DELINQUENT GODS

'Michelet already said it: when the aristocracy of the Olympian gods collapsed at the end of Antiquity, it did not take down with it "the masses of indigenous gods, the populace of gods that still possessed the immensity of fields, forests, woods, mountains, springs, intimately associated with the life of the country. These gods lived in the hearts of oaks, in the swift, deep waters, and could not be driven out of them.... Where are they? In the desert, on the heath, in the forest? Yes, but also and especially in the home. They live on in the most intimate of domestic habits." But they also live on in our streets and in our apartments. They were perhaps after all only the agile representatives of narrativity, and of narrativity in its most delinquent form. The fact that they have changed their names... takes nothing away from the multiple, insidious, moving force. It survives the avatars of the great history that debaptises and rebaptises them.'

- Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, p.129-30

'The Mole was staggered at the size, the extent, the ramifications of it all; at the length of the dim passages, the solid vaultings of the crammed store-chambers, the masonry everywhere, the pillars, the arches, the pavements. "How on earth, Badger," he said at last, "did you ever find time and strength to do all this? It's astonishing!"

"It would be astonishing indeed," said Badger simply, "if I had done it. But as a matter of fact I did none of it - only cleaned out the passages and chambers, as far as I had need of them. There's a lot more of it, all round about. I see you don't understand, and I must explain it to you. Well, very long ago, on the spot where the Wild Wood waves now, before ever it had planted itself and grown up to what it now is, there was a city - a city of people, you know. Here, where we are standing, they lived, and walked, and talked, and slept, and carried on their business. Here they stabled their horses and feasted, from here they rode out to fight or drove out to trade. They were a powerful people, and rich, and great builders. They built to last, for they thought their city would last forever."

"But what has become of them all?" asked the Mole.

"Who can tell?" said the Badger. "People come - they stay for a while, they flourish, they build - and they go. It is their way. But we remain. There were badgers here, I've been told, long before that same city ever came to be. And now there are badgers here again. We are an enduring lot, and we may move out for a time, but we wait, and are patient, and back we come. And so it will ever be."'

- Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows, p.82-3

'When midnight comes a host of dogs and men
Go out and track the badger to his den
And put a sack within the hole and lye
Till the old grunting badger passes bye
He comes and hears they let the strongest loose
The old fox hears the noise and drops the goose
The poacher shoots and hurries from the cry
And the old hare half-wounded buzzes bye
They get a forked stick to bear him down
And clap the dogs and bear him to the town...

He turns about to face the loud uproar
And drives the rebels to their very doors...
The bull-dog knows his match and waxes cold
The badger grins and never leaves his hold...

He drives away and beats them every one
And then they loose them all and set them on
He falls as dead and kicked by boys and men
Then starts and grins and drives the crowd agen
Till kicked and torn and beaten out he lies
And leaves his hold and cackles groans and dies.'

- John Clare, The Badger

'I lay in my last self, stricken, like a sheep on its back.
When up comes the jackel-headed god, the guide
who herds the dead
and sniffed and frisked and found me already half
rotted
in a little pile of teeth and broken bone laths

And said he could spare me in exchange for three
truths.
Then first, I said, I don't want to see you again.
Second, I want you to go blind.
Third, I wish you and your kind would come to
some violent end.

And off he went,
chasing some other scent,
muttering to himself
not yet not yet...'

- Alice Oswald, Five Fables of a Length of Flesh