Taking as his starting-point the dead girl in Rain Johnson’s 2005 film Brick and the subjects of any number of Victorian paintings – from Ophelia and Arthurian maidens through to G. F. Watt’s Found Drowned – Burnside suggests that such figures are best seen as allegories for a male ‘soul-self’ that is seen as a girl ‘because a seeming girlishness’ is what boys appear ‘to give up in order to be a man’. Like much of the book in which this appears – I Put a Spell on You: Several Digressions on Love and Glamour – what Burnside has to say in On Lost Girl Syndrome is not about the lost girl at all, or not in any literal sense, but about the problem boys have growing into full manhood in a patriarchal society. Burnside’s preoccupation with this was already present in 1988, the year The Hoop, his first volume of poems, was published. There, in the poem Psyche-Life, he speculates that ‘the soul’ may be a woman or, perhaps, a ‘dialect … of a common tongue’. A poem then that can be read as a prelude to On Lost Girl Syndrome.
My attraction to what Burnside is exploring registered a while back, although I did not really understand it. It appeared in connection with the image of the young Greek girls who, dedicated to Artemis, were called “little bears”. They took part in a ritual dance that’s described by Paula Meehan in one of the lectures in her Imaginary Bonnets with Real Bees in Them (2016). I first came across this years back in a short essay by the cultural anthropologist Károly Kerény dedicated to his nine-year-old daughter and called A mythological Image of Girlhood. At the it caught my attention as something psychically resonant, but nothing more.
Then, back on October 24th, 2022, I posted the last of Twenty-two Postcards for Utopias Bach on this blog. There I wrote that a momentary sighting in Alston had:
‘answered my question about the “grounding” of all Artemis stands for. A willowy tomboy in cut-off jeans and sweatshirt, maybe eight or ten, appeared from the back of a beaten-up old Landrover. She radiated an absolute self-possession that seemed all of a piece with her make-shift bow – a flexed wand of wood bent taut by its string – that was slung across her shoulder. She then half strode, half danced towards the Co-Op, followed at a respectful distance by her father and younger brother. All three disappeared inside and I saw no more of them’.
That sighting might best be described as giving me an elusive sense of another way of being, of an as yet “untamed”, intimate knowing of the world. One that I believe is related to what is called in Irish an saol eile (literally “the other life”). It’s this quality that, for me, links the epiphany of that sighting to John Burnside’s chapter.
The images below relate in various ways to these thoughts.
