,The Third

Day, which apparently involvesa

visitor to an island off the British

coast who starts to investigate the

strange rituals practisedby the

islanders... Now where have we

seen that before?

Andrew Mitchell

Bourne, Lincolnshire

Duck hive mind
Nick Maloret’s account of agroup
of 10 ducks “waddling towards
him” in South Harting [FT381:75]
reminded me of a phenomenon
that used to be observable in
the Suffolk village ofWestleton.
The village’s duck colony on the
village pond (it had an informal
“duckwarden” whokept aneye
on them) used to be aragtag
group of mostly mallards, but
also some khaki Compton’s, the
odd Chinesewater duck and the
occasional Muscovy duck. On one
occasion therewere geese that
attached themselves to the colony.
What was oddabout themwas
JOHN ROBERT DOCHERTY that they seemed to have a group

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