Category: Ode

I recently paid a visit to the Provencal village of Roussillon, that extraordinary location where great ochre deposits are visible in the cliffs upon which the town is perched. During the trip I learnt that the village has a legend to explain these colours, the tale of Lady Surmonde. The legend has similarities to many aboriginal myths in the way it explains the origin of the colourful red ochres as having been stained by the blood of a mythological figure.

I decided to write a poem about this, expanding the legend a little to make Surmonde a rock artist and trance dancer so the blood infused in the rock carries the essence of her passion.

It’s a curious fusion in some ways. The myth has some obvious similarities to those of the classical / Western / Greco-Roman tradition with its tragic heroine. I’ve drawn this out and expanded on it, making her the muse of rock art.

For me, this conflation of aboriginal Dreamtime and the realm of classical myth is not so odd. Part of how we can put the final nail in the coffin of the colonial mindset is by transforming Western culture itself into an indigenous one, and that means allowing it to stretch back to and embrace its own Dreamtime, the age of the European cave painters, so its roots are in the Earth and there is deep cultural richness at the heart of the culture rather than a gap that might seem to need to be filled by conquest and acquisition.

The Greek theatre of Golden Age Athens has been described as the greatest miracle in the history of culture, but all they really did was add polish, proportion, geometry, rhetotic to story telling traditions and modes that had been maintained for tens of millenia. The Greeks were jusy expert makeup artists of mythic matter.

Aboriginal cultures long told stories in dramatised ways, with different voices for different characters and making use of other arts such as song and dance. It’s too easy to fall into the trap of making biased comparisons between Greek mythology and these other mythologies that are skewed by the halo effect, mesmerised by attraction to the makeup that was applied to the core mythic matter. But that halo effect is in this case a valuable precious thing, so the answer is not to uglify the Greek myth; rather, the obvious course of action is to take other matter from elsewhere and apply the same makeup. To show that Trojan women are as beautiful as Helen and that Paris had no need to sail away with the Greek queen – hence that there is no need for another Tojan war.

One of the simplest ways to apply proportion and geometry to a story is to turn into metered verse.

In this case I haven’t done so with an actual aboriginal myth but rather with this French legend that has this strong similarity with such myths about ochre-blood, because as said part of my goal is to reveal Europe’s own Dreamtime – the Arcadian Dreamtime. Afterall, the motif of ochre as the blood of a mythic figure is a meta-myth: there are many versions from different places and it was obviously transported to new lanscapes and applied in new ways, so why not France, given that there is already such a tale, authentically old?

You can read the poem here below, but there’s also an audio version in the YouTube video above, complete with some images to help tell the tale, created with a bit of AI assistance. The irony of using AI to create images of the story of a muse of a rustic art form that is all about perfornance and process and working tangibly with materials from the ground is not lost on me, but these are merely intended to be illustrations of the story, not works of art themselves, and i like a bit of contradiction.

In the starting stages of writing the poem, I also used some AI assistance just to get the ball rolling. Having decided on the general thematic structure, I gave Chatgbt my instructions, and there was that initial surprise when it came back with something intelligible, but on reflection I realised it wasn’t saying what I wanted it to say nor in the way I wanted it to say it, but it served as a starting point to use for a rewrite. I think one, maybe two verses have remained from that AI version (the bit about love’s snare), but most of it has changed completely. Here is the final version:


An Ochre Ode

In Roussilon, the southern sunlight streams,
On ochre cliffs, lit sharp against the blue,
The rocky walls, banded with fiery seams,
Rise bold in brightest red and yellow hue.

High pinnacles remember what is past,
Strong colors sing of nature’s art profound,
With lofty grace, the ancient rocks hold fast,
The painter’s eye in awe forever bound.

Whence came such colour? How and when and why?
There lived a lady, Sermonde was her name,

With passion for the Earth and for the sky,
Her young and tender heart was all aflame.

With brush in hand, she captured what she saw,
From birds that soared upon the Summer breeze,
To noble beasts that roamed the forest floor,
In every stroke, she breathed life into these.

This lady loved the wild Bacchic dance,
Through which a mantic fire flowed through her heart,
And as she entered elevated trance,
A mystic potency enthused her art.

From here, her story takes a crueller twist,
Her lover to her husband is revealed,

Who to Sermonde serves up the foulest dish:
Her lover’s heart beneath the sauce concealed.

In grief and horror Sermonde climbs the hills,

Despairing, throws herself from their great height,

Then from her mortal wounds the red blood spills,
To stain the rock with colour, ever bright.

The cliffs, a testament to her despair,
Their hue a tribute to her anguished soul,
Each crimson drop, a symbol of love’s snare,
Her tragic tale, forever they extol.

But in her wake, her passion still remains,
Infused within the pigments we procure,
From rocks she fed, her ardor yet sustains,
The vibrant art, by love’s fair touch ensured.

So, when the brush upon the surface glides,
And ochre pigments bring the scenes to life,
It’s Lady Sermonde’s spirit that abides,
Her passion, fierce, dispelling all dull strife.

So blend the pigment, make the sacred mixture,
Take the brush and work in ancient style,
Use living paint to make a living picture,
Culture makes a window on the wild.

And so through many metamorphoses,
Into the beasts that walk the scrubland plain,
Once more she breathes and moves and feels and sees,
For when we paint, fair Sermonde lives again.

Above the clouds where Zeus’s temples shine,
The Muses circle round and round again,
And while some say the count of them is nine,
Others know in truth the number’s ten.

For Sermond’s spirit rose to her new home,
Within the gods’ great sacred company,
Zeus honoured her for painting beasts on stone,
And made her muse of rustic artistry.