Earth: A Wandering

 

 

 

Alfred Kentigern Siewers

 

Earth is at once both symbol and reality: both a planet with a proper name and a substance, humus, from which the human emerges in participation, along with many of our fellow travelers in the physical world – animals, plants, and others. It is thus also both a wandering and a grounding – and most of all, perhaps, a wondering, at what environmental philosopher Bruce Foltz in a new study of the ongoing life of noetic Christian tradition in environmentalism calls ‘the heavenly beauty of Earth’ (Foltz, 2012). Pre-moderns and non-moderns probably lived and articulated this more particularly than moderns do with our more abstract GreenSpeak. But we all experience the conjunction of meanings of earth at some level. The modern West often expresses it through a type of post-medieval understanding that re-centers us in a medieval middle on Earth, part of the original impetus behind Romanticism. Whether it’s J.R.R. Tolkien’s association of his retro-medieval Shire with Appalachia (Davenport, 1997); the medievalism enabled by a cyberspace that simultaneously removes us from the Earth and enables us to engage different time periods and cultures more simultaneously: or personal traditions that re-form community with Earth, as we weave them from our scholarship through the interstices of our academic lives or arts: we connect with actual people and physical environments on Earth and in earth as both refugees from the modern and ambassadors to it, enmeshed in that which we seek to proclaim.

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As I walk through a last remnant of old-growth forest in Pennsylvania looking for our annual church Fourth of July picnic, passing through shady groves of hemlock trees amid brooks habited by bears, Amish teenagers, and, in earlier days, the nature writer Euell ‘ever eat a pine tree?’ Gibbons, I am reminded of the retro-medieval Forest of Arden.

In Shakespeare’s As You Like It, the usurper duke’s wrestler Charles asks the dispossessed and out-of-favor Orlando, ‘Come, where is the young gallant that is so desirous to lie with his mother earth?’ (Shakespeare, 1992, 1.2.296).

But Orlando is thrown to earth in a different way than the duke and wrestler envision.

He flees the court for Arden. There he begins carving love poems to Rosalind on trees, in a ‘green world’ in which, as the duke-in-exile remarks, human life ‘exempt from public haunt finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything’ (2.1.299).

Arden, a disappearing forest in the Warwickshire precincts of Stratford-on-Avon, itself becomes a kind of sylvan haunt in the play, written during the time of the Enclosure movement.

Such remnant woods around England had become places where an outlaw forest economy found temporary refuge, while an expanding British Empire cut them down for ships, privatized pasturage, and witnessed a new pastoralism.

Phantoms of the Middle Ages like Robin Hood haunted such woods, while vanishing into Elizabethan stories. These forests of the imagination exemplified C.S. Lewis’ curmudgeonly remark while giving birth to his Oxford History of English Literature tome (a painful project he labeled by acronym ‘the oh hell’) that England had no Renaissance because of its insular medieval continuities (Lewis, 1954, 55–56; Coghill, 1965, 60–61).

Yet in Arden’s ‘green world’ of imagination, the denizens of Shakespeare’s forest (a locality confusable in name also with both Ardennes woods in France and biblical Eden) find empathy not only for crying deer, but for each other, ending in a metonymy of marriage rites as well as a crossing of the human and non-human.

What the exiled duke calls ‘this wide and universal theater’ (Shakespeare, 1992, 2.7.135) of Arden becomes in its engagement of the non-human, a place of experience of earth apart from the human conventions of the court.

In its back-and-forth focus between the ‘green world’ and human society, Arden comes to typify what environmental philosophers (glossing Heidegger) distinguish as earth differentiated from the world of human cultural constructions: ‘The other side of nature,’ the phusis that simultaneously both hides and discloses itself. Yet earth spans the real if ghostly Arden of Warwickshire, as well as the type of older ‘green world’ associations of English folklore identified by the critic Northrop Frye (Frye, 1949), rooted in both the mythological ‘Celtic’ Otherworld and the transplanted Desert of early Christian monasticism.

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The integration of the real, imaginary, and symbolic in this mysterious sense of earth echoes the American Pragmatist Charles Peirce’s pioneering work in ecosemiotics. In Peirce’s model, the process of semiosis, or meaning-making (for him a definition of life), could involve a nature-text, an outward-facing triad of sign, environment and meaningful landscape, beyond de Saussure’s more arbitrary and internalized binary of signified and signifier (Maran, 2007). Landscape, as a meaningful symbolic overlay of earth, thus integrated the contexts of reader and author, while relating them directly to text and physical environment. The earth itself then reads as a nature-text, but always beyond our full comprehension, since we ourselves are allegory in the text.

Arden’s ecosemiotics of ‘tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, / sermons in stones, and good in everything’ thus provides context, grounding, and redefinition for Jaques’ famous notion in the play that ‘all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women, merely players’ (Shakespeare, 1992, 2.1.16–17; 2.7.305). Linking that stage to a physical environment offers earth to Orlando not only as ground of humiliation, and not just Jaques’ placeless theater, but as experience of place leading to what deep ecology terms self-realization in the environment of earth. Deleuzean terms take it further into a rhizomic realization. And pre-modern Christian traditions literally and figuratively offer us a vision of the cross between the immanent and the transcendent, the anthropomorphic and the cosmic.

^***

When the Apollo 8 astronauts looked back on our planet from lunar orbit in 1968 and recited the Creation account from Genesis, they offered perhaps the most famous attempt to subsume ancient traditions of earth into the world of modern technology. But their words still evoked a pre-modern sense of our planet as mystery: ‘In the beginning God made the heavens and the earth.’ In Hebrew, Greek and Latin versions of Genesis 1, the terms used for ‘earth’ integrated meanings of essence and element, a span referenced here in the term ‘Earth.earth.’ Medieval schoolmen later split that relationship, demarcating essence and existence, supernatural versus natural, as if trying to forget the living, integrative metaphor of the earth mother, Gaia, referenced by earlier church fathers.

Earth to the ancients meant a realm including land and sea, ultimately planet and soil, native country and the dust of Genesis, from which humans were energized by God’s breath, pneuma, in Greek meaning wind and spirit, as well as breath. In medieval Greek usage, following the Septuagint γ (from which also developed the root of geology, geometry, geography, and geophilosophy, not to mention Gaia), ‘earth’ metaphorically stood also for the human mind, the realm of material things, the Promised Land, and heaven, following references in Psalms (Lampe, 1961, s.v.).

And the living breath from God in Hebrew and Greek in the clay or dust was related to earth by more than just simple infusion to early exegetes of Genesis. Its pneuma entwined the logoi of the speaking-into-being of Creation, in which logos could mean at once harmony, word, discourse, story, reason, and purpose. The kalos, or goodness, of Creation referenced in the Septuagint Genesis, likewise referred at once to the beautiful and the good, also spanning the physical and the spiritual. A speaking or breathing of harmonies, pre-moderns realized, involved chanting or music. St. Gregory of Nyssa in the fourth century declared ‘the order of the universe is a kind of musical harmony of varied shapes and colors with a certain order and rhythm’ (Gregory of Nyssa, 1999, 27–30). He identified music with the spoken word of God’s Spirit-breath as an essential if dynamic pattern of earth. Music, like a Deleuzean ‘body without organs,’ or colors, as in the early Irish and Native American colors of the winds, span the physical and the spiritual with an energy. The musical description of the logoi echoes this verse from the Wisdom of Solomon: ‘For the elements were changed in themselves by a kind of harmony, like as in a harp notes change the nature of the tune, and yet are always sounds’ (LXX 19:18; emended from Brenton, 1851). St. Basil of Caesarea described the aerial waters and the deeps as both singing hymns of praise to God’s glory – reflecting one another chiastically on the second day of creation, even as man in the image of God in a sense reflects the divine on the sixth day of Creation in Hebrew parallel poetics (Basil of Caesarea, 1999, 71). Music or chanting is a way to indicate the iconographic incarnation of the cosmic logoi in the Creation story, as energy but also as metonymic breath of the Spirit (pneuma), so to speak, the same Spirit that Basil refers to as ‘cherishing’ the waters (using the Syriac version of Genesis), vitalizing seeds of life in the sea as if breathing on them. Man himself is described in corporeal terms as a musical instrument for the nous or energy of the soul/spirit, shaped in the image and likeness of God, the image of God being the Logos in whom man is made. And while articulating a sense of divine logoi as cosmic music, Basil differentiates such cosmic semiosis from the Classical ‘music of the spheres.’ In the latter, to Basil, the human mind dualistically could be considered the objectifying observer-conceptualizer of the music-generating spheres, rather than a liturgical instrument of the very networks of cosmic semiotics that constitute human reason. The latter for him is the dominion of human beings in Paradise over the earth, but in harmonizing semiosis (the making of meaning) rather than arbitrary control. And the human body is not the only participant in that cosmic music of meaning-making. Basil describes the aerial and terrestrial waters as singing hymns, and the Spirit’s cherishing of the waters brings forth life. And humans as cosmic musical instruments interweave color as well as sound in their sub-creation. St. Gregory, associating color with music in describing the cosmic harmonies, evoked hues as virtues, which overlay Creation with layers of incarnational qualities associated with divine likeness (Gregory of Nyssa, 1994, 391).

Earth.earth shares much in common with what could similarly be called Nature.nature. Nature, from the Latin natura, mysteriously means both the essence of something and of all of us, both something enveloping and outside of us, and an organic presence that has emerged naturally through nativity. Similarly, earth apophatically remains both more and less physical than what we mean today by ‘world’ as a globalized human semiosphere, or bubble of meaning. The latter incorporates multitudes of virtual individual Umwelts (the term coined by the Baltic biologist Jakob von Uexküll in the early twentieth century for ‘meaningful environment of an organism’, foundational to biosemiotics). Uexküll, too, heard them singing: ‘The countless Umwelts represent the keyboard upon which nature plays its symphony of meaning…not constrained by space and time. In our lifetime and in our Umwelt we are given the task of constructing a key in nature’s keyboard, over which an invisible hand glides’ (von Uexküll, 1982, 78).

In the semiotics of earth, Umwelts gather into larger semiospheres, including human cultural communities and temporalities (such as overlays of Jewish, Byzantine, Chinese, Julian, and Gregorian calendars sharing the same physical environment). Semiospheres in turn can overlap within ecosemiospheres in eco-regions (such as the peasant-tended wooded meadows of Estonia, Native American-managed prairies of the Upper Midwest, or the urban ecosystems of New York City’s archipelago, celebrated in Mark Helprin’s Winter’s Tale [Helprin, 2005]). Ecosemiospheres overlap in the Earth.earth. But our own poetics don’t often perceive, celebrate, or experience such overlapping realms of meaning. In the twenty-first century we may still occasionally speak in 1960s space-age terms of ‘planet Earth,’ or even more awkwardly, ‘Spaceship Earth.’ But always, as in the iconic Disney nature documentary Earth, our technological outer-space iconography of earth since the 1960s projects a crisp bright mimetic concept from the outside, a machino-morphic ecosystem of quantitative inputs and outputs. This ‘real’ image, now digitalizable between our iPhone fingers and iPad palantiri (similar to what we used to do between our real fingers with the moon in the sky as children, as if the optical-illusion hotdog between digits), spins around in our electronic extensions, only to disappear in technological magic tricks. So too with the Earth.earth, as Stephen Hawking advocates space colonization to save humanity, leaving behind a trashed planet as we search for more galactic landfills. Technology as a philosophy of Creation erases it. But, in the service of a love for Creation (of which the pre-moderns remind us), the same technology (more as personal techné or craft) can help extend our engagement with the Earth.

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Living at a cultural distance from high-tech centers likelier to follow Hawking’s vision of the Singularity, our home lies in the central Susquehanna Valley, which some geologists call one of the oldest valleys on earth, and some political commentators unflatteringly call Pennsyltucky, amid the rolling hills and larger ridges and mini-mountains of the northern Appalachians, itself one of the oldest mountain ranges. The Appalachians formed a modern model for Tolkien’s retro-Middle-earth, Migarr or Middangeard, a northern European medieval image of Earth embraced by the roots and branches of the cosmic tree Yggdrasil linking different worlds. The Susquehanna River survived various types of primordial foldings related to the movement of continents and the swallowing of part of it by the sea into the lost estuary now known as the Chesapeake Bay. The cosmic tree of the Iroquois in this region morphed into the peace tree of Onondaga Lake, now a Superfund Cleanup site. And while there are no millennia-old Sequoia trees in this eco-region, near us grow the old-growth hemlock groves of Tall Timbers nature preserve, once home to the nature writer Euell Gibbons and now a favorite haunt of Amish teens on buggy dates. To enter into it, as we do for Fourth of July church picnics and family hikes, is to experience a real-world green-world peace that evokes Shakespeare’s Arden.Eden in Penn’s Woods. Nearby the renowned trout of Penns Creek run past an old Boy Scout camp (Karoondina, ‘land of shining waters’ in Delaware), still groaning with summer campers. If there are no salmon of wisdom, there are plenty of fly-casting fishermen.

All this, water and worn-down mountains and woods, in a watershed paradoxically worried now both by gas-drilling fracking and declining river towns, is the earth. From the small plot of enclosed land my wife gardens behind our river-view townhouse in ‘downtown’ Lewisburg (population 5620, give or take a few births and deaths since the last census), to the polluted mud deposited by the river outside our door when it floods and turns our neighborhood into a Venetian-like scene, to old oak trees of the grove in the hilly center of the college campus down the street, and into Amish farmland farther west, this all too is the earth.

Traveling out that way to bike and to get to the rural house-chapel we attend in Beavertown (population 870) on Beaver Creek, we skirt horse-drawn carriages as we go up and down through the rich farmland of West Union and Snyder Counties. The late Davy Jones of the Monkees moved to Beavertown, to find refuge from rock n’ roll celebrity, on a horse farm whose landscape undoubtedly reminded him of rolling countrysides in his native Britain. It’s forgiveable to compare the countryside to J.R.R. Tolkien’s Shire as well. Tolkien, enamored of America’s archaic Appalachia while seeking refuge from the mechanized destruction of earth in twentieth-century European warfare, drew on a Kentucky friend’s lore for the Shire as the heartland of his twentieth-century Arden in Middle-earth. Names of Hobbit families, their love of tobacco, and speech and lifestyles, draw on the culture of an Appalachian state.

The Susquehanna in our Appalachian valley remains a sacred river in native tradition, interconnected with all the waters of the world, according to river steward Gere Reisinger, a naturopath of Seneca descent, who keeps watch over the hyper-polluted old industrial and coal region of the Susquehanna’s North Branch, known as the Wyoming Valley (Brubaker, 2002, 68). Mormons also hold sacred the river, where they first began their baptisms, and the watershed offered Edenic refuge too for Slavic Eastern Christians along with their Inferno. Slavic immigrants often died in the mines of its watershed but founded Holy Trinity Monastery, whose grounds at a cypress marsh near Cooperstown dip into the farthest edge of the Susquehanna’s headwaters, appropriately, in Jordanville, NY, named for the sacred river of Israel by now-vanished Baptists there.

The urban archipelago of New York City’s islands (population 8,175,133), or the ‘end’ of the river in the Chesapeake near Annapolis’ historic mini-urbanity, both seem a long way from local frameworks of earth in the mid-Susquehanna Valley, but are only each about 3 hours away by car. The mythical headwaters are more distant, about 4 hours by expressway, less time than it takes earth to flow in the river from the headwaters to our mid-valley confluence of the West and North branches. At the headwaters, Otsego Lake still opens up a clearing in imaginary endless Eastern Woodlands, as it did under its name of Lake Glimmerglass for Hawkeye in James Fenimore Cooper’s legendary green world, and in the pioneering nature writing of his daughter Susan Fenimore Cooper. In summer the pristine green Doubleday field of the Baseball Hall of Fame coexists with the lawn that marks the site of the Cooper manse, a traffic jam of American ‘green world’ mythology where a statue of James Fenimore broods over crowds visiting the baseball museum but not him.

It is all of course both the same and different earth, and Earth, as the overgrown garden that I tended with my grandfather as a boy in a backyard in inner-city Chicago, listening to his memories of growing up on a nearby farm swallowed by the city, fantasizing my own Eden in a raspberry patch amid grids of streets flowing downtown to the Loop from out of Thomas Jefferson’s right-angled head, shooting the occasional rapids of a lost diagonal Indian trail. Chicago’s grid, now featuring sodium streetlights blocking the stars and security cameras focusing us back on ourselves in the self-proclaimed ‘city in a garden,’ like myself, and the Susquehanna Valley, are all earth and the Earth, but different worlds amid it. As in Yggdrasil’s entwinements, the worlds entangle both rhizomically and arboreally, as in the cosmic tree in Genesis, however bifurcated by the objectifying gaze of Adam and Eve.

Martin Heidegger helped apply his friend Werner Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle in physics to views of the earth, and while in postwar isolation in a Black Forest cottage helped lay the groundwork for current environmental philosophy, despite his politically reprehensible past. Heidegger described Earth as the region of the withholding of what he termedphusis, the mystery of nature that is not objectively present Being. As environmental philosopher Bruce Foltz glosses Heidegger today, ‘The earth is that whence phusis arises… the closed and self-secluding region that ultimately eluded Greek ontology… Nature as earth is not primarily that “from which” things are made but rather that “whence” self-emerging, self-unfolding, and self-opening arise and “unto which” they recede… The earth allows coming-forth’ (Foltz, 1995, 136).

That ultimately postmodern view of the earth finds suggestive parallels in the ninth-century Periphyseon by the early Irish philosopher John Scotus Eriugena. He defined Nature as both being and non-being, and earth (terra, land or region) as a ‘mystic name’ signifying the restored wholeness of nature, imbued with the divine energies, in theophany or divine manifestation (Eriugena, 1987, 589). ‘Our bodies are placed on this earth or surrounded by this air…bodies within bodies’ like ‘the fish in the sea’ (Eriugena, 1987, 70). His exegesis in his Periphyseon, Book 4, Chapter 4, compares Christ’s Resurrection to a re-synergized ‘earth of nature,’ or ‘His earth,’ uniting earth and Paradise as non-objectified process, in an experiential dialectic of apophasis:Paradise is not a localized or particular piece of woodland on earth, but a spiritual garden sown with the seeds of the virtues and planted in human nature, or, to be more precise, is nothing else but the human substance itself created in the image of God, in which the Tree of Life, that is the Word and wisdom of God, gives fruit to all life; and in the midst of which streams forth the Fountain of all good things, which again is the Divine Wisdom. … In this intelligible Paradise God goes walking. (Eriugena, 1987, 500)

Eriugena throughout the Periphyseon uses the Latin term terra – earth, land, or region – as a mystical name for Creation when experienced in relation with Paradise through the Tree of Life. Terra in its energized (or, as we might term it, non-objectified) state is for him ‘the bliss of eternal life and the stability of the Primordial Causes, from which all things which are have their origin…the fertile soil of the Primordial Causes’ (Eriugena, 1987, 520–521). The primordial causes are Eriugena’s adaptation of the logoi that St. Maximus the Confessor developed as activities of the Logos. In their effects as theophanies, these ‘word-harmonies’ interpenetrate and emerge from the earth. The earth thus functions in a sense as the ultimate Deleuze-Guattarian-style ‘plane of immanence,’ a relational sense of desire as different from Western possessive desire of lack as psychoanalytic models are from the Tao, while also however participating in transcendent meaning.

If earth, like Shakespeare’s Arden, is a palimpsest of layered memories and physicalities, words flickering in and out of metonymy, the divine logoi (or harmonies) are typed in some respects by today’s ecosemiotics. They open a sense of the dominion given unfallen humanity in the earthly garden of Paradise (which, restored, spans the earthly and the heavenly) as reason in the sense of harmony – an experiential semiosis constituting the natural symbolism of the body as described by Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1970). ‘All living things are critics,’ interpreting signs, as Kenneth Burke noted in the opening of his Permanence and Change (Burke, 1984, 1). Modern physics, in notions of the multiverse, quantum entanglements and the anthropic principle, likewise emphasizes potential relationality in the cosmos that turns our abstracting old scientific matrix of sociobiological time on its head. Resulting postmodern notions of temporality and non-temporality oddly remind us of the more ancient and personal senses of Earth.earth as experience.

C.S. Lewis, translating medieval and Renaissance notions of planets into fantasy and science fiction, included in his space trilogy the idea that each planet hosts an embodying spirit, an Oyarsa. Although Earth’s angel is ‘bent,’ a.k.a. Satan, a figure of what in modern terms might be called the objectification of Earth, ‘There is no Oyarsa in Heaven who has not got his representative on Earth,’ explains the hero Ransom (a space-traveling philologist loosely based on Tolkien, in the same way that Tolkien loosely based Treebeard on Lewis). ‘And there is no world where you could not meet a little unfallen partner of our own black Archon, a kind of other self. That is why there was an Italian Saturn as well as a Heavenly one, and a Cretan Jove as well as an Olympian. It was these early wraiths of the high intelligences that men met in old times when they reported that they had seen the gods’ (Lewis, 1996, 313). But if the chief spirit of our objectified ‘silent planet’ was ‘bent,’ a.k.a. the fallen angel, then who is the pre-modern type of Earth.earth, originally good and beautiful? A feminine figure of Mother Earth, in various forms, becomes today reconfigured in the Gaia Hypothesis, as advanced by the late biologist Lynn Margulis among others. The complementarity of biological sex becomes a symbolic reality, subverting social modern constructions of binarized gender and of essentialized/consumerized sexualities, in experience of Earth.

To early medieval Christians, such mystery of a feminine-gendered earth resonated bodily in the figure of the Mother of God, identified in Byzantine hymns as the noetic Paradise, Jacob’s Ladder spanning earth and heaven, containing the Creator in her womb, while contained in God. Luce Irigaray has noted how a double-enfolding landscape of the female body models a landscape in consonance with nature that is both being and non-being, but in personal bodily ways (Casey, 1998, 321–330). Iconography identified the Mother of God with the enclosed garden, the ‘park’ at the root meaning of the biblical word Paradise, the garden and the life-giving stream of Eden, both bride and Mother of God, and in a sense thus transforming the nature of both the human and the divine. In the seventh-century words of St. Andrew of Crete: ‘Conception without seed; nativity past understanding, form a Mother who never knew a man; childbearing undefiled. For the birth of God makes both natures new. Therefore, as Bride and Mother of God, with true worship all generations magnify thee’ (Matthewes-Green, 2006, 179). The Mother of God, at once the Bride of God, turns the sense of Earth.earth inside out. Our sense of both the natures of God and humanity are transformed in that figure of Earth.earth as Mother and Bride of God.

The twentieth-century writer Philip Sherrard, a translator of the collection of patristic writings known as the Philokalia[‘the love of the beautiful’], related the figure of Mary to both the feminine-gendered divine Wisdom or Sophia of theLogos, flowing forth from Paradise, and to Earth.earth:She is Earth as a single immaterial feminine divinity, and she is earth as a manifold, material reality. She is herself the Body of the cosmic Christ, the created matrix in whom the divine Logos eternally takes flesh. She is the bridge that unites God to the world, the world to God, and it is she that bestows on the world its eternal and sacred value. She is the seal of its sacred identity. (Sherrard, 2004, 181)

In medieval cosmology that touches the postmodern but lightly skips across modernity, Mary becomes ‘real symbol’ of Earth.earth spanning Arden.Eden. In her figure the semiotics of life come charged with energy. Thus monasteries became known as the gardens of the Theotokos, and so in the manmade deserts of clear-cut Ethiopian highlands, Google Earth today discloses green groves around ancient churches that guarded and nurtured their trees (like the sacred trees of early Irish monasteries) as living memories of the savanna of Paradise. Such non-modern insights extend social justice to environmental justice, by a realization of ‘our’ supposed objects as indeed numinous gifts shared by us all.

Human song as life mingles with that of birds under the cosmic tree on earth. The logoi or harmonies and purposes of Creation, including ourselves, sing as birds in the branches of the tree of contemplation of the Logos/Harmony, as Maximus put it (Thunberg, 1997, 138–139). Yet the singing or semiosis of the earth calls into question the normality of the discourses of our simulacra worlds of self and society. It engages us with the other as we put on and shed disguises in layers of meaning amid our vanishing Ardens, still personalized in the intersections of time and eternity embodied in the living symbols of trees – medievally the ‘cross’ between the transcendentally semiotic and the immanently incarnational.

Amiens, a courtier-in-exile in As You Like It, thus appropriately put the ambivalent yet beguiling terms of our earthly sojourn into homely song in the twilight borderland of Arden, finished and countered by the self-styled fool Jacques. Very simply, under a cosmic-yet-real tree, the song touches first on the medieval forest of adventure and trans-species harmony, then suggests ascetic sustainability in the greenwood, hinting of post-human futures interweaving categories of human and non-human on earth:

Amiens

Under the greenwood tree
Who loves to lie with me
And turn his merry note
Unto the sweet bird’s throat:
Come hither, come hither, come hither.
Here shall he see
No enemy
But winter and rough weather.
Who doth ambition shun
And loves to live i’th’sun
Seeking the food he eats
And pleased with what he gets:
Come hither, come hither, come hither.
Here shall he see
No enemy
But winter and rough weather.Jacques:
If it do come to pass
That any man turn ass,
Leaving his wealth and ease,
A stubborn will to please,
Ducdame, ducdame, ducdame:¹
Here shall he see
Gross fools as he,
An [if only] he will come to me.
(Shakespeare, 1992, 2.5.302–303)

 

Notes

¹ It has been suggested that ‘ducdame’ is a nonsense word, but also could mean ‘lead him to me’ (from Latin), ‘come to me’ (from Welsh), or a Gypsy term to attract customers, meaning ‘I foretell.’ It could also reference a woman (‘dame’) leading a man, which we here could interpret in terms of Mother Earth.

 

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21. Shakespeare, W. 1992. The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. D. Bevington. New York: Harper Collins.
22. Sherrard, P. 2004. Human Image: World Image. The Death and Resurrection of Sacred Cosmology. Limni, Evia, Greece: Denise Harvey.
23. Thunberg, L. 1997. Man and the Cosmos: The Vision of St. Maximus the Confessor. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press.
24. Von Uexküll, J. 1982. The Theory of Meaning. Semiotica 42(1): 25–82.

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Alfred Kentigern Siewers is an Associate Professor of English and an Affiliated Faculty Member in Environmental Studies at Bucknell University. The essay first appeared in PostMedieval 4.1.He also co-edits the Stories of the Susquehanna Valley.

 

Sheesha Ghat

Naiyar Masud

[HUG is grateful to author Anil Menon  for providing us with this version of the story]

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sad mauj raa ze raftan-e khud muztrib kunad

Mauje keh bar-kinaar ravad az miyaan-e maa

Each wave that strikes out to embrace the shore

Leaves a hundred more perturbed by its departure

—Naziri Nishapuri

And with such luck and loss

I shall content myself

Till tides of turning time may toss

Such fishers on the shelf

—George Gascoigne

After keeping me with him with the greatest of love for eight years, my foster father was finally forced to find another place for me. It was not his fault, nor was it mine. He had believed, as had I, that my stuttering would stop after a few days of relaxation with him, but neither he nor I expected that the people here would turn me into a sideshow, the way they do a madman. In the bazaars, people listened to my words with a greater curiosity than they exhibited toward others, and whether what I said was funny or not, they always laughed. Within a few days my situation worsened so drastically that when I tried to say anything at all, not only in the bazaar but even at home, the words collided with my teeth and lips and palate and bounced back the way waves retreat on touching shore. In the end, I would get so tongue-tied that the veins in my neck would swell and a terrible pressure would invade my throat and chest, leaving me breathless and threatening to suffocate me. I would pant, forced to leave my sentence incomplete, then start all over again after I had recovered my breath. At this my foster father would scold me, “You’ve said that. I heard you. Now go on.” If he ever scolded me, it was over this. But my problem was that I couldn’t begin my account from the middle.

Sometimes he would listen to me patiently and at others he would lift his hand and say, “All right, you may stop.”

But if I couldn’t begin my account from the middle, I couldn’t leave it unfinished, either. I would grow agitated. Finally he would walk away, leaving me still stuttering, talking to myself. If anyone had seen me, I’d have been thought insane. I was also fond of wandering through the bazaars, and enjoyed sitting there among the groups of people. Though I could not utter what I had to say comprehensibly, I made up for this by listening closely to what others said and repeating it in my mind. Sometimes I felt uncomfortable, yet I was happy enough, because the people there didn’t dislike me, and above all my foster father held me dear and looked after my every need.

For the last few days, though, he had seemed worried. He had begun talking to me for long stretches of time, a new development. He would come up with questions to ask me that required a long answer, and then listen attentively without interrupting me. When I’d tire and begin to pant, he would wait for me to finish what I was saying, and when I resumed my account he would listen with the same concentration. I’d think he was about to scold me, and my tongue would start to tie itself in knots, but he would just gaze at me, saying nothing.

After only three days my tongue began to feel as if it were unknotting a bit. It was as if a weight were being lifted from my chest, and I began to dream of the day when I would be able to speak as others did, with ease and clarity. I began collecting in my heart all the things I had wanted to share with others. But on the fourth day, father called me over and had me sit very close to him. For a long time his talk rambled aimlessly, then he fell silent.

I waited for him to pose one of his questions, but he suddenly said, “Your new mother is arriving the day after tomorrow.” Seeing the joy begin to dawn on my face, he grew troubled, then said slowly,

“She’ll go crazy if she hears you speak. She’ll die.” The next day my luggage was all packed. Before I could ask any questions, my father took my hand and said, “Let’s go.”

***

He didn’t say a word to me during the journey. But on our way, he told a man who chanced to inquire, “Jahaz has asked for him.” Then they both started talking about Jahaz. I remembered Jahaz, too. When I had first come to live with father, Jahaz earned his bread by performing clownish imitations at fairs and bazaars. He would wear a small pink sail tied to his back—perhaps that’s why his name became Jahaz, “ship,” or perhaps he wore the sail because his name was Jahaz. The pink sail would billow when the wind blew hard and Jahaz would seem to be moving forward under its power. He could mimic to perfection a ship caught in a storm. We would be convinced that angry winds, raging waves, and fast-spinning whirlpools were bent on sinking the ship. The sounds of the wind howling, the waves slapping, the whirlpool’s ringing emptiness, even the sails fluttering, would emerge distinctly from the mimic’s mouth; finally, the “ship” would sink. This routine was very popular with the children and the older boys, but was performed only when the wind was high. If the wind halted, however, the young spectators were even more delighted, and called out: “Tobacco, tobacco!”

I had never seen anyone smoke tobacco the way Jahaz did. He usevery kind of tobacco, in every way it was possible to smoke it, and when the air was still he would perform such astounding tricks with clouds of smoke that the spectators couldn’t believe their eyes. After producing several smoke rings, he would take a step back, then twist his hands and wrists in the air as though sculpting a figure in soft clay. And sure enough, the rings would take on a shape, just like a sculpture, and stand suspended in the air for some time. Some of his mimic-routines the boys weren’t allowed to see or hear. When performing these he would hide inside a rapidly closing circle two or three spectators deep, and the only way those standing at a distance knew that Jahaz was performing his mimicry was by a glimpse of the fluttering sail and the sound of the spectators’ laughter. A year after I had come to my foster father’s, Jahaz’s voice had gone bad and he had been afflicted with a severe cough. In the course of his mimicry he had used many different voices, but now if he opened his mouth a coughing fit would seize him, and at times it took him nearly as long to finish his sentence as it would have taken me. Not only did he cease to perform his mimic-routines, he stopped coming to our village at all, and after the first year I did not see him again.

***

We passed many settlements and ghats by the Big Lake on our route. Everywhere we went, there were people who knew my father, and he would tell them that Jahaz had asked for me. I didn’t understand what this meant, but asked no questions. In my heart I was angry with him, because I wasn’t the least bit happy about the idea of living apart from him. But my father didn’t look happy either; at least he didn’t seem like someone who was about to bring home a new wife.

Finally we arrived at a grimy settlement. The people here worked glass. There were few houses, but each one had a glass-furnace; ugly chimneys belching smoke protruded from the straw thatch of the roofs. Layers of soot had settled on the walls, the lanes, the trees. The people’s clothes and the coats of stray dogs and cats were black from the smoke. Here, too, a few people were acquainted with my father. One of them bade us sit down to eat and drink. An oppressive feeling stole over me. My father looked at my face observantly, then he spoke to me for the first time on the journey.

“People don’t get old here.” I didn’t understand him. I looked at the people strolling by and, indeed, none among them was elderly. Father said, “The smoke eats them away.”

“Then why do they live here?” I wanted to ask, but the question seemed futile, so I simply stared in father’s direction.

“Jahaz knows glass-working, too,” he said after a while. “This is his home.”

I stood up with a jolt. My tongue was in many knots all at once, but I couldn’t stay silent now. Would I have to live with a smoke-belching bazaari clown like Jahaz in this settlement where a dark barbarity seemed to pour over everything? This question had to be asked, no matter how long it took to get it out.

But with a reassuring gesture father beckoned me over to sit by him, and said, “But he moved away long ago.”

I was relieved. As long as Jahaz doesn’t live here, in this settlement, I said to myself, I can live with him anywhere. Then father said: “He lives on the ghat now.” He pointed off in its direction. “On Sheesha Ghat.”

When I heard this name the oppressive feeling returned. Father must not have known that I had already heard mention of Sheesha Ghat from visitors in his house. I knew that it was the most widely known and least inhabited ghat on the Big Lake, and that a scary woman by the name of Bibi was its sole owner. She had been the lover of a notorious dacoit—or maybe he was a rebel—and later become his wife. He had in fact been betrayed when he came to see her one time, and had died on the same ghat at the hands of the government people. But then things went strangely topsy-turvy and the entire ghat was given over to Bibi’s custody.

Her huge boat lay anchored in the lake and Bibi had made it her abode. She ran some sort of business, in connection with which people were allowed to come to the ghat now and then. Otherwise it was forbidden to go near. Nor had anyone the courage. All were too frightened of Bibi. How had Jahaz come to live on Sheesha Ghat? Would I have to meet Bibi as well? Would she speak to me? Would I have to answer her questions? Would she go mad with anger on hearing me? I had grown so absorbed in these questions and their imagined answers that I didn’t even realize we had left the settlement of the glass-workers.

I was startled when I heard father’s voice in my ear: “We’re here.”

***

This was perhaps the most deserted area around the Big Lake. An expanse of muddy water began at the end of the barren plain, its far shore invisible in the distance. On our left, set back from the water, a big boat obscured the view of the lake. Perhaps at one time it had been used to transport logs. Now the same logs had been used to build many large and small rooms on the deck. The planks on the boat were all loose, and a light creaking sound issued from them, as of some giant object slowly breaking apart. On the shore of the lake a low, long retaining wall was lying face down on the ground. Near it stood four or five rickety platforms with huge cracks in them. Close to them lay a moldy length of bamboo, nearly claimed by the soil. Though there wasn’t much left here, I sensed that it must have been a bustling locale before it had fallen into this tumbledown state. It was called a ghat, but all that was left was a roofed shelter extending from a building toward the shore, the front of it overhanging a little pool of lake-water that had sloughed over into a depression in the ground. At the rear of the shelter, on a little rise, sat the shapeless building of logs and clay, which looked as though its builder had been unable to decide whether to construct it of wood or earth, and in these contemplations, the building had reached its completion. The roof,however, was all of wood. A small pink sail, perched on a projection in the center of the roof, was fluttering in the wind.

My foster father must have been here before. Grabbing my hand, he quickly walked down the slope and over to the five earthen steps beneath the shelter that led up to the doorway of the building. There was Jahaz, sitting on the floor smoking his tobacco. We, too, sat down when we went in.

“So you’re here, are you?” he asked father, and began coughing.

He seemed to have aged quite a lot in eight years. The extreme paleness of his eyes and darkness of his lips made it look as though they had been dyed in different vats. From time to time his head would move as if he were admitting something. During one of these motions he glimpsed me with his pale eyes and said, “He’s grown up!”

“It’s been eight years,” my father told him.

We sat silently for a long time. I’d have suspected that the two were talking in signals, but they weren’t looking at each other. Suddenly my father stood up. I rose with him. Jahaz raised his head, looked up at him, and asked, “Won’t you stay a little?”

“I’ve got a lot to do,” my father said. “Nothing’s ready yet.”

Jahaz nodded his head as though agreeing, and my father stepped out the door. He descended the earthen steps, then turned back, came over and took me in his arms. We stood there silently for a long time, then he said, “If you don’t like it here, tell Jahaz. I’ll come and get you.” Jahaz’s head moved in the familiar fashion, and father went down the steps. I heard Jahaz cough and turned toward him. He took a few quick drags of his tobacco, made an effort to even out his breathing, then got up, took my hand and walked out under the shelter. He just stood there quietly, running his eyes over the lake. Then he returned to the earthen steps, but stopped himself before putting his foot on the first step.

“No,” he said. “First, Bibi.”

We walked along the shore of the lake until we came to the big boat. A gangplank had been built between shore and boat by joining two boards. Carefully balancing on the planks, we reached the ladder at the other end, then climbed up onto the boat. Over the door of the small front room was a curtain of coarse cloth. In front of the curtain a two colored cat was dozing. It peered at us with half-open eyes. Jahaz halted as he neared the curtain. I halted many steps behind him. At Jahaz’s first cough the curtain slid aside and Bibi appeared.

The sight of her filled me with fear, but even more with amazement at the thought that this shapeless woman had once been someone’s lover. She looked at Jahaz, then at me.

“Your son’s here?” she asked Jahaz.

“Just got here,” Jahaz told her.

Bibi looked me up and down a few times, then said: “He looks sad.”

Jahaz didn’t say anything. Nor did I. The silence lingered for some time. I looked at Bibi and she asked me, “Do you know how to swim?”

I shook my head “no.”

“Afraid of the water?”

I just nodded, admitting it.

“A lot?”

“Yes, a lot,” I indicated.

“You should be,” she replied, as if I had said what was in her heart.

I viewed the expanse of the lake. In the still air, the muddy water seemed entirely at rest; the lake could have been mistaken for a deserted plain. I looked up at Bibi. She was still looking at me. Then she turned toward Jahaz, who was handing her the tobacco-smoking paraphernalia. For some time they smoked and talked. The conversation had something to do with finances. Meanwhile, a brown dog appeared from somewhere, sniffed at me and went away. The cat, which had been dozing all this time, raised its tail on seeing the dog, arched its back, then retreated behind the curtain. I would peek at Bibi from time to time. She was a strongly built woman and seemed bigger than her boat, but it also seemed as if she, like her boat, were very slowly disintegrating. At least, that was my impression from looking at her, and from her talk, which I couldn’t hear very well. Suddenly she stopped in the middle of what she was saying, raised her head and called loudly, “Parya!”

The sound of a girl’s laughter came toward us as though floating on water. Jahaz took my hand and led me back to the gangplank. After we had stepped onto it, I heard Bibi’s voice behind my back, “Take good care of him, Jahaz.” And she repeated, “He looks so sad.”

She said this in such a way that I myself began to think I was sad.

***

Yet there was no reason for me to be sad. When we returned from Bibi’s and Jahaz showed me my quarters, I couldn’t believe this was part of the shapeless house on the deserted ghat, between the muddy lake-water in  front and the barren plain in back. The best preparations had been made for my comfort. The rooms were lavishly decorated, mostly with glass objects. Glass was also inlaid in the doors and the vents in the walls. I was surprised that Jahaz could create a place like this. I thought he must have had help from someone, or else had been trained in the art of decoration. A lot of the items seemed to have been brought there that very day; I suspected that other things had been removed, and that before me, perhaps long ago, someone else had lived here.

After I had seen the place where I was to live, I thought I must have seen the whole of Sheesha Ghat on the first day. But on the second day I saw Parya. To this day I am amazed that during the many times people at my father’s house spoke about Sheesha Ghat, no one ever mentioned the name of Bibi’s daughter. I first heard her name the day I arrived at Sheesha Ghat, when Bibi called her from the boat. I was overwhelmed by the day’s confusion, it didn’t even occur to me to wonder who Parya was.

But the next morning, I heard the sound of someone laughing. Then a voice said, “Jahaz, let’s see your son.”

Jahaz jumped up and grabbed my hand. “Bibi’s daughter,” he told me as he led me out to the shelter.

About twenty-five yards away in the lake I saw Parya, standing perfectly erect at the far end of a narrow, slowly swaying boat. With a light shimmy of her body she advanced the boat toward the shelter. Her body gave another little twist. The boat came nearer. Advancing and stopping in this fashion, she pulled right up to the shelter.

“Him?” she asked, with a questioning glance at Jahaz.

I was as wonder-struck that this girl was Bibi’s daughter as I had been that Bibi was once someone’s lover. I tried to look at her closely, but now she was inspecting me from head to toe.

“He doesn’t look so sad,” she said to Jahaz; then to me, “You don’t look sad.”

“When did I say I looked sad?” I tried to say, feeling a little irritated, but could only stutter. Parya laughed and said, “Jahaz, he’s so …”

Then she began laughing louder and louder, until Bibi’s voice boomed from the boat, “Parya, don’t bother him.”

“Why,” Parya asked loudly, “because he’s sad?”

“Parya,” Jahaz said encouragingly, “you’ll have a good time with him.”

“Who needs a good time?” she said and began to laugh again.

I began to feel uneasy, as though trapped, but then she asked, “Have you seen your new mother?”

“No, I haven’t,” I told her with a shake of my head.

“Don’t you want to?”

I didn’t answer and looked the other way.

“You don’t want to?” she asked again.

This time my head moved in a way that could mean yes or no. It occurred to me that my new mother was to arrive at my former house today, or perhaps had already arrived. Father had said that she would go crazy if she heard me speaking. I tried to envision myself talking and her slowly going crazy. I tried to imagine how it could be possible to live with a woman who would go crazy because of me. I also reflected that at this time yesterday I was at my old house, and the memory seemed to come from the distant past. I relived my eight years there in eight seconds. Then I recalled my foster father’s embrace before leaving me in Jahaz’s custody. I believed now, even more than before, that he loved me deeply.

“Jahaz will love you deeply, too.” Parya’s voice startled me.

I had forgotten about her, but she had been watching me all this time. Then, balancing herself as she walked, she moved to the other end of the boat. With a little spin of her body, her back was toward the shelter. A light swing of her torso nudged the boat and slowly she slid away from us. I felt as if a wonder had taken place before my eyes.

“If Bibi had not called to her,” I said to myself, “I would have thought she was the spirit of the lake.”

If not the spirit of the lake, she was indeed a wonder, because she had been born underwater, and her feet had never touched the earth.

***

Bibi had received her boat from her forefathers and no one could say how long it had been in the Big Lake, Jahaz told me after Parya had left. But Bibi herself used to live far away from the lake where her husband, the same dacoit, or whatever he was, came to meet her clandestinely. When Parya was about to be born, the husband had Bibi sent to the boat along with a midwife. During the birth, Jahaz could hear Bibi’s cries of pain. Suddenly, the voices changed. The government people had arrived and were interrogating Bibi as to the whereabouts of her husband. Seeing that Bibi wouldn’t tell them anything, they started holding her underwater over and over, and in the midst of one of the longer episodes, Parya was born.

“I could clearly see bubbles coming from Bibi under the water,” Jahaz said, “then amid the bubbles Parya’s little head came out and you could hear her cry.”

At this the government people realized that Bibi wasn’t faking. They left, but continued their surveillance. And one day, Parya’s father came to the ghat, just as they had thought he would. They surrounded him on the boat. He tried to escape, but was injured, fell into the lake and drowned. Since that day Bibi had made the boat her and Parya’s abode. Bibi sometimes ventured out to other localities herself, but had never let Parya set foot on land. She would roam around the lake in her small craft, or would return to her mother on the big boat. Why was this so? Had Bibi made a vow of some kind? Was it the condition of some pact? No one knew how long Parya would be circling the lake, and whether her feetwould ever touch the earth.

***

I spent a year at Sheesha Ghat, and during that year I witnessed the passing of every season, and in each season I watched Parya’s boat roam the waters. She was my only means of diversion. The outer door of my abode opened onto the barren field, which led only to the fishing settlements at its nearest outskirts, past the smoky dwellings of the glasswallahs. I stayed away from these habitats because of the drying fish. The fishermen were always immersed in their work and were of no use to me, just as I was of no use to them. There were many ghats at the far ends of the field, including some at good-sized fishing settlements. A few ghats were lively with activity, but once or twice when I went to them I realized that the news of Jahaz’s foster son had preceded me, and the people were going to realize who I was; that is why, except for roaming the abandoned field and amusing myself with a few stray objects, I mostly sat underneath the shelter. Jahaz, too, after running here and there to complete his errands, would come and sit here with his tobacco supplies and recount to me all sorts of tales which were worth remembering, but I forgot them anyhow. However, I do remember that when a story of his failed to hold my attention, he would become agitated, even frenzied, and narrate it the way he used to perform his imitations; in the telling he would suffer a fit of coughing and ruin what little interest there had been in the story.

In the beginning, I thought that Sheesha Ghat was a place totally cut off from the world, and that this part of the lake had always been a wasteland. That was not the case, but it was true that no one could set foot there without Bibi’s consent. This is what I had heard from people at father’s house, and I had assumed that Bibi never let anyone come here.

But once at Jahaz’s I noticed that on certain special days the fishermen gathered here, bringing their nets and boats. Sometimes their numbers were so great that the scene looked like a little fair set up on the water. Sitting at my post under the shelter, I would hear the fishermen calling to each other and shouting directions. Filtering through their voices here and there came the sound of Parya’s laughter. At times they seemed to be forbidding Parya from doing something. Occasionally, the voice of one of the older fishermen would be heard scolding Parya, yet laughing heartily at the same time.

Then Bibi’s voice would come from the boat: “Parya, let them work!”Parya would laugh in reply, and the fisherman would tell Bibi not to say anything to Parya.

On those days, and other days too, Parya would come to the ghat early in the morning. Standing in her boat in front of the shelter, she’d converse with Jahaz for some time, then call me out to the shelter as well, and if Jahaz left she would talk to me. Her conversation was a bit childish. She would tell me stories about her dogs and cats, or why Bibi had scolded her the day before. Sometimes she would ask me a question so suddenly that I’d start to answer with my tongue instead of the bobbings of my head. She would laugh wildly at these attempts and get a scolding from Bibi, then she would push out to the far reaches of the lake.

In the afternoon, Bibi would call her loudly and her tiny craft would be seen advancing toward the boat. Then the sounds of Parya laughing and Bibi getting mad would emanate from the boat. Late in the afternoon, she would set out again and stop in front of the ghat. If Jahaz were not there, she would talk to me about him. She found something to laugh at in everything about Jahaz, whether his tobacco-smoking, his disorderly dress or the sail on top of his house.

As she was talking to me one day, I began to suspect, and was soon convinced, that she had never seen the clown routines Jahaz performed in the bazaars years before, and at last realized that she knew nothing about them. That day I tried to speak somewhat calmly for the first time, to tell her about Jahaz’s mimic-routines. I tried for quite some time. She listened to me very attentively, without laughing, the way my father had begun to listen to me in the end. At that moment Jahaz walked out underneath the shelter, smoking his tobacco. He relieved me of my efforts by telling Parya all that I had been trying to recount. He even performed two or three of his minor routines. To me they seemed pathetic imitations of his old ones, but Parya laughed so hard her boat began to rock. She wanted more, but Jahaz in the meantime had been overcome with a coughing fit. Parya waited for the coughing to stop, but he gestured for her to go away.

Laughing, Parya turned her boat around and said as she left, “Jahaz, Jahaz, you would make even Bibi laugh.”

The next morning she arrived at the shelter earlier than ever, but Jahaz had slipped off somewhere. She began talking to me about Jahaz and describing the mimicking as though I hadn’t seen Jahaz performing his routines the day before, indeed, as though I’d never known about them. I listened to her for a while, then tried to tell her that Jahaz used to walk through the bazaars with the sail tied on his back, and mimic sinking ships before the crowds. I could not tell her, by tongue or by gesture. Finally, I fell silent.

“Tomorrow,” I said in my heart, “somehow, I will tell you.”

I watched her as she retreated from sight.

“Tomorrow,” I said again in my heart, “somehow.”

My foster father arrived at the ghat the same evening. In one year he seemed to have aged more than Jahaz had in the eight-year period before my arrival. His step was halting and Jahaz was supporting him, almost carrying him. As soon as he saw me he drew me into his arms. Finally, Jahaz separated him from me, made him sit properly, then turned to me.

“Your new mother has died,” he told me, and the coughing overtook him again.

***

There was no conversation between my foster father and me. Shortly after he arrived, Jahaz took him off somewhere and returned late at night alone. I had just stretched out to sleep. I believe Jahaz too fell asleep after smoking his nightly tobacco. I kept pondering how my foster father could have grown so old so quickly. Then I thought of my new mother who had died without seeing me, and perhaps without going crazy. Then I started recollecting my year at Sheesha Ghat. At first I had been bored by the extended, nearly unbreakable silence there, but I now realized that the place was always full of noises. Faint calls would come from the glasswallahs, fishermen and other ghats, and water birds would call over the lake. But I had never paid attention. Now, when I tuned my ears a little, I heard the halting sound of waves coming in and turning back after touching shore, and the faint creaking of the planks of Bibi’s boat. I decided that Sheesha Ghat was the only place for me to live, and that I had been born to live at Sheesha Ghat.

“Tomorrow morning, I’ll tell Jahaz,” I told myself, and fell asleep.

In the morning my eyes opened, as usual, to the sound of Jahaz’s coughing. Then I heard Parya’s voice, too. They were talking much as on any other day. Jahaz was inside and couldn’t see Parya’s boat from where he sat, so he had to speak loudly, and was coughing again and again. I got up and went out to the shelter. There was Parya, standing in the middle of her boat. She chatted with Jahaz a little more. Part of it had to do with Bibi. Then Parya retraced her steps to the other end of the boat.

The boat made a half-circle from the light movement of her feet. Now Parya’s back was toward the shelter. For the first time I took a good look at Bibi’s daughter, and found myself more amazed than ever that a woman like Bibi could be her mother. At that instant Parya’s body twirled and the boat moved away from the shelter. Then it swayed a moment and stopped. Parya scanned the expanse of lake before her. Again the boat rocked lightly, but Parya, straightening her body, adjusted its balance. She made another barely perceptible motion with her feet. The boat made a very slow half-circle, and I gazed at Parya from head to foot as she stood in the bow. I was afraid she might not like the way I was staring at her, but she wasn’t looking in my direction. She was gazing intently at the ghat’s still water, as if seeing it for the first time.

Then, measuring her steps, she walked to the end of the boat nearer the shelter. Leaning over the water, she gazed at it once again, stood up, shook her whole body into alignment, and very calmly placed a foot on the water’s surface as one steps on dry earth. Then her other foot left the boat. She took one step forward, then another.

“She’s walking on the water!” I exclaimed to myself, my surprise tinged with fear; I turned my head toward Jahaz, who was smoking tobacco a little distance away, then looked back to the lake. Between Parya’s empty boat and the shelter there was only water, concentric circles of waves spreading on its surface. A few moments later Parya’s head emerged from the circles. She slapped the water with her palms over and over as though trying to grab onto the surface of the lake. The water splashed and I heard Jahaz’s voice: “Parya, don’t fool around with water.”

Then a noose of smoke tightened at his throat and he doubled up, coughing wildly. My eyes turned to him for an instant. He was having a fit and needed someone’s help. I looked back at the lake. New circles were spreading on the bare water.

She rose again, then began to sink. My eyes met hers and I stood up with a jolt.

“Jahaz!” I shouted, as my tongue began to knot.

I leapt toward the old man. His coughing had stopped, but his breath was gurgling. He was rubbing his chest with one hand and his eyes with the other. Dashing up the steps, I grabbed both his hands and shook him with force.

“…Parya…,” my mouth said.

He looked into my eyes with his pale irises, then lightning flashed in his eyes and I felt as though a bird of prey had escaped from my grip. Dust was dancing on the steps to the shelter and Jahaz was standing at the shore. Parya’s boat completed a full circle. Jahaz looked at the boat, then the water. Then with full force he let out a call in a strange language. I heard Bibi match his cry from her boat. Then from far, far away the same voice returned.

Bibi’s voice came again: “The sad one?”

“Parya!” Jahaz said with such force that the water before him trembled.

Other voices, far and near, repeated Jahaz’s cries over and over and fishermen, some with nets, some empty-handed, began running toward the ghat from all directions. Even before they got to the shelter, some of them had plunged into the water. Jahaz was signaling to them with hand gestures when a splashing sound came from the left. I saw a barking dog running helter-skelter on the big boat and the two-colored cat, its back raised, looking at the dog from a corner of the roof. Then I saw Bibi, almost naked, like some prickly man-eating fish, cutting through the water. Her body collided with Parya’s boat, sending it spinning like a top. Bibi dived and came up on the other side of the boat. She signaled to some of the fishermen and dived again.

Fishermen from other ghats were seen rowing toward Sheesha Ghat. Some had jumped overboard and were swimming in front of their boats. Now heads were bobbing everywhere in the water between the shelter and Parya’s boat. The crowd grew, collecting along the shore as well. There was din and commotion everywhere. Everyone was talking, but it was hard to tell what was being said by whom. The loudest noise was the splashing water, obscuring all sense of the passage of time. Finally, a loud voice rang out. The clatter peaked and suddenly died to nothing. The bodies in the water, swimming soundlessly, slowly gathered at one spot.

All were silent now; the only sound was the dog barking from the boat. At that moment I felt my hand clamped as though in a vise. Jahaz was standing next to me.

“Go,” he said, giving my hand a shake.

I didn’t understand where he wanted me to go. But now he was leading me inside the house. Turning back, I tried to look toward the lake, but Jahaz tugged my hand and I turned to look at him. His eyes were glued to my face. “Go,” he said again.

We had come to the back door of the house. Jahaz opened it. In front was the barren plain. “They’ve found her,” he told me, then pointed off across the plain and said hurriedly, “You’ll reach the glass-workers’ settlement in a short time. There you’ll find transportation out of here. If not, just mention my name to anyone.”

He deposited some money, tied in a handkerchief, in my pocket. I wanted to ask him many things and didn’t want to leave, but he said: “Only you saw her drown. Everyone will ask you questions. Bibi more than anyone. Will you be able to answer?”

The scene rose before my eyes: the people—fishermen with rings in their ears, rowers with bangles on their wrists, visitors from different ghats—all forming a ring around me two or three deep, questions flying from every direction, Bibi fixing me with her intent stare. They all fall silent as Bibi approaches me …

Jahaz noticed me trembling and said, “Tell me what happened …

Anything … Did she fall into the water?”

“…No…” I managed somehow.

“How did it happen, then?” Jahaz asked. “Did she jump?”

“No,” I said, and repeated it with a shake of my head.

Jahaz shook me: “Say something, hurry!”

I knew I wouldn’t be able to say anything with my tongue, so I tried to communicate through hand gestures that she had been trying to walk on the water. Yet my hands halted again and again. I felt that even my signals were beginning to stutter, and that they too were uninterpretable.

But Jahaz asked in a constricted voice, “Was she walking on the water?”

“Yes,” I said again with some difficulty.

“And she went under?”

“Yes.”

“She was heading toward Bibi?”

“No.”

“Where then?” he asked. “Was she coming toward us?”

“Yes,” I gestured with my head.

Jahaz lowered his head and grew a bit older before my eyes. “I’ve seen her every day,” he said at last, “from the day her tiny head popped out of the water”—he was nearly coughing the words—“but I hadn’t noticed how grown-up she’d come to look.”

I stood silently watching him grow even older. “All right, go!” he said, putting his hand on my shoulder. “I’ll find

something to tell them. Don’t you tell anybody anything.”

What could I tell anybody? I thought. And my attention, which had meanwhile strayed from the ghat, returned to it. But Jahaz gently turned me around and nudged me in the direction of the open field. When I reached the edge of the field, I turned toward him and he said, “Your father came to take you back yesterday. I told him to wait a few days.” Again he coughed a little. He grabbed both panels of the door and slowly began to back away.

Before the door had closed, I’d already started on my journey, but I’d only gone some fifteen steps when he called out to me. I turned around and saw him walk toward me haltingly. He looked as though he were mimicking a ship whose sails had been torn off by the winds. He came up to me and embraced me. He held me to him for a long time. Then he released me and stepped back.

“Jahaz!” Bibi’s wail was heard from the ghat. The pale eyes of the old clown looked at me for the last time. He nodded, as though in affirmation, and I turned and walked on. _

 ———————————————————————-

—Translated by Moazzam Sheikh and Elizabeth Bell

Success, Publishing & Indian Comics

Bharath Murthy

This piece is a presentation of my views on the comics medium in India, and some of my ideas for the growth of the form. These ideas are the result of the last few years spent trying to understand the medium. My background is in painting, (I studied painting in college) and I want to create as well as publish comics successfully to the end of my life. These views come from this commitment to the form. I also studied film making, and strangely enough, I had an opportunity to make a feature length documentary film in Japan about its vast self-published comics (doujinshi) culture. I learnt about the manga industry and found out why it is the the most successful comics industry in the world. I met many manga authors, publishers, printers, readers and realized how little westerners and Asians like us know about Japanese manga. Before making this film, I also sniffed around a little bit into the Indian comics scene, having received a grant from the India Foundation for the Arts, Bengaluru, to study Indian comics. I wrote a 5000 word essay about Indian comics which was published in Marg magazine in 2009. The same year, I also started an independent comics magazine called COMIX.INDIA (www.comixindia.com). What follows is a ‘fact finding report’, and the ‘recommendations’ of this report on how we can have fun, make money and generally enjoy creating and consuming comics in India.

Why black & white is better than colour for comics printing:

 Colour printing began during the late 19^th century, but picked up only by the 1930s. Colour comic strips appeared in American Sunday supplements pretty much the same time as comic strips themselves. The newspaper form gave birth to the modern comic strip as we know it. By the 1930s, 32 page comic books appeared in American news stands in 4-colour printing. This is the format of American comic book that continues to this day.

From the website http://www.dereksantos.com/comicpage/pregold.html :

In 1933, after seeing the Ledger syndicate publish a small amount of their Sunday comics on 7 by 9 inch plates, an idea hit upon two printer employees. Sales manager Harry L. Wildenberg and saleman Max. C. Gaines, employees of Eastern Color Printing Company in New York, saw the plates and figured two of these plates could fit on a tabloid page and produce a 7 1/2 by 10 inch book when folded. Gathering 32 pages of newspaper reprints including Mutt and Jeff, Joe Palooka, and Reg’lar Fellas, they created Funnies on Parade. This was the first comic produced in a format similiar to modern comics. Looking to test their product, they published 10,000 copies to be given out as premiums by Proctor and Gamble.

Impressed by this success, Gaines convinced Eastern Color that he could sell thousands of these to big advertisers like Kinney Shoe Stores, Canada Dry, and Wheatena to be used as premiums and radio giveaways. Because of this, Eastern followed by printing Famous Funnies: A Carnival of Comics and later Century of Comics, both containing Sunday newspaper reprints. M. C. Gaines was able to sell these in quantities of 100,000 to 250,000 copies. Century of Comics was the 2nd comic book and the first 100 page comic.

One fact is significant here. The first comic books were reprints of Sunday strips that first appeared in the low quality newspaper format, where they met with initial success. The first monthly comic magazines were anthologies and appeared in 1934. They all had 4-colour printing. In 1935, National Allied Publications, later renamed DC Comics, was the first publisher to print original material in the 32 page monthly comic format. It was in this format that superhero characters came to be in 1938, beginning with Superman. From then, till now, 2009, 71 years later, the format has been the same. 4-colour printing has become synonymous with superheroes and with the comic book form itself.

In India, colour printing got associated with comics by following the American example. It gave rise to the notion that comics MUST BE in colour, and the idea that Indian comic readers will not buy comics unless they are in colour. These notions are common among Indian comics publishers. However, we’ve had our fair share of successful b&w comics and 2-colour comics (way cheaper than full 4-colour printing). For example, Mayukh Choudhury, Narayan Debnath, Toms from Kottayam, Diamond comics magazine (all Pran comics in b&w), the comics in the now extinct ‘Target’ magazine, and countless other short comics in magazines.

The model for comics production in India is the American DC/Marvel Comics model. This involves an assembly line setup, with employees working on a monthly salary or per project. In other words, a factory. This style of production is suited for large volumes. Artists are paid average salaries (unless their reputations precede them) and monthly colour comics are produced for news stands. But colour poses a problem here. If high quality colour comics are to be produced, the cost shoots up too much. Colouring takes the longest time to do in the production process. As a result, the narratives have to be short, so that they can be coloured on time. 32 pages a month, at high quality, is a very tough target to achieve. At low quality, it is easier, but doing colour and doing low quality is not such a great idea.

Price Comparison of comics:

Comic	no. of pages	Price in Rs.	Quality of color printing
Raj Comics (India)	96	40	low
Tinkle Double Digest (India)	94	75	low-medium
Virgin Comics (India)	32	30	high
One volume of ‘Sandman’(DC Comics, America)	258	782	high
Tintin comic (Europe)	62	380	very high
One volume of ‘Buddha’(Black &White comic, Japan)	429	295	-n.a.-

From this simple comparison, it is clear that colour comics are expensive to produce and buy, and the higher the production quality, the lesser the number of pages offered, restricting narrative length. The best value for money is provided by the lowest quality colour printing, and full black & white printing.

What about European style colour comic ‘albums’? They are the luxury goods of the comics medium, much like other over priced European luxury items. The most expensive comics are European ones. A 62 page Tintin album costs Rs.380 on the ACK website. Too expensive even for me. The interesting thing about Tintin is that the initial few stories were first produced in b&w and serialized in a b&w comic magazine. Only later were they collected, redrawn, coloured, and released as a book. Even the direct-to-colour albums were serialized as pages in magazines. Ananda Bazaar Patrika has released a few Tintin style albums, a 38 page full colour book costing Rs.40. Recently, Puffin has published a few colour comics first serialized in newspaper supplements, a 48 page album costing Rs. 99. Comics already have a restricted audience, and further restrictions due to high cost is sure to kill the medium. The high cost of European comic albums has ensured that so much of their great comics remain unavailable in the English language. In England, however, there has been a b&w cheap comic magazine tradition, and one will recall that Alan Moore’s ‘V for Vendetta’ for example, was first published in a b&w comic magazine, and so was ‘From Hell’.

So, we’ve covered Europe and America, and seen that colour comics dominate and are expensive products, thereby restricting readers and also narrative length, eventually stifling the medium. What remains to be studied are Japanese comics, called ‘manga’. Japan happens to be the world’s largest comics producer and consumer. It seems that they draw comics as effortlessly as the rest of the world writes text. What is the secret of the stupendous, unimaginable success of manga? Is there a lesson in it for Indian comics creators and publishers?

The secret of the success of Japanese manga:

 When I went to Japan to make a film about self-published Japanese comics sub-culture, (which is larger than the commercial American comic market), I realised how little Indians like me knew about manga. First of all, manga is not a particular style of drawing faces and figures. The big-eyed faces popularized as ‘manga style’ is only one among a whole spectrum of styles, from hyper-realism to extreme abstraction. MANGA is simply a general term for ‘Japanese Comics.’ Manga narratives cover every possible genre that exists on planet earth in  both fiction and non-fiction, and they have created a very unique genre that exists only in manga called ‘Yaoi’ or ‘Boys Love.’ Wiki it for more info. And contrary to notions, there are quite a few manga which are printed in full colour. However, most manga are black & white. Part of the reason manga is so misunderstood is because most manga remains untranslated. What we read in English is the tip of the iceberg. But another reason we misunderstand manga is because we have a preconceived idea of what comics are and what they can do.

The secret of Japanese manga is their method of production, and its got nothing to do with the quality of the content. The entire most successful comics industry in the world rests squarely on CHEAP B&W MAGAZINES produced week after week. The high-end ‘books’ that appear in Indian bookshops are only reprints of the most successful stories from the manga magazines. Virtually ALL manga stories first appear in the manga magazines. And you have to see them to believe the kind of low quality product they are. Hardly any ink is used! Its worse than photocopy resolution! And that’s what most people read and enjoy. The well-printed book manga is a sort of bonus for the author who has proved successful in the magazine form. I still don’t know how the publishers get their feedback on popularity, but fan letters and self-published comics featuring characters from mainstream commercial manga are two of them. Surveys are also done, but I don’t know details about that.

Because of the magazine form, because its b&w, and because it’s printed cheaply, comics are affordable by everyone. Even a high-end ‘artistic’, ‘serious’, ‘intellectual’ ‘literary’, ‘graphic novelesque’ whatever story first appears in cheap manga magazines. This ensures that literary stuff is also affordable by everyone. Contrary to popular conception, cheap printing DOES NOT equal cheap content. This is a truly unique feature of manga that we could do well to adopt. In Indian text-based books, cheap printing is generally equated with pulp fiction, (of course there are exceptions). Books claiming higher literary status tend to have better quality paper and printing, and are costlier.

The uniqueness of Japanese comics printing is in the fact that all content regardless of artistic merit passes through the initial ‘cheap-magazine-printing’ phase, guarantees income (paid by page rate) to the author, and on positive feedback, gives a second lease of life to the author through high-quality reprints in book form (called ‘tankobon’ in Japanese) that give the author royalties. The author owns the rights to the work throughout. The ‘cheap-magazine-printing’ phase also ensures space for newcomers who are always required for a comics culture to flourish, while providing fresh, original material and also fostering healthy competition. As I see it, this is a fool-proof system.

Aesthetic reasons for black & white over colour printing:

Very interestingly, there’s also an aesthetic reason why black & white is better than colour for comics publishing, in a rare instance where art and commerce fit hand-in-glove. The clue to this lies in the nature and characteristics of the comic medium. The success or failure of a comic is not at all dependent on the ‘quality’ of the artwork. It lies in how narrative information is communicated and manipulated using images and text. You might have an grand gorgeously produced image, but to the reader, it is just narrative information. He or she will quickly turn the page and your painstakingly drawn beautiful image is gone, it has become information in the reader’s head. Lets face the awful truth here– comic drawing is NOT painting (no offence to great comic artists here, I am an artist myself, and I know how to paint). Any amount of extra detail in artwork only goes into narrative info. Another problem that occurs in cases when extreme stress is given to gorgeous colour artwork is inconsistency. This inconsistency is very obvious in many Indian colour comics. The first few pages are great, then the deterioration starts.

The truth is, the reader demands narrative information first and foremost, and all the aesthetic appreciation comes later. You can independently admire the artist’s virtuosity for as long as you want, but only after narrative satisfaction is complete. Artistic virtuosity is an added ‘bonus’ for a comic, and not an absolute necessity. If artistic virtuosity was the only criteria for a successful comic, many many comics authors would have been failures. Colour information in a comic adds artistic value to the drawing, but it does nothing to the narrative. A panel of Superman kicking ass in black & white has exactly the same amount of NARRATIVE INFORMATION as the same panel in colour.

Mainstream Indian publishers are very reluctant to publish full colour graphic novels, and rightly so. Its a huge burden on them. Its a huge burden on the artists too. I say remove colour, cut out the fat, and we’ll have a healthier comics industry. Why imitate all the wrong ideas from American comics.

In order to save artists from self-destruction, this tyranny of colour must go. Also, my little experience of comics has convinced me that the line is the basic tool of comic art. A bad line and no amount of jazzy colouring can save it.

Why printed books are still the best medium for comics in the age of the internet:

Now that we’ve seen the value of Black and White in comics printing, I want to make a point that is relevant to the times we live in. With the coming of the internet, one might ask the question, why bother with traditional printing at all? Why not simply do comics on the internet? Why not sell them as e-books? Why print comics?

One part of the answer to this is the obvious advantages of the book. No electricity required, no batteries, no machine breakdowns, durable, one can take it anywhere, and finally, feel the tactility of the book on your hands. But with comics printing, there is another techno-aesthetic reason why comics can be best enjoyed as a printed book. This is because of the fact that COMICS ARE HAND DRAWN. Even if you use a pen tablet and computer, which is the cutting edge of comics drawing technology, you are still drawing by hand. Even if you use photographs instead of drawings, there is still a major amount of handicraft involved. The printing of a hand drawn inscription brings us as close as possible to the actual process of drawing of the author. There’s an intimacy generated with the author. I believe this is part of the reason for the strange urge felt by comics fans to copy comic artwork. I’ve tried reading b&w comics on the Amazon Kindle e-book reader, and it is very cumbersome. Of course, the technology will get better, so maybe e-book readers are another distribution channel, but I doubt very much that it will kill the printed comic book. It might kill the text-only book however, but this is unnecessary speculation on my part, sorry!

How cheaply produced black & white comics magazines can save Indian comics:

The black & white comic magazine format has a huge number of obvious advantages going for it. The failure of many comics companies doing full colour comics (recent example, Virgin), has debunked the myth that extreme high quality colour artwork will guarantee success. On the other hand, a totally low-quality dirt cheap b&w comic magazine drawn and published by Malayali cartoonist Toms has been a success in Kerala for many many years. The reader wants an enjoyable, informative narrative, first and foremost. If you are able to provide that, everything else falls in place. One can always attempt to imitate the limited success of ACK or Raj Comics, by doing full colour. But to start and run a high quality colour comics company now is a very risky proposition. I would not attribute Raj Comics and ACK’s success to great quality or great artwork, but to the fact that they began way before everybody else, and are now venerable institutions. The truth is both companies were going downhill in the late nineties. ACK changed ownership, while Raj redrew and recreated their old characters, just like how DC and Marvel Comics of America have been doing. The problem with this method of production is not that colour is evil or something, it is that building a team of in-house artists and writers producing full colour comics is a lot of expense, and not recoverable in the short run. This colour method also gives little space for new talent, for reasons I’ve given above.

A good place to change our notions is to learn from cartooning, those quickly drawn, mostly black & white, single panel nuggets of narrative mainly used for humour. Cartooning in India has truly become an Indian art form, complete with a history and tradition, even though now it has lost its edge. Cartooning has lost relevance only because it imposed a sort of censorship on itself, both in content and form. Comics can simply be seen as cartooning expanded to many panels. This self-censorship has resulted in us not having a strong ‘comic strip’ tradition, let alone a comics tradition. Comics have come to us mainly via imitation. But all we need to do is build on what we already have, a cartooning tradition. This argument also leads to the creation of b&w comics magazines. It was in fact a black & white cartooning magazine called ‘Shankar’s Weekly’ that helped establish a whole generation of cartoonists.

          

Comparison between b&w and colour magazines:

BLACK &WHITE COMIC MAGAZINES	COLOUR COMIC MAGAZINES
Very cheap to produce.	Very expensive to produce.
One author can create a whole comic story.	Requires a team.
Can be done fast, deadlines can be met.	Takes a lot more time.
Because b&w is cheap to print, narratives can be much longer.	Narratives tend to be short because more pages means more time and more money.
More space for newcomers, as emphasis is on narrative rather than only drawing skills.	High skills required. Entry barriers high. Stifles growth.
Affordable by working class, students, and others with little money to spare, but would love to read.	Restricted audience because of lesser affordability.
Increased possibility of reprinting popular serialized comics into affordable b&w books, resulting in royalties for author.	Reprinting high quality colour comics into full length books is prohibitively expensive.
Longer narratives also mean one story can run over many books. More demand and supply. Good for book publishing in general.	Fewer colour pages mean fewer books.

           

Bharath Murthy is a comics author and makes non-fiction videos for a living. He studied painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S University, Baroda; and Film direction at the Satyajit Ray Film and TV institute, Kolkata. He was commissioned by Japan Broadcasting Corporation (NHK) to make a documentary on the comics subculture of the countryThe film titled, “The Fragile Heart of Moe”, was part of a series on Japan’s capital, called Tokyo Modern. The films, all by non-Japanese filmmakers, explored the various facets of life in the metropolitan. Bharath explored the subculture of Japanese comics called manga. He did a comic strip for The New Indian Express for a while, and excerpts from his ongoing book-length work were published in ‘Siruvarmalar’. He started COMIX.INDIA magazine in 2009, which is currently the only independant Indian comics magazine in this country. 5 Volumes have been published. Follow Bharath Murthy at: http://bcomix.wordpress.com

            

Bashonti

Chandril Bhattacharya

Is this Bashonti Sanyal who imprints red-lac dye and rubs lotus-petals on her palms.

Is this Bashonti Mukherjee who lights candles every morning on the window sill so that her lover gets irritated

Is this Bashonti Seth who plans on jumping into the pond along with her son on MonTueWed and on ThursFriSat plans without him

Is this Bashonti Mondol whose short stammertongue evokes rabid jokes at the morning bakery

Is this Bashonti Saha who fills up forms in such a calligraphic hand that folks mistake it for print

Is this Bashonti Halder who everyday voluntarily crosses her appointed bus stop and walks back again, slipper-worn, toe-strained

Is this Bashonti Sen who doesn’t kiss men who don’t smoke because men’s lips ought to be dark and bitter

Is this Bashonti Ghosh who rings Thebun-mashi everyday so that she can listen at least once to her maiden petname

Is this Bashonti Saha-Ray who stopped buying fish since every time she would sit on her haunches to check them out men would breathe nasty over her goosebumpy-neck

Is this Bashonti Ganguly who always wears sarees and  chhichhis her husband every single time he brings her a nightie

Is this Bashonti Sarkar who finds her Upanishad text every time on the third shelf

Is this Bashonti Chakarborty who said “Ufff, so warm” and got herself into the fridge  and didn’t realize neighbours were arriving in droves to look at her tanpura-posterior saying “Boudi, a glass of sherbet for you”

Is this Bashonti Dasgupta who created so much sound and fury while screwing that her in-laws fainted with laughter in the next room

Is this Bashonti Chatterjee whom her brother-in-law ordered “Switch on the fan, woman” and as punishment clipped her nipples

Is this Bashonti Laha who aimed her dartlike rubber-band perfectly at the nose of her grandfather’s portrait

Is this Bashonti Roy who quotes Jibabananda Das right, left and centre so that this evening’s intellectual can suck that name from her lower lips

Is this Bashonti Guha who undressed herself on the rooftop and later learnt that such cheap tactics would be censored

Is this Bashonti Banerjee who put all the utensil stickers on the rear-doors and cello-tapes on her stomach and pulled them out rough one at a time

Is this Bashonti Tarafdar who sent her Ma off to get some sweets so that she could close the windows and ventilators right away and hold her lover’s tool

Is this Bashonti Bhattacharya who shuttles in space so that she can manage her parents’ fights and comes flying back to the loo to get the urgent job done

Is this Bashonti Parui who makes boats out of foolscap papers for young birthdays and the young ones hate that kind of a gift

Is this Bashonti Sarkhel who can sprout herbs on her thighs just like that and then hide them just as fast

Is this Bashonti Sen-Sharma who will die before she goes to the Elgin Road crossing because she discussed divorce there one day

Is this Bashonti Chowdhury who put bananas country aubergines car keys in her vagina so that no one could go to the Dakshineshwar temple that day

Is this Bashonti Biswas who could not hold back puking every time her husband would swallow gloppy mucus but ended up with cheekmarks from the window bars

Is this Bashonti Bardhan who midnightly stands on the verandah and a bitch makes eye contact

Is this Bashonti Thakur who doesn’t care much about risks. She knows that the thin plastic bag won’t feel the hurt when it is hurled down

Chandril Bhattacharya is a journalist and non-fiction writer from Kolkata. He is also the singer-songwriter in the popular music band Chandrabindu. The Bengali version of this poem was published in the magazine Apar in 2011.

Aliens of the same world: The Case of Bangla Science Fiction

Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay

Locating Bangla Science Fiction

SF as a genre has always presented problems of definition. Since Gernsback’s “scientifiction”, attempts to define the nature of this genre have been common, so much so that when we refer to District 9 or Avatar as SF, as we did in this seminar, we think we know exactly what we mean. However, when we extend our understanding of SF to include those outside the predominantly Anglo-American (and marginally European) space, I believe we must redefine SF tentatively as an index of cultural transformation which may be understood through what I call the “history of scientificity”. I use the term scientificity as a concept. The colonial era, in which actual political control became the progenitor of a number of myths of science, is an important site for the study of concepts as orienting components – words around which archival and paraxial histories may be constructed. These histories are utilized by the colonizer and the colonized in the context of Bengal in ways that enable different forms of the same discourse: the discourse of legitimacy that gives meaning to the colonial situation. What remains unquestioned in these histories is scientificity itself. The existence of non-relative truths that may be discovered is never under debate. Working on colonial science, one must isolate strands of debate that allow “scientificity” to become enshrined as the principle of political legitimacy for both the colonizer and the colonized while reflecting upon the historicity of the concept itself.

SF is a space where the “transcendental” nature of science merges with its subjective “earthy” historical other in fiction; consequently, one must begin a history of scientificity and unravel when and by what means scientificity becomes an orienting component of the “future history” that is SF. This is as much a question in the history and philosophy of science as it is of modernity and the constitution of the modern self in the development of techno-scientific cultures. Since science functions as a constant field of cultural tension in the asymmetry of colonial relations, SF becomes an invaluable means of exploring the nature of cultural identity shaped by colonization. I have selected one specific kind of SF for analysis here – the category of the tall tale. This is because the tall tale most explicitly engages with the criterion of scientificity and reveals the questions which a history of SF must recognize.

Games of Truth in SF-Tall Tales

The stories of Joseph Jorkens written by Lord Dunsany, Edward Plunkett (1878-1957) and the ones of Ghanada (Ghanashyam Das) written by Premendra Mitra (1904-1988) belong to the category of travel tall tales. Tall tales that base themselves on travel have three basic dimensions. The first is the landscape and people of the travelled land. The second is the object or point of surprise. The third is the character of the storyteller, which defines the tale as a tall tale. The similarities between fantasy, SF, fiction and the tall tale are governed to a large extent by the presentation of the tale. The tall tale becomes a tall tale owing to the relation created between the teller of the tale and the event in which the teller participates. And the fundamental premise of the tall tale is that the tale is always described by the teller as absolutely true, exceeding the boundaries of fiction (which by definition is not-true). Unlike Munchausenesque tall tales, regarded generally as the forerunner of the genre, the similarity between Jorkens and Ghanada emerges in the precision of the narrated tale in scientific terms – including geographical specificity, use of expressions that convey the scientificity and hence seek to attest the truth of the narrated tale, and presentation of ideas and events which in themselves seem logically possible. The veracity of the tale is seldom under doubt due to the events themselves, the doubt emerges from the character of the teller of the tale and the tale itself is then compared to a framework of non-fiction outside the fictional world. All fiction is by definition false, the important part of the tall tale is not that which is clearly false, but that which posits itself as true. Thus if we are to pay attention to the actual source of textual meaning in the tall tale, we must locate it in the probable rather than the incomprehensible, because the latter derives its meaning secondarily from the former. By paying attention only to the locus of improbability, one is likely to miss out on the power effects of the images and ideas taken as true within the fiction.

In the context of the adventure stories described here, the two layers of truth that are particularly important are the presentation of the foreigner and the use of science. In the preface to the first volume of Jorkens’s adventures, the narrator explains that one of the purposes of the stories is to “advance the progress of Science, and establish our knowledge upon a firmer basis; yet should they fail to do so, I feel that they may at least be so fortunate as to add strangeness to parts of our planet, just as it was tending to grow too familiar.”. This is a recurring idea in the Jorkens stories: the impact of these stories on scientific knowledge. But the novelty of the scientific idea is supported by the “familiarity” of the taken for granted, whose scientificity is never in question. Thus even if we mark out the story as a tall tale, the experience of the improbable is only tied to the novum, Darko Suvin’s term for the new object or idea that SF introduces, and not to the cultural assumptions within which the novum is placed. Moreover, the experience of the scientific is exclusively linked to the British colonizer, and indigenous experiences of these objects become irrelevant in the “scientific project”. “The tale of the Abu Laheeb” is a prime example of the way in which the scientific project assimilates local knowledge. In this story, Jorkens travels to the “Empire’s edge”, Sudan, and seeks to hunt the elusive creature known locally as Abu Laheeb that uses fire like humans. The locals who wish to protect their knowledge of this creature from the “white man” refuse to reveal any information concerning the abu laheeb, choosing jokes over “truth”. Jorkens finally meets a white man living by himself in this place, who has managed to extract knowledge from the locals by unknown means. For Jorkens, this white man alone approaches the problem from a scientific perspective, that of a zoologist, who sifts through the many “stories” brought by the natives to find the grain of truth in them. Yet the white man himself is not very forthcoming with information at the beginning: “yes the natives believed in some such animal, but his own opinion he would not expose to the possibility of my ridicule.” Jorkens is thrilled to have the information, and his immediate thought is to be “the first white man that had seen the abu laheeb, and to shoot him and to bring his huge skin home” Jorkens pursues the creature down from the information given by the explorer-zoologist (“the last white man you see as you go through the final fringes of civilization”) and engages in reflections regarding the place, its inhabitants and tribes (the Dinkas). For Jorkens, hunting down the creature appears to be a scientific enterprise: “of all the steps science had taken from out of the early darkness toward that distant point of which we cannot guess, which shall be full of revelations to man, one of her footsteps would be due to me”.  He even considers naming the creature “Prometheus Jorkensi” (16). Jorkens finally discovers the creature, but unsurprisingly, fails to take a picture and is unable to shoot it down.

The fact that the creature is not discovered and is unverifiable makes the whole incident a tall-tale. Yet it is not merely the tale of the creature, but a whole network of assumptions that serves to make it a tall tale. Because it is only by privileging the white man’s knowledge and scientific expertise that one establishes the creature called abu laheeb within the story, and not the stories of the natives, whose stories and beliefs are always already classified as tall tales. It is the British colonizer who names and makes the creature “scientific”. Bruno Latour’s assertion is fully realized in this brief fiction, not as science but as the cultural claim of scientific knowledge which transforms the local into something abstract and fitted into the body of scientific data whose unquestioned master is the white colonizer. And it is not merely this one tale; Dunsany heaps stereotype upon stereotype in almost all of the tales, creating a picture of the East (which covers Africans as much as Asians) that is slow, listless, governed by superstition, Buddha like calm, worshipping false gods and witches, governed by fate, as opposed to the West, which is always higher civilization to the native. These stereotypes abound in much popular literature of the period, particularly as images of degeneration, but what is curious about Jorkens’ adventures is that the untrue is never experienced by his listener in anything but the novum, and Jorkens, despite being considered a teller of tall tales, is at the same time considered a man who has travelled widely. Indeed it is the narrator who is ever at pains to establish the scientificity of all of Jorkens’ tales. And while the novum itself is considered fabricated, the cultural assumptions within which the novum is placed are never realised as such. And despite the accepted superiority of the East in several respects, the main point of challenge and superiority of the West is always ultimately established in terms of science. In another story, “The Electric King”, one of the characters is driven to near-madness by a psychological trauma and he takes refuge in the “wisdom of the East”, namely a Tibetan monastery in the Himalayas to get a cure. The monks are able to cure the character, yet when it comes to utilizing scientific knowledge, the monks are curiously tradition bound and indifferent to the material benefits to be accrued from a change of practice. And their attitude is generalised to represent the homogenous East once again: “I grant you the wisdom of the East: it had saved my reason. But when it comes to organisation, you have to go a long way West for it. God’s own country every time.” The West, particularly Britain, with its healthy materialism is the source, origin and destination of science, independent of location and universal. It is the non-acquisitiveness of the East, it’s bondage to tradition and its spiritual nature that ultimately makes it indifferent both to knowledge and to its use as science.

This is where Ghanada’s tales provide an effective contrast. Also SF, and emerging from a shared field of ideas regarding scientificity and yet subverting ideas regarding the universality of Western scientific knowledge, Ghanada’s tales become a response to the homogenizing stereotypes of Jorkens. One of the first differences that register when one compares the two is that despite the apparent similarity of contextual details – the regular group of listeners, the teller being bribed to tell his stories (whiskey in Jorkens’ case, and food in Ghanada’s), the geographical precision of the place where the tale is set – is that the framework of disbelief in Ghanada exists prior to the tale, and Ghanada does not have a single believer amongst his group of listeners. The frame narrator of Jorkens’ adventures places them in a cast of truth, and only the improbability of the climax makes the adventure a tall tale. Thus in the case of Jorkens, we move from truth of the tale to the impossible/improbable, whereas in the case of Ghanada, we move from total disbelief to a network of real factual details established by Ghanada by means of geographical and scientific precision and back to the event as tall tale. Indeed, by not taking the truth for granted in Ghanada’s tale, one effectively isolates the tale as a tall tale even before it starts. Thus Ghanada’s position mimics the position of the natives in Jorkens’ tales, whose stories are not likely to believed simply by a pre-existing bias regarding the teller.

This equation is the one that is constantly presented in the Ghanada adventures. Ghanada is an adventurer-trader-spy in his many adventures, but he is always at the centre of things in all these adventures. This however is not a position that is given to him automatically; Ghanada generally always encounters at least one white man in all his foreign travels who will refer to him as a “nigger”, “black ghost”, “black mouse” and the like, before a showdown – generally physical – in which the white man loses. Thereafter the centrality of Ghanada is never questioned.

Because the utility and necessity of scientific knowledge is unquestioned and because only the white man is seen as capable of scientific activity, the Jorkens stories become an argument in favour of the colonial enterprise and the structures of science become the bolster for a simplistic hierarchical binary between the coloniser and the colonised. And this binary remains the framework of truth within which the tall tale is placed. Thus Jorkens engages in fantasy making which is inextricable from its colonial structure. Ghanada on the contrary engages in a conscious restatement of a past which is still recognisably colonial, but in which the power equation locally has altered to give not merely space or agency but active control to the native. For instance, in “Glass”, Ghanada proudly declares: “Do you know, if it weren’t for this piece of broken glass the first atom bomb would have dropped on London and not on Hiroshima and Nagasaki?” (28), launching thereafter into a story in which he foils Nazi designs to extract uranium in Angola. In the first two adventures, “Mosquito” and “Insect”, written during the last years of the colonial rule, Ghanada foils an attempt by a mad scientists (Japanese in the first and a German Jew with a grudge in the second) to spread genetically modified insects with great destructive power over all of Europe. In “Hat” Ghanada become the first man to climb Mount Everest and has an adventure with Yetis.

Ghanada meets the challenge posed by Jorkens’ directly. Firstly, he destroys the image of “spiritual East” by fitting into active roles rather than passive reflective ones. Secondly, while the tales of Ghanada are always doubted by his listeners, the precision of the tale and Ghanada’s abundant knowledge of the world – its culture, geography, politics and its languages – always add to the truth of the tale which has been pre-judged as a tall tale. Thirdly, Ghanada in his own way, even as he represents in his own tales the self-asserting native both physically capable, scientifically sound, and materially acquisitive, is quite a bit of a snob whose very pretence of being always the most important man in the piece creates a hierarchical structure vis-à-vis the white man, and in his adventures, he often becomes the only possible saviour of the British and Europe. Importantly though, in Ghanada’s tales the colonial hierarchy is rarely referred to in actual terms, and when it is, Ghanada is politically very much aligned to the British. Ghanada tales are based on a synthetic framework that both utilizes the binary used by Jorkens and subverts it. The foreigner remains foreign, but in becoming more familiar he becomes less alien.

Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay is Kultrans Doctoral Fellow at the Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages, University of Oslo. A version of this article has been published as: ”Aliens of the Same World: The Case of Bangla Science Fiction” in Home in Motion:The Shifting Grammar of Self & Stranger. ed. Pedro F. Marcelino (Oxfordshire, UK: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2011).

 

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Raina, Dhruv and S. Irfan Habib, “The unfolding of an engagement: ‘The Dawn’ on science, technical education and industrialisation: India 1896-1912”, Studies in History vol.9, no.1, 1993, p. 87-117.

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—, Ghanada Samagra Ek, Surajit Dasgupta (ed), Ananda Publishers, Kolkata, 2000.

 

Of Sublunary Incubus-Demons and Their Givenness

 

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen

 “Between the moon and the earth there live spirits whom we call incubus-demons.”

             So declares Maugantius, summoned before the king to explain how a boy named Merlin could have been born without a father. Inter lunam et terram, between a celestial globe in ceaseless circulation and the dull earth: in this intermedial space dwell creatures at once human and angelic. Incubus-demons can assume mortal forms and descend to visit earthly women. “Many people have been born this way,” Maugantius asserts. Among the progeny of such intercourse is Merlin, destined to become our iconic wizard. This genesis narrative marks Merlin’s advent into the literary tradition. The story yields no evidence of his future as a bespectacled and senescent figure, cloaked in robes and wielding a wand. Dumbledore is a diminished and modern avatar. The primordial Merlin is much more difficult to emplace. Between moon and earth is a gap that opens because the two realms cannot touch. Merlin arrives from a kind of heavenly lacuna, a suspended and disjunctive space created because two bodies which are two worlds endlessly withdraw from each other. Aerial and moonlit, this middle realm is knowable only at second hand. Maugantius makes clear that his knowledge of what dwells between lunar possibility and the cold earth’s heft arrives vicariously, through books of history and philosophy.

 Speaking of philosophy books and strange intermediacy, Graham Harman has argued that “Objects hide from one another endlessly, and inflict their mutual blows [“physical relations”] only through some vicar or intermediary” (“On Vicarious Causation” 189-90). The Merlin episode suggests a medieval version of this statement that is just as true: “Worlds hide from one another endlessly, and enjoy their mutual embraces [“physical relations”] only through some vicar or intermediary.” Merlin’s birth is the weird result/enabler of an asymmetrical, humanly inassimilable relation. Merlin’s mother is a king’s daughter and a cloistered nun who nightly finds a handsome man in the solitude of her cell. The incubus-demon who fathers Merlin is of unknown biography and intentions. He sometimes touches the ordinary world, but just as often withdraws from terrestrial connection. His desires cannot be reduced to the merely sexual. He wants at times to kiss and hold the nun, at times to converse invisibly on unstated subjects. Merlin arrives, that is, through an abstruse relationship that unites for a while two beings from oblique realms. The angel-demon and the solitary princess never fully touch, or do so askew, in a conjoining that is textually enabled only backwards, through the strange progeny who makes possible and embodies their “shared common space” (Graham Harman’s term for the third object within which two others meet, 190) or “thalamus” (Geoffrey of Monmouth’s word for the nun’s cell, a Greek noun that also means “chamber” “bedroom” “bridal bed” and, metonymically, “marriage”: that is, the space of an unequal, complicated, potentially disastrous, possibly transformative caress). The relation between the nun and the incubus engenders a creature who if not wholly unprecedented is nonetheless unpredetermined. Though Maugentius can invoke a history for such an arrival, he cannot account for Merlin’s erratic life to come.

The text that I am speaking about in this language that weds Object Oriented Ontology to Latin historiography is Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain (c. 1136). Geoffrey’s history is most widely known for having bequeathed to the future the King Arthur of enduring legend. Without Geoffrey this provincial British warlord would be an obscure medieval footnote rather than the progenitor of a still vibrant world. At his first appearance in Geoffrey’s text Merlin is a precocious and quarrelsome young man. As the story unfolds he will reveal surprising abilities, demonstrating that seemingly inert rocks may contain within them bellicose dragons; foretelling grim futures that include incineration, poison, and flowing blood; enabling through his transformative potions an adultery-minded Uther Pendragon to engender Arthur. Merlin alters completely the timbre of the text in which he appears. The History of the Kings of Britain has until the moment of his entrance offered a chronicle of the island’s early days. Its sedate Latin prose describes how Britain was founded and who ruled its civil war loving kingdoms. Wonders and supernatural events before his advent are few. A tribe of giants to kill, a sudden rain of blood, a sea monster and some ravenous wolves are scant exceptions to a martial account of settlement, inheritance, dissent, and political intrigue. Merlin appears just after the first mention of magic in the narrative, in the form of incompetent magi whom the perfidious King Vortigern summons to assist him in finding a way to escape the persecutions of the Saxons. Merlin is not himself a magician; magi are figures of failure in the story. For Geoffrey of Monmouth Merlin is a prophet, a poet, a schemer, an architect and an author, a figure of singular ingenuity rather than of saintly or demonic inspiration. He cannot be domesticated into mere category.

After his unexpected advent the rules for how the story may unfold change. Earlier in the History when an earthbound king dreamt of travelling spaces of cloud and air, his fate was to plummet with his manufactured wings to a shattering death (Bladud, who practices “nigromantium” rather than magic, 30). That stretch between earth and moon had not yet opened for narrative sojourn. Merlin, however, born of the meeting of nocturnal radiance with mundane constrictedness, conveys the wheel of Stonehenge across the sea “with incredible ease.” This transmarinal relocation is not accomplished through supernatural agency. There is nothing divine or occult about the movement. Merlin works with the earth’s givenness, its alliance-seeking materiality. The monoliths are swiftly transported via his operationibus machinandis (“feats of engineering” 128) and machinationes (“machinery,” “engines,” “contrivances”). Merlin is an engineer, a vicar of causation who knows that objects launch into motion only through the intermediary agency of other objects. The stones are disassembled, loaded onto ships and carried to their current home for repurposing as a British monument, thus proving the power of ingenuity (ingenium, the Latin word that gives us “engineer”). Significantly, we are never told of what Merlin’s machinationes consist. A materialist but not a reductionist, Merlin knows well that “inscrutable depths” intractably hold the objectal world.

Merlin is likewise a vicar or engineer of diegesis. He moves the narrative, but cannot be absorbed back into it. He remains an essential mystery, a figure who changes everything and at a certain point simply vanishes, but even after his quiet disappearance his presence permeates what follows. Though he never meets Arthur, that king’s ambiguous destiny on Avalon is inconceivable without Merlin’s having set into motion the path of his ambivalent life. The text that Merlin creates is eccentric to what precedes: what sought to be history opens into a possibility-laden new genre, a mode to be christened in the future romance.

Merlin embodies the strange prospects offered by that space inter lunam et terram, between earth’s banal givenness and the moon’s unreachable allure. This suspended geography might be called sublunary, but by that term I do not mean mundane. The sublunary designates a region neither terrestrial nor empyrean: unregulated by tedious rules about proper history, untouched by diurnal limitations, immune to the stasis that holds heaven. Sublunary means unpredestined by humans and gods, an intermedial sweep where the fixities of doctrine, custom and theology do not necessarily obtain. The wandering incubus who traces this space, celestial but not heavenly, a lover of earthly things but not bound to the small spaces of earth’s human dwellers, imbues in his progeny the ability to escape constricted textual spaces as well.

 “Between the moon and the earth there live spirits whom we call incubus-demons.” The pithy declaration is sudden, breathtaking. It opens an unforeseen space and populates it with creatures who are both familiar and utterly strange. The advent of the sublunary floods the text with alien luminescence, and for me calls to mind another strange phrase about lunar glow. In his essay “On Vicarious Causation,” Graham Harman describes the solitude of reticent objects, describing how these cloisters are sometimes breached by oblique, transformative, but carefully mediated relations. He writes that “While its strangeness may lead to puzzlement more than resistance, vicarious causation is not some autistic moonbeam entering the window of an asylum” (187). The metaphor does its Merlin-like work, transforming a philosophy that might have contemplated the “dull realism of mindless atoms and billiard balls” into “an archipelago of oracles or bombs that explode from concealment … [the] sacred fruit of writers, thinkers, politicians, travellers, lovers, and inventors” (212). Harman employs this lunar and lunatic metaphor to convey (and reject) meager, inviolable solitariness. We can see already from Geoffrey of Monmouth, though, that radiance from the sublunary sphere cannot be immured in an asylum or convent. It engenders strange and rules-changing progeny by placing into communication seemingly isolated bodies or objects. An angel-demon enters the window of a nun’s cell and enables the advent of Merlin, he who can discern in dead stone the possibilities of dormant dragons and of lithic wheels ready for conveyance across vast waters. No moonbeam is in the end solipsistic, even if some objects in this world attempt withdrawal into utter isolation. Lunar pull is incessant, drawing artists and philosophers to speculative modes, to dreaming of incongruent but at times imbricated worlds where even magic is not weird enough.

Geoffrey of Monmouth is not the only medieval writer to have populated sublunary expanses so vibrantly. Incubus-demons in their inscrutable flights share interlunar space with voyagers who traverse the clouds in ships. Gervase of Tilbury describes a congregation who, upon leaving church, witness an anchor lowered from the clouds (Otia imperialia, c. 1214). A mariner shimmies down its rope, hand over hand. He is seized by the onlookers and drowns in the moistness of terrestrial air. Between heaven and earth sail aerial vessels of unknown design, dwell “beings neither angelic, human, nor animal” (as Robert Bartlett entitles a wonderfully miscellaneous section of England Under the Norman and Angevin Kings). This sublunary space might also open underwater, as in Ralph of Coggeshall’s report of merman caught in the nets of an English fishing boat (Bartlett 688-89), or the belligerent fish-knights of the Roman de Perceforest. Always radiating at a slanted angle to lived human reality, the intermedial realms also frequently erupts from underground. In the Breton lays that are among the literary progeny of Geoffrey’s History, the space is most often called Fairy.

The Breton lays are short, romance themed narratives, often with Arthurian settings. Sir Orfeo, a good example of such a work, describes the lays as full of marvels (“ferli thing”), war, woe, joy, trickery, adventures, enjoyment, fairies, and love (4-12). The Breton lays are an English genre set within a “magical” Welsh or Breton past. Composed in French and English, the stories are replete with radiant objects, magic, strange beings, monsters, and music. Their worlds open repeatedly into unexpected geographies, into spaces similar to Geoffrey of Monmouth’s sublunary expanse: across the roiling sea traversed by the lovers’ ship in Marie de France’s Guigemar, for example. Or within the rock that the author of Sir Orfeo envisions as the entrance to the Fairy Realm, a seemingly underground kingdom where all normal rules for objects, agency, telos and time are suspended. A hunt proceeds without prey, bodies are caught in eternal disaggregation, captivity is a pleasant slumber, being endures without becoming. The Breton lays are a medieval version of speculative fiction, a space to think the possible without recourse to theology, to explore a terrain rich in mysterious objects without predetermined answers or even clear objective.

 Sir Orfeo is a queer story, grafting the classical myth of Orpheus and his lost Eurydice to elements of English history and romance. Its setting is Thrace, but the city has been relocated from ancient Greece to not-so-long-ago Winchester. The queen does not die, but is abducted into Fairy by its enigmatic king. His domain is accessed in two ways: at a grafted (“ympe”) tree under which Queen Heurodis falls asleep, and “in at a roche.” That Fairy should be a kind of omnipresent underworld resonates uncannily with Graham Harman’s description of the objectal world. He writes that we are “moles tunneling through wind, water and ideas no less than through speech-acts, wonder and dirt” (“Vicarious Causation” 210). A subterranean milieu, “numberless underground cavities,” but a place of neither finitude nor negativity. And sparks from that distant satellite do penetrate from time to time, perpetually exploding and renewing a wide sublunary world, “an archipelago of oracles or bombs” (212).

The Fay world obliquely and multiply touches our own. After ten years of wandering, Orfeo discovers his stolen wife in a kind of non-juridical Hades, where bodies are forever arrested in their self-undoing: headless, butchered, burnt, bound, slumbering in a fragmented nondeath, caught in the moment at which they have been taken (y-nome) by the Fairies. This is a somnolence removed from time, preservation in the agony of capture, a withdrawal into untouchable solitude. Among these grotesque sleepers Heurodis is anomalous: the kidnapped queen slumbers peacefully beneath a grafted tree (“ympe-tree”) while the dismembered, the mad, the strangled and the drowned neighbor her dreams. Perhaps the peacefulness of Heurodis arrives because she did not resist the advent of her taking. The Fairy King warned her that should she not appear at the appointed time at the grafted tree in the courtly world, “thou worst y-fet / And totore thine limes al / That nothing help the no schall” (170-2). By surrendering to adventure, to the thing that arrives unwilled and sometimes undesired, she is transported. An ambivalent future opens that otherwise could not have arrived. The queen is the only one of these sleepers who is also glimpsed in movement outside of Fairy, where she accompanies on his aimless hunt the King who stole her from her familiar world.

In her surrender to advent Heurodis is like her husband. Once his wife is abducted by the fairies, Orfeo dons a pilgrim’s cloak but seeks nothing. He wanders the wilds in a bare existence, a barren space of “snewe and frese.” Nothing pleases (“seth he nothing that him liketh”). Whereas Henry David Thoreau famously discovered in the sunbathing of a serpent the appearance of “thing-power,” the invitation that the world’s materiality offers to “be surprised by what we see” (Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter 5), Orfeo discerns only “wilde wormes,” unsatisfying roots to eat, and “berien but gode lite” (“berries of little worth”). No vibrant materiality here. Yet through the music of his harp he allies himself with “weder … clere and bright,” with a forest yearning for resonance, with birds and wild beasts hungry for “gle” and “melody.” The ecological conjunction that he creates through his harp seems to call forth the King of Fairy, who wanders the woods with his retinue on a chase in which no animal is pursued. Orfeo, ten years in the forest and transformed now into an arboreal semblance (“He is y-clongen also a tre!” exclaim his subjects upon his return), has given himself over to adventure: a coming or avenir that like the Fairy King’s hunt moves without aim. Adventure is surrender to an overlap of worlds, an embrace of an intermedial cosmos larger than the confines of a single subjectivity.

Orfeo speaks for the first time since his exile began when he beholds the falcons that the fairies bear. These effulgent birds remind him of his abandoned life (“Ich was y-won such werk to se!”). Once he conjoins Otherworld and relinquished court he finds his opening. Adventure is an act of worldly intersection, like the arrival of an incubus at a conventual cell: you cannot seek it, it’s an object rather than an objective, but you can train yourself to perceive its arrival, to recognize the dangerous invitation to the sublunary that adventure offers, an allure that warps the orbit of ordinary life. Orfeo follows the fairy retinue into a rock and across the flattest of plains. He rescues Heurodis with his music. The Fairy King fears the two are ill-matched, but offers no impediment to their return: no fateful injunction not to look back as they depart the Fairy realm, only an unexpected benediction: “Of hir ichil thatow be blithe,” I hope that you are happy with her. Orfeo is.

The Breton lay abandons the grim ethos of the classical myth from which it arises: no fading of Eurydice at the threshold of the underworld, no dismembering of her grieving husband by crazed bacchants. While speculative realism seems to prefer the gloomy and the somber for its image store (heavy metal, H. P. Lovecraft, dark ecologies), the Breton lays tend to conclude with the equivalent of sunshine and rainbows, suggesting a happier but no less serious register at which objectal relations might be explored. Nor do I wish to turn Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History or the Breton lay Sir Orfeo into allegories or romans à clef for the working of object oriented ontology. While it is true that there is an uncanny intersection between Graham Harman’s work on vicarious causation and Geoffrey’s originary myth of Merlin, you won’t find the latter briskly expostulating “five kinds of objects … and five different types of relation” (201). Geoffrey’s sublunary is too chaotic to be organized into a metaphysics, no matter how fascinated he is by causation and allure. He did not compose in 1136 an uncanny prophecy of the advent of flat ontologies in 2011. Art is tangled, sprawling and untidy compared to philosophy’s crisp distinctions. Having explored what is enabled by the conjunction of Geoffrey’s “between the moon and the earth” and Harman’s “autistic moonbeam entering the window of an asylum,” I would now like to ask what is eclipsed when that moon moves into such momentary terrestrial congruence.

Erratic angels like the incubus-demon, the Fairy King and Merlin are the vicars or intermediaries who make possible the world’s vibrancy by enabling contact and relation. They allow the emergence of transformative textualities, even while they themselves are left behind at that luminous advent. These messengers can be dangerous. In the Breton lay Sir Gowther, the same incubus who engenders Merlin impregnates another woman with a son who will become a rapist, a murderer, and his family’s undoing. Sir Orfeo oscillates between a vibrant materialism and a dark vitalism, replete with the messy, melancholic, admixed and unbeautiful stuff of the world that is as just as much an ethical ecology. Such a textual expanse is also an artistic thought experiment conducted through the objects of the everyday world, rendered marvelous through the excitation of objectal and material potency — but it is an experiment in which not every participant is allowed a full story. As the Fairy King, the incubus-demon, the nun, and Merlin learn, a mediator’s love is necessary to make the machinery (ingenuity, contrivances, art) of the text spring into action — and a mediator’s love is unrequited. Though these figures open new worlds for and bestow unexpected futures to others within their texts, their shared fate is silent abandonment. Speculative awareness comes through the labor of those reduced to mere go-betweens, those who move from one place to another in order to change both. These mediators are literally sublunary angels, messengers who in their erratic flights refuse reduction into narrative or philosophical order. Perpetually conveyed, traveling without necessary destination, these disordered angels remind us that a retreat into tidy heaven leaves too many abandoned on the rubbish heaps of the earth.

Speculative realism requires speculative narrative, along with its troubled and troublesome angels. We need to examine the world as it is, in its catastrophic givenness, but also to consider as well how it might be, not just in the past or in the future but in the now: a place where the inhuman has agency, narrative, the power to withdraw, but also to caress, to create sublunary realms that with or without our consent touch us, take us out of our asylums or cells, create strange new beings of futurity, menace, and promise who will vanish into our stories, our futures that are ever arriving — futures that are narratives of the air and the lofty moon, but unfold just as easily in an asylum, a convent, or “in at a rock.”

Notes:

# Sir Orfeo (full e-text): http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams/orfeo.htm

# Arthurian Passages from the Monmouth text: http://www.lib.rochester.edu/Camelot/geofhkb.htm

#Graham Harman ‘On Vicarious Causation’:   http://www.lib.rochester.edu/Camelot/geofhkb.htm

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen is Associate Professor of English and Human Sciences at George Washington University. The essay is part of the talk he delivered in the series Speculative Medievalisms II: A Laboratory Atelier recently held at The City University of New York.