Nothing But Flowers: On Chaucer's 'Former Age'

by KARL STEEL

Over the past week, I've been working on a piece on Chaucer's "The Former Age" (Middle English; translation), primitivism, and pigs. I need 5000 words by July 20th for an anthology on Chaucer and animals.'But wait!' some of you will say a few months from now, 'Didn't you already do that in your book?'

Well, yes. Sort of. But this is my chance to do it right. To slow it down. To spread it out.

Most of 'The Former Age' comes from somewhere else; not this line though:

They [the people of that age] eten mast hawes & swych pownage

"But wait!" you say, because you're kind of a pedant: "aren't references to vegetarian nut-eaters, like, everywhere in the classical and medieval tradition of the Golden Age?" You start to quote Petrarch at me, and, being a pedant myself, I cut you off: "...and Ovid; and Cicero; and Jean de Meun; and Chaucer himself. I get it. The question isn't the nuts. The question's how we get from Chaucer's own translation of Consolation II.v, "they were wont lyghtly to slaken hir hungir at even [at evening: this is from Nicholas Trevet's commentary] with accornes of ookes," to "the people of the Former Age ate like pigs."'

And now you're silent, not because I silenced you, but because I'm sick of this conceit.

My key point: for Christians, pigs are only for eating. To say that the people of this age eat in the woods like pigs is to say they "eete nat half ynough" (don't eat half enough), like any number of distressed knights (Orfeo, Partenopeu, etc.) who go about on hands and knees grobbing for what they can; it is also to say that they are like beasts, and especially like the beasts meant only for our eating. We're a long way from praising these people for their asceticism, and we're a lot closer to pity or contempt (h/t Andy Galloway for this reference).

And see elsewhere in Chaucer, where Griselda's water-drinking (CT IV.215), a topos of medieval primitivism, opens her to Walter's exploitation; and the poor widow of the Nun's Priest's Tale, whose ascetic diet (VII 2836-46) incites our (clerical) admiration even as it leaves her lodged in nature, nearly voiceless and animalized (VII 4570-80).

In February, I asked my undergrads whether the people of The Former Age really had no wealth for conquerors, whether we should believe that "tyraunts [would not] putte hem gladly nat in pres / No wildnesse ne no busshes for to winne"?

The students got it right away. The people had no gold, no wealth, no cities, no linen, no delicacies; but, one said, they had their bodies. And for some tyrants, that's enough.

So: for now, I plan to go at this via four lines:

1. other 14th-century English works where humans who refuse to eat pigs get treated like pigs. By this I mean stories like this one (lines 361-96) or this one (lines 487-530), where the child Jesus turns transforms a bunch of Jewish children (in the latter version, hiding in an oven!) into pigs;
2. the manuscript context. 'The Former Age' survives in two manuscripts, one of which also includes Lydgate's "Churl and the Bird" and The Debate of the Horse, Goose, and Sheep: what are the animal networks of this manuscript as a whole?;
3. the exploitation and animalization of the people of the Golden Age, especially in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. I'm inspired by Isidore of Seville's Etymologies XIV.vi.8, on the Fortunate Isles, mistaken for Paradise by the pagans. Isidore seems to mean the Canary Islands ("situated in the Ocean, against the left side of Mauretania," trans. from here), which were exploited in earnest, as I understand it, beginning in the early fourteenth century. Did Christian Europe's characterization of the Guanches have anything to do with the Golden Age tradition? How were these encounters received in England? Or perhaps by Chaucer, during his Iberian travels?;
4. and finally, perhaps most ambitiously, the encounter of Alexander and Dindimus, King of the Brahmans, (see also: here and many, many other places), the Middle Age's most well-known vegetarian, paradisical people, whom Alexander repeatedly calls beasts. He says to the Gymnosophists that if everyone were equal, then we would be like animals; see also lines 858 and 892, and 904. Basically: the Brahmans have abandoned their responsibility to the human, and this pisses Alexander off. I intend to argue that the poetic gaze of 'The Former Age' looks on these people like Alexander looking on the Brahmans, that this gaze has stumbled into another, less anthropocentric way of being in and with the world, and that it doesn't quite know what to do with it.

My work on animals has largely, deliberately avoided discourses of the animalization and colonialism. Here I think of Cary Wolfe's "so long as it is institutionally taken for granted that it all right to systematically exploit and kill nonhuman animals simply because of their species, then the humanist discourse of species will always be available for use by some humans against other humans as well" (Animal Rites 8). This essay means to repair that fault by examining a text and a textual tradition that at once participates in discourses of animalization and offers a posthuman critique of animalization's violence.

There's work to be done, and any suggestions will be cheerfully, gratefully received.

(image from Bodley 264, a manuscript containing a French Alexander romance and, beginning at f. 209v, the sole exemplar of the Middle English alliterative Alexander and Dindimus, whose illustrations (209v; 210r; 211r; 212r; 213r; 213v; 214v; 215r; 215v) could use further study, especially in the ecocritical mode as exemplars of "green men" or "wodwose": for more, and for a kind of presiding spirit for this project, see Lorraine K. Stock))

(blog post title from here)

Quote of the Day: Manuel De Landa on the Biogeological

by J J Cohen

From Manuel De Landa's magnificent A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, a narration of the possibilities enabled via organic-mineral alliance:

"In the organic world ... soft tissue (gels and aerosols, muscle and nerve) reigned supreme until 500 million years ago. At that point, some of the conglomerations of fleshy matter-energy that made up life underwent a sudden mineralization, and a new material for constructing living creatures emerged: bone. It is almost as if the mineral world that had served as a substratum for the emergence of biological creatures was reasserting itself, confirming that geology, far from having been left behind at a primitive stage of the earth’s evolution, fully coexisted with the soft, gelatinous newcomers Primitive bone, a stiff, calcified central rod that would later become the vertebral column, made new forms of movement possible among animals, freeing them from many constraints and literally setting them in motion to conquer every available niche in the air, in water, and on land. And yet, while bone allowed the complexification of the animal phylum to which we, as vertebrates, belong, it never forgot its mineral origins: it is the living material that most easily petrifies, that most readily crosses the threshold back into the world of rocks. For that reason, much of the geological record is written with fossil bone. The human endoskeleton was one of the many products of that ancient mineralization. Yet that is not the only geological infiltration that the human species has undergone. About eight thousand years ago, human populations began mineralizing again when they developed an urban exoskeleton: bricks of sundried clay became building materials for their homes, which in turn surrounded and were surrounded by stone monuments and defensive walls. This exoskeleton served a purpose similar to its internal counterpart: to control the movement of human flesh in and out of a town’s walls. The urban exoskeleton also regulated the movement of many other things: luxury objects, news, and food…Thus, the urban infrastructure may be said to perform, for tightly packed populations of humans, the same function of motion control that our bones do in relation to our fleshy parts. And, in both cases, adding minerals to the mix resulted in a fantastic combinatorial explosion.” (24-6)

Future Prehistory

by J J Cohen
Via Long Views:

The Visual Archive at Artificial Owl.

Just the Facts

by J J Cohen

In a post at Cliopatria, Jonathan Jarrett writes about history and facts:

Whether or not we can in fact know it, people in the past did things, and history's business is trying to recover, describe and understand them ... there is an idea of right and wrong in play that is not itself subjective, though its evaluation must be. And we can say things that there is no point denying are factual: Charlemagne was in Rome on Christmas Day 800, there was a Benedictine monastery at Cluny, the Dorset Inuit met Europeans in Greenland, and so on. (OK, the last one might be contested, but it sounds good.)

Much of his post is about the qualifying phrase "though its evaluation must be." Facts are potentially indifferent to human apprehenders; interpretative processes are where right and wrong come into play. The scheme isn't quite as Platonic as it seems, though, with facts lurking like eternal truths while cave-bound interpreters discern them from their shadows. Jarrett allows an inextricability of investigative process and truth determination when he turns to a passage by Carl Becker (1910), about the selection and sorting of data in its relation to knowledge. Jarrett's point is, like Becker's, that facts are not created out ex nihilo, but take determinate form under specific historical conditions that include the interpreter's interests and predilections.

Arguing with such a common sensical position is difficult, because it isn't so easy to see what exactly the alternative might be. That all "facts" are infinitely malleable?

I raise this question because in a frequent misapprehension the philosophy called [social or cultural] constructivism is often taken as "willy-nilly constructivism": full cultural determination with attendant free floating relativity. Constructivism, that is, is taken to argue that facts or reality are wholly discursive and boundlessly flexible rather than historically durable and undeniably material. Judith Butler, for example, never posited that sexual identity has nothing to do with biology, even though she is often criticized as if she had. Although sometimes misconstrued as arguing that we are free to invent and reinvent our bodies without regard to our genetic or cultural inheritance, Butler is a philosopher who leaves little wiggle room for innovation, a philosopher with a strong materialist and deterministic streak.

Reality (such as our bodies) is not infinitely pliable. We can't turn a stone into water because we "socially construct" the lithic as the aqueous. That doesn't mean that stones are so immobile that they will not reveal their fluid tendencies when viewed in a nonhuman historical frame. Over eons tectonic plates travel vast distances and mountains rise; even in short spans volcanoes spurt molten stone. Rock is actually quite a flexible material, but although we can discover some stone that might float like a ship (as Mandeville wrote of pumice), we don't carve ships out of boulders because something in them resists this construction. Another way of putting this: a fact emerges into knowledge only through the alliances it forms with human and nonhuman agents. A diamond becomes a precious gem because its rarity, lucidity, durability have and can sustain strong alliances with certain forces, tools, economic and aesthetic systems, alliances that pumice cannot maintain. An alliance between the shipbuilder and granite will fail because the stone can't support the laborer's marinal desires, but that between the granite and the architect will flourish since the granite will comply with her desire to shape it into a durable and aesthetically pleasing support for kitchen appliances.

The alliances that underlay facts are typically a good deal trickier than what I've so far outlined. Bruno Latour's work, for example, is full of complicated networks posed around tough questions about how facts come to be and might under certain pressures change. How does a scientist know, for example, that he has created a vacuum in a jar, given that a vacuum is invisible? How do you convince others of your discovery, and under what conditions will your experiment become commonly accepted knowledge? It's not that the vacuum is socially constructed: it exists or it doesn't. But what the vacuum means and how that meaning changes, what processes lay behind its discovery and its determination as fact, what networks of human and non-human alliances are required to give the fact force, and how its existence enters or makes reality: this is what the discipline called science studies is all about.

In The Social Construction of What?, Ian Hacking examines the "construction" of dolomite, a rock that has consistently challenged those who seek to map its origin -- possibly because nano-bacteria (organisms so small they cannot be observed, and therefore may or may not exist) are behind its formation. After Hacking details dolomite's scientific history, he states "we see in plain scientific work, such as the study of dolomite, a happy mix of both induction and analogy ... and conjecture and refutation" (201). Through this long process errors accumulate and are shed (i.e., its supposed calcium is revealed to be magnesium; the fact that dolomite ceased to be created as the primal earth aged gives way to the fact that dolomite is coming into being even now, but only in places hostile to earth's contemporary life); certain data cling and are retained; but an aura of uncertainty consistently surrounds what should be as solid as any stone.

Because "questions of method arise in context" (198), what best serves this stone is, according to Hacking, "ecumenical descriptive epistemology with hardly any normative implications" (199), a multiple-perspective and nonrigid approach that traces the alliances and networks that enable facts to emerge and to endure. This process-oriented perspective stresses:

1. the contingency of knowledge (we know dolomite in part because we have asked very particular questions of it, mainly centered upon its petrochemical uses; had we asked different initial questions about its nature, we'd think of the rock rather differently, and might not have wondered -- for example -- if it could be the product of nanobacteria and therefore a key to understanding the origins of all earthly life)
2. the dependence of knowledge upon a sorting into human naming systems that are value-laden (i.e., it matters to us that the rock is a magnesium carbonate rather than a calcium carbonate because we want oil from it; from a strictly geological point of view, though, a sediment is a sediment and there isn't a good reason to separate your limestone from your dolomite)
3. the interrelation of belief with epistemological stability (the history of dolomite has as much to do with giving up on certain myths as it does accruing "stable knowledge"; even now we don't know exactly how the rock came to be, and so "the dolomite problem leaves philosophical questions of stability untouched, precisely because it is still a problem" [206] -- meaning that in the end we can't say whether the science stabilized dolomite, or dolomite lent a certain stability to a science intent on explicating it).

Dolomite, a rock so solid and so durable and so ancient that much of Stonehenge is built of it, is a reality; dolomite is a blunt fact, as hard as reality; but it is also -- when looked at within a wide perspective -- a fact on the move.

The Future of 'The Weight of the Past' / Credo

[illustration: a projector supported by The Flowering of the Middle Ages and The Faerie Queene, a talk supported by more collaborators than any bound volume could contain]
by J J Cohen

First, a tremendous thank you to those who invited and coddled me in NYC (especially Hal Momma, Liza Blake, the Anglo Saxon Studies Colloquium and the NYU English Medieval Forum), and to all who attended my talk, asked me questions that ripped away its foundational assumptions, and otherwise provoked me to rethink everything I thought I knew. Subjective destitution and an existential angst hangover are a small price to pay.

Highlights: a reception before my presentation, so that I could urge attendees that I would sound a lot smarter if they would imbibe a glass or five of wine; an intimate dinner for 22 afterwards, with an excellent food and excellenter company; shenanigans and antics later that evening; hanging out in Brooklyn chez Karl; a good Indian dinner with a taste-free dessert; shenanigans and antics Friday evening at a faux British pub with red telephone booths and an upscale nautical-themed bar serving absinthe-infused "zombie" drinks in ceramic tiki head cups (where we got deep).

So I gave a presentation entitled "The Weight of the Past" at NYU on Thursday.

Of all the pieces for public performance I've composed, "Weight" is my favorite. The talk originated as my Holloway Lecture at McDaniel College, then underwent a series of radical mutations as it was adapted and refined for some other venues. NYU was its final performance: a form of the essay will soon see print, and I observe that unwritten academic rule that thoughts hardened into books don't get oral existence any more. Yet the closing night of "The Weight of the Past" has already proven to be far from its last metamorphosis. To adapt what I was attempting to argue in the presentation itself: as substantial and as fully materialized as the thing might seem, its trajectory has yet to be arrested and "The Weight of the Past" keeps becoming other things. The questions I was asked at NYU were so penetrating that they've challenged me to refine and even reconceptualize some of what I yearn to achieve -- especially as this nexus of obsessions begins to take its form as a future monograph.

This reformulation will be most evident in the closing movement of "Weight." In its current version, the coda arrives just after a conversation I restage with my daughter Katherine, one in which we think about memorializing the dead, especially in museum displays of prehistoric corpses. I posted one version on the blog quite some time ago as Who Mourns for Lindow Man?, then later reflected on the function that these vignettes perform in The Moment of Interpretation and Those Carried in Its Wake -- though spurred by a question by Carolyn Dinshaw, I want to emphasize that these are for me moments of collaboration rendered visible, rather than the use of a story, person, or object to achieve something that does not necessarily require extrinsic participation or agency. So, here is the ending to "The Weight of the Past":

To intertwine meditation upon past and future while retaining some confidence that we are doing justice to history, we must encounter the materiality of the past in a way that grants life to what might otherwise seem inert. We must keep the distant past, the present moment, and the future—near and distant—alive, capable of plenitude, heterogeneity, change. We must never cease to grieve for Lindow Man, no matter who in life he was. We must never think of Stonehenge or of Avebury as anything but a ring of stones that does not cease to dance. We must never forget that the past has a weight, but that weight is seen only in the past’s movement, in its desire ever to remain alive.

And here is the provisional credo (or the credo of provisionality) that starts to move beyond such termination.

Many things about the closing paragraph do not ring true to what I had hoped to achieve in the piece: its hortative mode, its ethical high-handedness, its injunction to mourning, its funereal finality.* I realize now that what I have been attempting in "The Weight of the Past" project is not an ethics but an ethos: instead of an ethics of compulsion to remembrance, an ethos built upon the practice of wonder. I am attempting an explicitly collaborative praxis -- and by "collaborative" I actually mean "inhumanly collaborative": I'm as interested in alliances with rocks, texts, forces of nature, and corpses as I am with the living and the dead. The project offers, I hope, an invitation to coinhabit a world made strange.

I don't think I can say it better than that right now.

*Questions from Karl Steel, Glenn Burger, Carolyn Dinshaw, and many, many others made me realize these facts so essential and so close to me that I could not discern them well.

Stonehenge. Also, Woodhenge.

Went to see archeologist Mike Parker Pearson speak last night at the National Geographic headquarters here in DC. Pearson supervised one of the two digs that took place at the site last summer (Geoff Wainwright directed the other).

To an auditorium filled with about two hundred people he delivered news from the field, stressing how archeologists now see Stonehenge as one among many interconnected sites along the River Avon. Pearson argues that Stonehenge must analyzed as a counterpart to Woodhenge. The perdurable stone was a place for the dead (so far sixty cremation interments have been discovered there, mainly in or near the Aubrey holes that used to house megaliths), and the rot-prone but enormous tree-derived structure was a place for the living. He showed us slides of what remains of the plaster floors of wattle and daub houses from the period. The hearth often endures as a kind of ghost image. In one dig an imprint left by two knees is discernible just in front of where the fire would have been, an impression left by years of careful tending.

Pearson stressed the importance of discovering antlers fashioned into the digging tools that were used to transform the earth. When these remnants survive, they enable fairly precise carbon dating of the structures nearby. He also emphasized the tediousness of using stone tools to dress the megaliths, and the price paid in the body by those who employed them (osteoarthritis especially). In an aside, he also mentioned that a ribbon-like band of rock unearthed near Stonehenge naturally points towards the winter solstice (the ribbon effect the product of glacial runoff). He ventured that this stone band may have rendered the place sacred, triggering Stonehenge's solar alignment (an alignment unique among henge monuments).

I left the auditorium full of admiration that human lives could be imagined from such scanty leavings. My son Alex came with me, and was even ready to ask a question (though they never got to him). He fills me with wonder as well: that someone at age eleven can sit through an archeology lecture on a day that also included homework, Hebrew school and piano practice ... and love it.

Medieval Inhuman Art: Geoffrey of Monmouth and Marie de France

[illustration: the subterranean dragons of history erupt into art, Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain: Lambeth Palace Lib. MS 5 f. 43v]

by J J Cohen

Below you will find the third section of my draft for an essay on "Inhuman Art," a recent obsession of mine. Part one of the essay is here; part two here; a description of the book in which it will appear here. I've realized, in fact, that I have much of my fourth monograph sketched out, its working title something like Art from a Stone: Dreaming the Medieval Prehistoric.

---------------------
Aninormality is an inhuman beauty both superfluous and intimate to that which holds and is held by it, confounding distinctions between self and other, object and milieu. This ecstatic disruption of boundary and its intermixing of what might otherwise seem discrete occurs through the opening up of sublime new worlds -- or, to foreground the activity that inheres in aninormality, broaches a possibly infinite series of worldings. Roger Caillois found such enfolded eruptions within animals and stones. Medieval art, however, is also filled with aninormality’s aesthetic dispossessions and interpenetrations.

Take, for example, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, a Latin text widely known not for its artistry, but for its contributions to history: the establishing of a new historiographical tradition, the promulgation of a potent origin myth for Britain, the bestowal to the future of Arthur and his court. Likely composed to boost Welsh ethnic pride, this rhetorically unadorned twelfth-century work could not be more time-bound. Its vision of ancient Britain is an antidote to English triumphalism, to the dominating version of the past of the island, a history previously told in England only from an Anglocentric point of view. The History of the Kings of Britain was an instant success from the moment of its first appearance (c. 1136), likely because it offered a radically reconfigured insular past in which the Welsh and Bretons played a heroic role. By offering a counter-narrative to Bede, whose Ecclesiastical History was seen in the twelfth century as the truth of early English history, Geoffrey’s History offered the possibility of a present that did not have to culminate in lasting English glory, a present in which room existed for the Norman transformation of the country into the appendage of a transmarinal empire. The popularity of Geoffrey’s text can be ascribed to the cultural needs it satisfied: Welsh and Breton patriotism, the Norman desire for a present in which their presence was something more than a baffling interruption of the island’s English destiny, a more pluralistic vision of the British archipelago.

Yet if the text were so wholly of its moment, we should expect the enthusiasm elicited at its appearance to dissipate as the exigencies it arose to address were mitigated by its success. The History of the Kings of Britain should have followed the arc of all propaganda, from spectacular ascent to rapid decline in the wake of the cultural changes it embodied and brought about, to lingering existence at some margin where it could be acknowledged the somewhat embarrassing remnant of a transcended past. Ardor for the text, however, only burgeoned over time. Copies and versions proliferated. Translations from its international Latin into the indigenous tongues of French, English, and Welsh appeared quickly. From historiography its narratives migrated into chronicle, lyric, romance, lais. Each transformation was an amplification: as the poet Wace, for example, translated Geoffrey’s unadorned Latin prose into rhymed French verse (c.1155), he added details like Arthur’s creation of a Round Table. Through his publication of the History Geoffrey created what might be called a consensual world, a time-place that may never have existed, that comes into being and is sustained only through the texts by which writers populate its envisioned landscapes, but a world which nonetheless functions as if real, inviting other authors and scholars and fans to contribute their fictions masquerading as histories, their new characters, their enlargements of the consensual world’s inherent possibility. Without Geoffrey of Monmouth, the Arthurian realm would not have come into being. Stories of the Grail, Lancelot, Morgan le Fay, the Lady of the Lake, and the Green Knight are simply the additions of later writer-fans to a universe of which the loose parameters and initial content Geoffrey of Monmouth was the primary engineer. This expansive worlding of Geoffrey’s rather sparse textual realm originates at least in part from the powerful moments he placed in his narrative when art (which we could gloss as what Caillois called an innate or objective lyricism) propels the text outside of history.

Lists of kings with regnal spans, bare accomplishments, and progeny structure long expanses of Geoffrey’s narrative, a chronicling that tends towards the laconic. The dullness of his lists of data give the History of the Kings of Britain the heft of an artifact, the substantiality of something real. Thus the brief but exciting story of a sodomite king devoured in the wilds by “ravening wolves” is tempered by the dry facticity of his son’s data-heavy vita:

After the death of Mempricius, his son Ebraucus, who was very tall and a man of remarkable strength, took over the government of Britain and held it for thirty-nine years. He was the first after Brutus to sail a fleet to the shores of Gaul. He made war upon the provinces of the Gauls, slaughtering their menfolk and sacking their cities. By the time he came back victorious he was enriched with a vast booty of gold and silver. At a later date he founded a city on the farther side of the Humber, which city he called Kaerebrauc after himself, that is to say the City of Ebraucus.
At that time King David was reigning in Judea and Silvius Latinus was king in Italy. In Israel, Gad, Nathan and Asaph were the prophets.

Ebraucus also founded the city of Alclud over in Albany; and the castle of Mount Agned …

What is more, by the twenty wives which he had, he was the father of twenty sons and of thirty daughters. For forty years he ruled over the kingdom of Britain with great firmness. The names of his sons were as follows: Brutus Greenshield, Margodud, Sisillius, Regin, Morvid, Bladud, Lagon, Bodloan, Kincar, Spaden, Gaul, Dardan, Eldad, Ivor, Cangu, Hector … (78-79)

Twenty sons are listed in total, and, having finished this catalog, Geoffrey goes on to name the thirty daughters, a weighty piling up of information that imbues this catalog of British, Roman, Greek, and invented appellations the verity of an archive. This truth effect is enhanced through reference to events happening simultaneously in Israel and Rome, giving an invented past the authority that derives from unfolding alongside biblical and classical history. Invoking Brutus, the founding father of Britain in Geoffrey’s History, builds Ebraucus’s majesty and buttresses Brutus’s own tenuous reality through self-referentiality.

The inventory of countries conquered, cities founded, and children fathered does its work, answering the preceding account of a king turned too much inward. The sodomitical copulations of Mempricius, Ebraucus’s father, express sexually his unwillingness to think about the life of his country beyond the termination of his reign (“he did away with any who he feared might succeed him in the kingship … he deserted his own wife”), of his inability to rouse himself from self-enclosure in Britain and to expand his domain into an empire. His lupine ingestion within a valley where he wanders alone and abandoned is a rebuke to the tyranny through which he has built paninsular dominion. His son’s regnum offers a complete contrast: a king whose vigorous imperialism is paralleled in his exuberant heterosexuality, whose ardor for founding cities and building castles finds biological expression in his fecundity in producing heirs. Geoffrey’s rhetorical prowess is evident in how he structures the opposition between the two monarchs. His tale of father and son allows him to buttress quietly a kind of empire-loving kingship never practiced by the Britons of whom he writes, but beloved by the Normans who had annexed England to holdings that stretched to Sicily and the Levant. Geoffrey’s History, in other words, advances a useful argument about contemporary kingship and thereby makes itself cultural necessary.

Because it is structured through such cleverly contrived historicality, the History of the Kings of Britain remains largely an unadorned chronicle, its art more evident in its deep structure than in anything that effloresces from the work itself. Yet the narrative is interrupted by moments of unexpected and superfluous beauty, smaller stories that derail the progress of the larger plot with their vividness and, at times, poignancy. Such aesthetically charged eruptions can saturate this otherwise arid text with moments of profound emotional enlargement. Think, for example, of Princess Ignoge, Greek captive on a Trojan ship, forced to marry the warrior who has ruthlessly defeated her father. In this moment when the forward movement of the History eddies backwards, in this interlude when “history itself is forgotten,” we watch with Ignoge as she stares fixedly across a widening sea towards her receding homeland. We behold with her eyes everything she knows dwindling to its vanishing point, lost as an ocean she never desired to sail propels her towards a future she cannot know. We understand why “as long as the shore lay there before her eyes, she would not turn her gaze” [Nec oculos a littore auertit dum littora oculis patuerunt, a nicely balanced bit of Latin lyricism, 8]. We comprehend why she weeps. If we are responsive to this uncharacteristically poignant effusion ebbing through the sangfroid of the text, her tears become ours as well. Geoffrey can give her weeping no answer, no conclusion: enervated by sadness, Ignoge falls asleep in her new husband’s arms.

The vessel speeds onward regardless (“Meanwhile the Trojans sailed on for two days and one night …”), British history speeds onward regardless (“Then they touched land at a certain island called Leogatia …”), but Ignoge’s stubborn gaze upon shores from which she never wished departure stays with us. By leading our eyes back towards what has been left behind, the vision keeps returning us to stories without conclusion: the narratives of those forced onto this vehicle of relentless forward motion, this ship of history on which some unwilling passengers find no waking solace. We last behold Ignoge when, “worn out with crying,” she falls into forgetful slumber. Her story literally ends with that sleep, ends with a hero’s embrace, but emotionally such closure is denied. How can we not wonder about the life towards which she is relentlessly conveyed, how can we not wonder about her future?

Other than to acknowledge that she bears Brutus three sons, Geoffrey is silent. By refusing to provide the narrative space opened by her longing with a conclusion or resolution, Geoffrey keeps Ignoge alive forever in alluring despair, like the heroine of an opera whose voice reverberates long after she has departed the stage. Meditating upon such performers, especially in operas that feature the spectacular demise of female protagonists, Carolyn Abbate writes of the “unconquerable” voice of the women seemingly silenced by opera’s murderous narratives, arguing that “this undefeated voice speaks across the crushing plot.” Abbate observes that such a woman can be “undone by plot,” yet remain “triumphant in voice.” Geoffrey of Monmouth goes farther, demonstrating how a woman can be undone by plot yet triumphant in art – traumatic art, in which grief and death are nearer to hand than survival and life. Yet Ignoge’s tears are an art of endurance that lacks neither beauty nor ethical complexity. Once voiced, her despair and her desires form a circuit of identification between reader and text-event (which is also a temporal circuit between past-as-text and the reading, imagining present) that brings the History out of history and into a new realm, a new world – and this worlding is art. This moment of art, moreover, is wholly in excess of any historical demands placed upon the text, wholly in excess of cultural needs. In its lyricism, its superfluity, its captivating aninormality, its liquid love of oceans and weeping and movement and dreams over the stability of fatherlands and promised destinations, this little work of art within the text opens a space within that narrative, one difficult to close or to forget.

The eruption of art that occurs in the Ignoge episode involves an efflorescence of emotive beauty. An aesthetically moving moment caused by unanticipated estrangement from the dominant narrative of the story, Ignoge’s vision transforms her ardor for a lost home into something that seems striking, new, capable of lifting us out of our solitary orbit (which so far has been tracing great men and their celebrated deeds) to encounter a more capacious world. This ecstatic effect depends upon Ignoge’s human, all too human longing. Yet Geoffrey is also capable of mixing the human and the inhuman in order to produce strange new kinds of art. His book is interrupted at times with moments of lyrical mystery, sometimes through effusion of what is his text’s most sublime substance, blood. Take, for example, the pluvial gore that drenches the island during the rule of the obscure king Rivallo, a soaking in crimson both awesome and gruesome to visualize: “In his time it rained blood for three days and men died from the flies which swarmed” (87). By saturating the landscape with an element alien to it [pluuia sanguinea], this vivid reddening of the island estranges place from world: a medieval version of Christo’s “Pont Neuf Wrapped” or “Surrounded Islands” hitched to a kind of charnel house art in which even death becomes an aesthetic element. The text offers a narrative precursor to T. Coraghessan Boyle’s story “Bloodfall,” in which a similar hematic rain transfigures the world into something violent, rotting, and weirdly beautiful.

A rather similar moment involving blood occurs later in the text, when the History takes a swerve into what seems like a new generic register (though just as likely this swerve is actually the invention of a new genre, romance). On the run from his Saxon enemies, the traitorous British king Vortigern is frantically attempting to bring stability back to an island he once dominated. With the lines Uocatis denique magis suis (“in the end Vortigern summoned his magicians”) the tone of the narrative is transformed: previously Geoffrey’s History has been largely empty of enchantment, its wonder confined mainly to the natural or the naturally inexplicable, such as the sudden rain of blood. Enter the magicians. These magi – the first in the text, and the first therefore in Arthurian myth -- are charged by Vortigern with imagining a way to bring durability to a fugitive life. The magicians declare that such permanence can be found only in the creation of a work of architecture, “an immensely strong tower” (166). When a suitable site is chosen at Mount Erith, however, whatever stones the masons erect one day is swallowed back into the earth the next. The magicians declare that to lay secure foundations, the mortar must be sprinkled with the blood of “a lad without a father” [iuuenem sine patre] – with blood, that is, that carries none of the kind of history that Geoffrey’s own text embodies, obsessed as it is with fathers, sons, and persistence through generations.

Such an escape from history – or at least from story -- is impossible: the lad without a father, a surly and precocious boy named Merlin, is the progeny of a nun and an incubus. In the form of a very handsome youth [in specie pulcerrimi iuuenis], the demon made frequent, secret love with the nun in her chamber’s solitude. Eventually she bore his child. Ancient books verify, according to an authority summoned by Vortigern, that incubos demones exist between moon and earth [inter lunam et terram, 72]. Possessed of a pedigree that ties them to the fallen angels of the Bible, incubi were in the Middle Ages monsters who incarnated the very spirit of Geoffrey’s own History – that is, they incarnated a kind of counter-history, stories at war with dominating traditions and mundane realities. Enter the magicians: What Vortigern’s magi have unwittingly demanded is the coming into the narrative of a living embodiment of the shattered border between the quotidian (the ordinary world where people remain in the times and places history allots to them) and the extraordinary (the space of possibility where a cloistered nun can find love in the embrace of a mysterious, handsome knight). These magicians transport the History of the Kings of Britain into a new realm, where the rules that have so far structured its narrative unfolding are suspended, remade anew.

Merlin, the boy in whose body the blood of a different kind of story pulses, has his own ideas of how Vortigern can construct an enduring structure. Merlin declares that the only true method to create a durable architecture is not to commit more violence in the present, but to acknowledge the unstable history that underdwells that artwork’s coming into being. Merlin insists that Vortigern’s tower topples at each foundation because he is constructing its base upon ground inhabited by unsettled history. Beneath Mount Erith, within an underground pool, inside two hollow rocks [duos concauos lapides] at the bottom of that water, twin dragons slumber [duos dracones dormientes, 73]. These are dragons of history: the white monster embodies the marauding Saxons, while in the red’s pugnacious body resides the story of the Welsh. Once this buried past is spoken and moved beyond (after the boy’s revelation, the dragons are dismissed from their subterranean enmity), Merlin is freed from the compulsion to yield his blood … and can endure in the story to erect on Salisbury plain the vast architecture of Stonehenge, rocks that when drenched with water heal bodily ailments. Vortigern, meanwhile, is eventually burnt to ash within his tower, his incineration a reminder of the oblivion that comes to those who reside only in history.

Stonehenge becomes Geoffrey’s shorthand for art itself, a lithic yet living structure that conjoins distant pasts (the stones journey from Africa to Ireland to Britain, and conjoin the stories of their primal architects, the giants, with those of humans) and unexpected futures (transported to Salisbury through Merlin’s engineering feats, Stonehenge stands for the futurity bestowed upon the House of Constantine, for not only will it last eternally as a memorial to the kings Aurelius Ambrosius and Uther Pendragon, the only great ruler from this family not interred there will be Arthur, whose absence body allows the possibility of a return to come). Merlin through this calculus becomes not so much an engineer as an author, an artist: his magical power is not the wizardry of spells, but the ability to add to that which would otherwise be merely functional or historical a beauty that enlarges the world into which it arrives, that ensures the structure it inhabits and worlds will nurture its own mobility, that guarantees the artwork will endure. Thus the Vortigern’s Tower episode concludes with some words about Merlin’s transformation from bastard child to uncanny spirit of creativity and estrangement:

[Vortigern] was more astounded [ammirabatur, “possessed by wonder”] by Merlin than he had ever been by anything. All those present were equally amazed [ammirabantur] by his knowledge, and they realized that there was something supernatural about him [existimantes numen esse in illo]. (169, 73)

Like a medieval Caillois, Merlin is expert in the writing of stones, in lapidary art – even when the stone in which this art has been enclosed has been sunken in a pool and placed within a mountain. By discerning the colored dragons within the stones’ heart, or the healing powers within Stonehenge – by discerning the inherent surplus in something as seemingly cold and inert as buried rocks and ancient monoliths – Merlin speaks the inhuman, self-dispossessing, and unhistorical truth of art.

Geoffrey of Monmouth was far from the only medieval artist to discover at the boundary between body and world, history and ecstasy the lyrical yet confounding power of inhuman art. Marie de France, a contributor to the consensual world put in place by Geoffrey, structured many of her lais are around an aesthetic object so dense in its significations that it cannot be reduced to a single meaning: the talkative, bisexual hind and the ship of dreams in Guigemar; the woven cloth that materializes a sexuality in La Cordre; the clothing that maintains and yet confuses the corporal line between human and wolf in Bisclavret. Guigemar, for example, is a knight so self-enclosed that he knows love only of solitary pleasures. While hunting he encounters a deer with antlers, a bisexual or hermaphroditic creature that also possesses human speech. His arrow rebounds from this living artwork of an animal, wounding his thigh and hurling him into erotic possibility. Guigemar’s world, like his body, has been penetrated, and will henceforth never be so circumscribed. He boards a boat that awaits him in the harbor, a ship that may be made of dreams, or it may be the bark of Solomon which worthy knights board to seek the Holy Grail, or may be a metaphor for all the beauty of poetry. The ship conveys him to a distant land, where his ardor for an imprisoned lady allows her access to a more capacious worldview. Notably, she is not allowed to sail across the sea and find him until she makes the choice to propel herself out of a familiar story in which she plays the affection-starved young wife to a dry old man. Once she makes that choice, she finds the door to the tower in which she has been enclosed has always been unlocked, and that the Ship of Poetry awaits at the harbor. Could lyricism take a less human, more beautiful form than that vessel gliding across the world’s seas, enlarging the world with every wave its prow traverses?

In closing I offer a scene that, like Rivallo and the pluvial gore, opens another world through blood; a scene enclosed, like Geoffrey’s sleeping dragons, in stone. The unnamed heroine of Yonec has been imprisoned in a tower by her jealous and elderly husband. She wastes away, losing her beauty, until one day, she wishes that the alternate worlds of which she has apparently been reading might be true, that ladies might discover lovers “so handsome, courtly, brave and valiant / that they could not be blamed, / and no one else would see them” (98-100). She wishes, in other words, that she might be like Merlin’s mother, enjoying in secret the embraces denied to her in the small space into which she has been confined. Upon its utterance her wish takes fleshly form: a hawk flies to the ledge of the tower and enters the room as “a handsome and noble knight” (115) – a man who has loved her from afar for many years, but needed her to articulate her desire for a world configured otherwise before he could fly to her chamber. Not an incubus exactly, but acting very much like one, this fantasy knight eventually impregnates the lady with a son. Her wicked husband discovers the truth of his wife’s enjoyment, and sets sharp spikes along the window ledge. When the hawk-knight attempts to enter, he is torn apart, and stains the bedclothes with his blood (316).

When her dying lover returns to his distant land, the lady decides upon an extraordinary course of action: she leaps from her window, leaps into activity and out of her prison of self-possession. She follows a glimmering trail of blood straight into a hillside, where after a subterranean journey an Other World opens in splendor: “There was no house, no hall or tower, / that didn’t seem of silver” (362-3). She enters a series of chambers, each with a slumbering knight she does not recognize: other lovers for other dream-filled ladies. On the third bed in the third room she discovers her dying knight, who speaks to her of a beautiful future yet to come. The story ends exactly where we expect: with the son taking vengeance against his wicked stepfather, the lady dying in a mixture of bliss and grief at the grave of her true love, tidy closure for this intricate little work of art. Yet to return to the lai’s middle space, to its underground chamber that in no way seems beneath the earth: here we glimpse the entrance to another world where sleeping knights without names, without narrated stories, await the cloistered dreamers who will dare to envision their own rescue from the stories that imprison them. This Other World, sealed beneath a hill but reached easily after a frightening leap of faith, through an encounter with one’s own potential obliteration, this Other World offers the possibility of infinite worlds, of spaces so strange within this earth that human imagination alone fails to capture all their potential for disrupting the seeming solidity of the ordinary worlds we inhabit.

Inhuman art: not in the culmination of the story of Yonec, which is an all too human tale of revenge, but in its dream of a hollow space within the hill, where possibilities are multiplied, where the world as we know it expands exponentially and induces the ecstasy, the vertigo, of ceasing to know one’s place.

Messages to an Uncertain Future

by J J Cohen

Here at ITM I once described Stonehenge as, among other things, a letter composed for an unknown receiver, a message in stone for an uncertain future.

For quite some time I have been preoccupied with the question of how the distant past might communicate with an alien future -- not just with how the temporary becomes permanent, not just with how the ephemeral might be memorialized, but with the possibility that graver and more lasting messages might be sent beyond the horizon of merely human time spans.

In part I have been inspired by the vanishing of prehistoric and medieval cultures, in part by contemporary events. Today I'd like to share with you a short riff on letters to the distant future that I composed for an essay forthcoming in a collection called Posthistoricism. I welcome your thoughts on the piece.

LETTERS TO THE FUTURE
Can the past speak in a voice of its own? Can meaning travel across a millennium, an epoch, or must meaning always be bestowed by an interpreter? According to linguists, a language becomes “unintelligible to the descendants of the speakers after the passage of between 500 and 1000 years.” Suppose you know that you inhabit a present that will someday, inevitably, become someone else’s distant past. How do you communicate with a future to which you will have become remote history?

This problem of communication received intriguing consideration when the Department of Energy proposed storing radioactive material inside Nevada’s Yucca Mountain in 2002. Because this waste will remain lethal for at least ten thousand years, the Environmental Protection Agency enjoined the construction of a warning sign that can remain efficacious across a ten-millennium span. What admonition can survive the likely vanishing of the United States, of English, of everything we who inter such waste now know? The University of Nevada sponsored an exhibit entitled “Universal Warning Sign: Yucca Mountain” in which artists created installations that might offer enduring, transparent commands to avoid the contaminated site. The winning entry proposed seeding the desert with genetically engineered cacti, altered to become cobalt-blue, transforming the desert into an unnatural wasteland, a swathe of sky on earth. Yet this solution could as easily prove an attractant to the area as a bar to entry. The same problem was considered at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, New Mexico. Since 1999 the Department of Energy has stored the lethal detritus of nuclear weapons manufacture at this facility. Its vast subterranean chambers are expected to be filled by 2030, at which time the complex will be permanently sealed. Architectural theorist Michael Brill

led one of two teams of linguists, artists, engineers, archaeologists, and other experts, who were charged by Sandia National Laboratories to design a method of keeping future Indiana Joneses out of this real temple of doom. “Passive Institutional Controls,” meaning monuments impervious to harsh climate and sandblasting winds are mandated, because even the federal government has to acknowledge it might not be around in a few hundred years, never mind millennia hence.

The team’s first, practical thought was to allow the materials to lie exposed, creating in the desert an ocean of corpses, an instantly readable sign that no one should draw near. They then moved on to reflect upon the possibility of transhistorical, transcultural forms that announce Danger, such as fifty-foot high concrete whorls laden with spikes (dubbed “Landscape of Thorns”) or hulking black cubes arranged to provide neither shelter nor aesthetic appeal (“Forbidding Blocks”), jagged and irregular megaliths that pierce the desert at disconcerting angles (“Spike Field”). Inspired in part by the panel’s study of architectures like Stonehenge, the pyramids of Egypt, and the Great Wall of China, these menacing works of art would dominate the landscape, a speech act wrought in stone. They would be supplemented by admonitory texts composed in all known languages, with room to carve more deterrents as new tongues arise. Cheaper, less philosophical and far-looking solutions were eventually adopted, however: monoliths with pictograms. Even these will not be put into place for another eight decades, when the radioactive cache is abandoned, a lethal message to a future that may not comprehend the lasting power of its contents.

Though the necessity of disposing of nuclear toxins is new, the desire to send messages across inhuman spans of time seems an enduring human obsession. Whatever groups instigated the construction of vast, perdurable architectures like Avebury knew that they could not possibly live to see their project to completion. To erect a structure as massive as Stonehenge, lofty stones rising upon massively reconfigured earth, is to face mortality. Such an architecture cannot be initiated unless a time long beyond one’s own demise can be imagined. Otherwise, why not build something out of wood – a choice many peoples living in Britain made at this time made, as surviving postmarks make clear? A builder in timber can live to behold the results of such labor. With projects that require generations to complete, projects that may in fact be designed to never come to completion, how can one not be sending a message into a future that does not include one’s own presence, and perhaps the presence of one’s people as well?

Such writing in rock and soil require a leap beyond the horizon of death, a movement from human spans into a deeper temporality. Megaliths, menhirs and stone rings are a letters sent to someone who comes after, and very often to an unknown someone who comes long after. Architects of old surely possessed a decent set of wits, and knew from experience that the present is not eternal, that the horizon of the future is uncertain, that even powerful communities never long endure ... and can we not therefore imagine, without too much of a leap of faith, that a project like Stonehenge is sent into that future in part to stabilize it, but also to keep an ever-receding present alive, even beyond the demise of those who inhabited it? A building project that mandates the passing of multiple lives before its realization cannot be a day-to-day endeavor. This inbuilt temporal horizon tells us nothing about specific intent. It will not allow us to discern whether Stonehenge was a fertility shrine or ceremonial ground or a tomb or a monument -- but it will remind us that such architectures have from the start lived within a future as much as a present.

The weighty exuberance of Stonehenge, the majestic chambered cairn at Maeshowe in the Orkneys, the gothic spectacle of York Minster: these structures are time capsules as well as messages to a known-in-advance receiver. What Avebury and the cathedral the Normans built in Norwich have in common is surfeit. Their colonization of space and time are far in excess of anything a historicist argument based upon cultural context or use value can explain. Both are ritual spaces; both are pedagogical machines that shape a certain kind of subjectivity; both are materializations in stone of cosmologies; both anchor an earthly point to a celestial one. But both also in their exorbitance place their makers (and by their makers I mean everyone who at every point conceptualizes the architecture and its space as alive and open to enlargement and adaptation) into a relationship with time that moves them beyond the predictable or the determinate -- so many generations into futurity that sameness and apocalypse and profound reorderings are all possibilities. The builders of the cathedral in Norwich realized that they were a conglomerate of parvenu Normans and “indigenous” English. Both groups knew very well that the land had not always been theirs. Did that knowledge suggest that, as the stone rose and they saw that this monument would endure beyond their great-great-grandchildren, that they didn't necessarily have full confidence that they were sending a message only to future versions of themselves?

Stonehenge: Decoded! ; or, What's so Secret about the Past?

by Mary Kate Hurley

[fig. 1: Aliens over Stonehenge, pilfered from the National Geographic site here]

If one searches ITM for "Stonehenge", a number of results come up, many associated with JJC's Weight of the Past project. I have not seen the special on the National Geographic Channel to which the title of this post refers to, though I'm hoping to catch it on a rebroadcast at some point. However, when I ran across Robin McKie's article on the Guardian entitled "Leave these stones their eternal secrets".

The article didn't really provoke much comment (or at least anything that was really productive), but I thought it might be of interest to ITM, particularly because of this part of McKie's process, which is in the ending of her article:

And that, of course, is the wonderful thing about Stonehenge: there are more theories about its meaning and purpose than there are stones inside it, a trend that goes right back to the idea, popular in the Middle Ages, that its monoliths had been assembled on Salisbury Plain by Merlin, though exactly why he bothered to do so remains a mystery.

In fact, Stonehenge took at least 1,000 years to build, starting from rings of wooden poles to its current complex status and its use clearly changed over the millenniums. Recent studies suggest it may have been 'Christianised' in the first millennium AD and at one point was used as a place of execution by the Anglo-Saxons to judge from the 7th-century gallows found there. This multiplicity of use increases opportunities for archaeologists to pin their pet theories to the great stone monument.

The crucial point is that every age gets the Stonehenge it deserves, as archaeologist Jacquetta Hawkes once remarked. Hence in medieval times, it was built by giants, while in the 1960s, at the dawn of the computing era, researchers said you could have used it as a giant calculating machine, while in more mystical New Age times, it was clearly a spaceport for aliens. 'In fact, you can come up with just about any idea to explain a structure like Stonehenge if you stare at it for long enough,' says archaeologist David Miles.

Just what that the latest patch of Stonehenge theories says about the 21st century is less clear. I would argue that the World Heritage site is probably best viewed today as a monument to government prevarication and deceit. Having promised a decade ago that it would bury and realign the roads that surround and disfigure Britain's most important ancient monument, ministers now seem to have abandoned any attempt to protect the monument and restore the site to its ancient glory, for the simple reason they are too mean-spirited and short-sighted to see its value.

What interests me here is the assertion, made clearer by the end of that final paragraph, that "every age gets the Stonehenge it deserves," commonly attributed to Jacquetta Hawkes. McKie makes an interesting point, though she doesn't really flesh it out. She seems to be arguing, if I read between her lines correctly, that every age dreams the Stonehenge it deserves -- or more likely, the Stonehenge that can speak to it, in that time, in that place.

Of course, "Stonehenge" is not really the monument it was at its building (whether by Merlin or under the influence of Aliens or as a burial ground), much less in its "original" usage -- rather, "Stonehenge" is a kind of shorthand, by which we mean all the things which intervened, the multiplicities of usages and all the "theories" about its origins that exist in the intervening time. The question McKie doesn't really ask, and the one which I think may be necessary to ask, is whether Stonehenge, World Heritage site, is important in and of itself, or only important in so far as "modernity" recognizes something in it.

It raises a question that I'm addressing in my current dissertation chapter, on time in the Old English Orosius. I'm planning another post on this, when I've figured out what it is I'm trying to do with Bakhtin, but there's this part of The Dialogic Imagination, in "Discourse in the Novel" that keeps obsessing me:

every word is directed toward an answer and cannot escape the profound influence of the answering word it anticipates…The word in living conversation is directly, blatantly, oriented toward a future answer-word: it provokes an answer, anticipates it and structures itself in the answer’s direction. Forming itself in an atmosphere of the already spoken, the word is at the same time determined by that which has not yet been said but which is needed and in fact anticipated by the answering word. Such is the situation in any living dialogue. (280)

However, in his "Epic and Novel" (which I should really reread at some point, Bakhtin makes the point that "The dead are loved in a different way. They are removed from the sphere of contact, one can and indeed must speak of them in a different style. Language about the dead is stylistically quite distinct from language about the living."

It all returns to a question that for me is not really answerable: can there really be a conversation between the living and the dead -- the past and the present? Or is the past destined to be a kind of straw man, whose script is always written by the living?

Or is there a way in which past words -- or past monuments -- are, in an odd Bakhtinian* way still actively responding to a kind of "answering word its future" -- our present -- will provide? Can we expand a notion of a "living dialogue" so far?

Work Cited
M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination : Four Essays, University of Texas Press Slavic Series ; (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004).

Cross posted at OENY.

Stonehenge update

by J J Cohen

Look here, here and here for varied reporting about some recent discoveries linking the structure to burials. One article even mentions medieval myths of its curative properties (that would be Geoffrey of Monmouth). Thanks to the many readers who sent these my way.

Oliver Sacks' Love of Fossils

From yesterday's NYT, a short piece on the prehistoric and lapidary devotions of the neurologist/essayist:

Dr. Sacks can be even more primeval, turning the clock back as far as it will go. To demonstrate, he has a slice of fossilized stromatolite, among earth’s earliest life forms. They date from the Archean era, more than three billion years ago. Stromatolites, once thought to have been long extinct until a large living colony was discovered in Shark Bay in Western Australia in the mid-1950s, are made up of large colonies of bacteria, often blue-green algae, and sedimentary deposits, which grow naturally in a style that Dr. Sacks likened to a layer cake.

Maybe not the most appetizing cake, but he pointed out that stromatolites are held to be responsible for converting the abundance of carbon dioxide in the earth’s Archean-era atmosphere into oxygen. “Over the years, they made enough oxygen to make life possible for the rest of us,” he said.

This should endear them to even the most squeamish. It is their longevity, however, that enchants Dr. Sacks, a man who still writes on a typewriter. “They’re survivors,” he said. “I like the idea of ancient things which have adapted.”

“I am horrified by poor quality and transience,” he added. “If you’re religious, you can believe in the eternal. For me, the next best thing is the enduring.”

As this suggests, his feeling for stromatolites and other long-lived natural-history curiosities is no casual attitude. While he came to the natural sciences as a refuge from a chaotic boyhood, he cherishes them more now that, as he often sees, their integrity is under attack by religious fundamentalists.

“My religion is nature,” he said. “That’s what arouses those feelings of wonder and mysticism and gratitude in me.”

Seamus Heaney on Tara

Veteran readers of ITM know that I was last in Ireland in April 2006, when I wandered the island with my brother. On a day that could be kindly described as blustery and moist, he and I arrived at Tara. With its melding of the prehistoric and the contemporary, this regal mound surveilling burials pagan and Christian was just the place for me ... even if the post I offered was a bit snarky. Tara is, like Stonehenge or Avebury, a numinous expanse, but -- as with Stonehenge and Avebury -- it is difficult to say if that impingement is the result of knowing some fragments of the place's long history, or if the architecture of the space itself causes that feeling of being touched.

The Hill of Tara has recently become a controversial space, where the demands of a burgeoning and future-focused economy battle the desire to preserve a landscape which has come to embody the past itself. The Irish government would like to ease Dublin's congestion by building a motorway nearby. At stake: Ireland's national identity in its relation to modernity and to history. Letting go of Tara's enchantment and building the road has come to mean letting go of a heritage-focused Irishness (and by that I mean an Irishness which reveres a misty past that may never have in fact existed, but certainly seems better that what had been until recently a fairly dismal modernity). The lure of the ancient has long anchored what it means to be Irish. The booming economy on the island has deeply challenged this nostalgia, and the Hill of Tara has become the point at which past-loving and future-obsessed currents meet. The past that Tara is made to embody, I hasten to add, is as that of a temporally frozen heritage site rather than the landscape as it has actually been lived and is now experienced, with its church and its instructional signs and its temporal thickness and anachronisms and its busloads of pilgrims passing through. Tara is spoken about in the controversy mostly as space that answers the demands of the dead, or as a space that serves the needs of the living, not as a coinhabited geography.

Here's Seamus Heaney on the controversy. Needless to say, he sides with the preservation of history, but does so in an interesting way: by stating that Ireland's heritage was better preserved under its colonial administrators than under its present government:

On the attitude of the Irish government, Heaney said: 'Tara had been protection under British rule. I was reading around recently and I discovered that WB Yeats and George Moore and Arthur Griffith wrote a letter to the Irish Times, some time at the beginning of the last century, because a society called the British Israelites had thought the Arc of the Covenant was buried in Tara, and they had started to dig on Tara Hill. And they [Yeats et al] had written this letter and they talked about the desecration of a consecrated landscape. So I thought to myself if a few holes in the ground made by amateur archaeologists was a desecration, what's happening to that whole countryside being ripped up is certainly a much more ruthless piece of work.'

The Nobel literature prize winner said Tara was 'a source and a guarantee of something old in the country and something that gives the country its distinctive spirit'.

The Phenomenology of Landscapes

I have been nearly successful in upholding my vow not to stimulate a single neuron between December 24 and January 1.

In years past a chunk of this time has been lost to the great vortex of MLA. For once, though, I don't have to attend this Convention of the Bespectacled, a fact both good and bad: good, because -- well, because I don't have to be there; bad, because that means we are not hiring this year, and we are down one early modernist. I have vowed to spend the hiatus as a normal person would: resting, eating, resting from eating, eating to assuage the hunger of resting from eating, resting from eating to assuage ... well, you get it. The best part of this week has been the liberation of my family from the tyranny of its schedule. No ballet classes, Hebrew school, fencing lessons, piano lessons, EcoDefenders meetings, readings, business meetings: almost nothing at all for any of us. This gift of time has given us the chance to halt our constant motion and reacquaint ourselves with each other. Interesting fact: until recently I had forgotten that I have TWO children. How wonderful it is to possess both a son and a daughter.

Today, though, most of the family has vanished to spend some time without The Killjoy (I think they mean our dog Scooby, but they seem to have forgotten that I am in the house as well. Odd.) I've been reading through an excellent book and thought I'd share it with ITM's readership, since it bears so directly on some conversations centering around the "Weight of the Past" project, on MKH's dissertation proposal, on Eileen's enduring interest in capaciously rethinking the human, and on Karl's animal-focused thoughts about boundaries and borders. Liza, a frequent contributor, will see that I have her in mind as well.

Readers may remember that not long ago in the comments to one of MKH's posts I suggested the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty as offering a usefully embodied way of thinking about horizons. Right now I'm working through an e-book heavily indebted to M-P, on the experience of stone and observer, and thought I'd share some of its foundational precepts as useful for other projects. So here is Christopher Tilley, The Materiality of Stone: Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology, laying out some guiding principles for his scholarship on neolithic stone structures:

A phenomenological perspective provides an ontological ground for the study of
things, places and landscapes, a means of approach and a way of thinking through
the body in its participatory relation with the world. I summarize some fundamental principles.

1. A phenomenological approach to landscape and place, as discussed here, using
the framework of Merleau-Ponty's thought and interpretations of this thought
by others, is not a philosophical approach emphasizing the personal and the
subjective. It is an approach emphasizing the intertwining of subject and object,
things and persons, mind and body, places and Being in the world. The rejection
of any possibility of an objective approach does not mean that we pass into a
realm of personal subjectivity, because meaning is grounded in the sensuous
embodied relation between persons and the world, an invariant ontological
ground for all feeling and all knowing taking place through persons with similar
bodies.
2. Any study begins with lived experience, being there, in the world. It must
necessarily be embodied, centred in a body opening out itself to the world, a
carnal relationship. The exploitation of basic bodily dyads provides one entry
point into the study of place and landscape. A concentric graded sense of place
and landscape provides another basic way in which meaning may be explored.
Both originate in the body and extend outwards.
3. Perceptual meanings of place and landscape are constituted as gestalts, themes
against horizons, to which the human body and the external world both contribute,
a lived structure of experience formed through engagement and interaction
in which the body-subject and the world flow into each other and form part of
each other. The body is concretely engaged in the world from a particular point
of view that is always unfolding and changing in space-time. The mobile
interaction of the body in the world creates a framework for experience which
is produced in this lived interaction. What is experienced is an articulated
sensuous theme, against a horizon, in which perception is a meaningful bodily
organization of the perceptual field. There is a dialectical exchange between the
embodied structures of the engaged perceiver and the structures of that which
is perceived.
4. This involves a dehiscence, an opening of my body to things, a reversible
relationship between touching and being touched, myself and other, the effect
of myself on things and those things on me.
5. In an experiential relationship with things there is always a chiasm, an intertwining between 'outside' and 'inside', which mediate each other but never
totally fuse. So my body is in contact with the world but still separate from it.
My body experiences from the inside but opens itself to the outside. Since, as
an embodied observer, I perceive the world through a set of frameworks which
are habitual and grounded in the body, to a certain extent anonymous, these
frameworks cease to be mine alone and are not therefore 'personal'. They are,
however, both objective and subjective insofar as they simultaneously stem
from my own body. First-person experiences can be used to gain access to the
experiences of other persons because of the incarnate and sensuous opening
out of the 'primal' embodied subject to the world.
6. Our primordial experience is inherently animistic, disclosing a field of phenomena that are all potentially animate and expressive because our perception
involves the reversibility born out of our participation in the world.
7. Direct prereflective perception is inherently synaesthetic, disclosing the things
and elements that surround us not as inert objects but as expressive subjects
of experience, born out of our multidimensional sensorial participation in the
world.
8. There is a fundamental temporal dimension to the body, place and landscape
carried through movement and sedimented into what places and landscapes
are and how we experience them.
9. Persons do not passively receive information and knowledge about the world
but always act in accordance with practical projects, values, needs, desires and
interests. What information and knowledge is indeed received can only be
understood in the context of these needs, desires, etc. It is in the context of a
needful body reaching out to the world that meaning and significance are
found. The manner in which we experience place and landscape is, however,
forever unfinished, uncertain and therefore ambiguous. The ambiguity inherent
to both that which we investigate (place, landscape) and how we perceive
is not a problem for analysis. Instead it provides an inexhaustible field of
affordances for us.
10. The aim of a phenomenological analysis is to produce a fresh understanding
of place and landscape through an evocative thick linguistic redescription
stemming from our carnal experience. This involves attempting to exploit to
the full the tropic nature of our language in such a way as to seek the invisible
in the visible, the intangible in the tangible. The mode of expression must
resonate with that which it seeks to express.

Reference: Tilley, Christopher. The Materiality of Stone: Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2004) pp 29-30.

Cf. this summary, p. 31: "What I have been suggesting is that rather than regarding things, placesor landscapes primarily as systems of signs, or as texts or discourses which encode meaning and reflect social identities in various ways, we can regard them as agents which actively produce that identity. In other words we need to think about places and landscapes animistically, in an analogous manner to the way in which we like to think about persons, as entities who can and do make a difference. The move is from considering things as representing the world to us to things as producing that world for us. It is a move from the cognitive sign value of things to the embodiment of things, from the code of the world to the flesh of the world, from symbol to action. Producing human meaning in the world is all about establishing connections between ourselves and the disparate material phenomena with which and through which we live, the plants and animals, landscapes and artefacts that surround us, and this is the work of tropic language, of metaphor and metonymy."

For October 31: A severed head, skeletal fairies, ghosts and a bog man

Fodder for several of our longrunning conversation here at ITM: the Museum of Natural History at Rouen in Normandy has decided that a mummified Maori head in its collections ought to be returned to New Zealand for burial, while the Ministry of Culture has declared the body part preservation-worthy art. Today's NYT meanwhile provides a queer ghost story that ends up rather straight (no gay wizards are involved). Bioephemera has breathtaking images of skeleton fairies attacking a bee and a spider, the mixed media work of artist Tessa Farmer. Lastly, today's illustration is the poster for my impending Holloway Lecture at McDaniel College. Nothing says scholarly fun like an executed peat bog body. The poster was, I'm told, the product of a student competition. Click on the image to enlarge.

Giants' Ring / Giants' Dance

(for earlier posts on this topic, see At Avebury and Augustine, a giant's tooth, and particles of alterity. These are all part of a larger project on what the Middle Ages made of the prehistoric)

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The fascination that Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain exerted can be accounted for in two ways. Geoffrey gave to Britain a far deeper past than it had ever previously possessed, and he promulgated as part of that history the charismatic figure of King Arthur. Geoffrey filled a silent, empty space in Britain's prehistory with durable content. He did so not by obliterating what little he found in that past, but by giving fragments gleaned from other texts a fullness, a vivaciousness, a new life. The Trojan Brutus he takes from a scant narrative found in the ninth-century Historia Brittonum, growing the original story into the Aeneid in miniature. Geoffrey's Arthur emerges from his interweaving of vague references to a Welsh war leader into a coherent and compelling monarch whose conquests resemble nothing so much as those of contemporary Norman kings. Without Geoffrey's vision of earliest Britain as strangely contemporary place, the genre of romance would never have assumed the contours it came to possess, so attractive was the alternative (and secular, and marvelous) vision of history he offered. Arthurian literature could not have burgeoned without Geoffrey's creation of its primal scene in the History. The consensual world which the History of the Kings of Britain established invited medieval artists to add their own narratives, their own images, animating Arthur and Merlin and Guenevere through continuous dilation and frequent change.

Geoffrey of Monmouth's giants are an aboriginal population against whom the first settlers to Britain must wage genocidal war. Gogmagog, their leader, is executed by being hurled from a clifftop, plummeting to "a sharp reef of rocks, where he was dashed to a thousand fragments and stained the waters with his blood." The place of his spectacular death is known thereafter as "Gogmagog's Leap." Yet despite the action inherent in the designation, the toponym captures not a life in motion but an enduring arrest, an eternal fall from which Gogmagog – ever about to be smashed to blood and fragments by looming rocks -- will not escape: "Gogmagog's Leap," not "Gogmagog's Death." After the giants are cleansed from the land by the flood of newly arriving Trojan immigrants, moreover, we encounter more of the monsters. Just as in the Bible David fights one of the giants present after the Deluge, so in Geoffrey's History King Arthur will battles the giant of Mont Saint Michel.

Old English poetry is full of dark meditations on unnamed ruins. These crumbling remnants of human habitations may be Roman cities, like Bath; they could as easily be generic devastated architectures, since no specific history anchors them in the stream of time. In elegies like "The Wanderer" such windswept piles of stones are simply but ambiguously "the old work of giants, standing abandoned" (eald enta geweorc idlu stodon). Geoffrey of Monmouth is the first medieval author to attach primal architects to the Neolithic structures that intruded into his present. The History of the Kings of Britain speaks of Stonehenge and possibly Avesbury. Aurelius Ambrosius, a glorious king of the Britons and the uncle of Arthur, defeats at great cost the Saxons who have invaded his island. Desiring to construct for his fallen men a monument capable of memorializing them eternally, he

collected carpenters and stone-masons together from every region and ordered them to use their skill to contrive some novel building which would stand for ever in memory of such distinguished men. The whole band racked their brains and then confessed themselves beaten.

To conceive this "novel building" that can do justice to the story it incarnates, Aurelius must commission the prophet Merlin. No one, we are told, possesses greater skill "either in foretelling the future or in mechanical contrivances." A prophet and an engineer (rather than the magician he will become in later literature), Merlin was introduced in the narrative as the son of a cloistered nun and an "incubus demon" – the product, that is, of the kind of trans-species sex that usually engenders giants. Giants are in Old English literature builders of structures from time out of memory; a giant, Nimrod, was also supposed to have been the architect of the Tower of Babel. These monsters indeed form an integral part of Merlin's solution to Aurelius's architectural quandary, for he declares:

'If you want to grace the burial place of these men with some lasting monument ... send for the Giants' Ring which is on Mount Killarus in Ireland. In that place there is a stone construction which no man of this period could ever erect, unless he combined great skill and artistry. The stones are enormous and there is no one strong enough to move them. If they are placed in position round this site, in which they are erected there, they will stand forever ... These stones are connected to certain secret religious rites ... Many years ago the Giants transported them from the remotest confines of Africa and set them up in Ireland at a time when they inhabited that country ... There isn't a single stone among them which hasn't some medicinal virtue.'

Entranced by this vision of an eternally persisting, eternally powerful construction, Aurelius commands that Merlin, Uther Pendragon, and fifteen thousand men set sail immediately for Ireland. There they meet Gillomanius, an Irish king incredulous that anyone would sail to his island to swipe big rocks. Gillomanius declares nonetheless that only over his dead body will the "minutest fragment of the Ring" be stolen. The Britons are happy to oblige, obliterating the Irish forces. Merlin then urges the Britons to attempt to move the rocks. Though they employ "every conceivable kind of mechanism ... They rigged up hawsers and ropes ad they propped up scaling ladders," no contrivance budges the unyielding stone.

Laughing at these attempts to alter a structure so powerful, Merlin easily dismantles the Ring with unnamed gear and places the megaliths aboard the waiting ships. He transports the disassembled ring to Britain and with precision rebuilds it upon the burial mound: "Merlin obeyed the King's orders and put the stones up in a circle round the sepulchre, in exactly the same way they had been arranged on Mount Kilaraus in Ireland, thus proving that his artistry was worth more than any brute strength." Whereas the Irish king can discern in the Giants' Ring only dead rock, Merlin – like the Ring's original architects -- realizes that in their clefts and beneath their coldness the megaliths harbor ancient power: the ability to cure ailing bodies, the ability to do justice to the dead, the ability to memorialize that which would otherwise be forgotten. True, he steals the stones from their native place and erects them where they will forever be out of place: like a later day archaeologist transporting Mayan artifacts from Mexico or marble sculpture from Greece he has no confidence that the people living with these artworks can appreciate their beauty or their history. Geoffrey apparently approves of the decision to relocate the Giant's Ring, for its founders seem no longer to be present in Ireland (the dwindled age of men has long been in progress there), and in Britain the Ring becomes the gravesite not only of Aurelius and his soldiers, but of King Arthur's father, Uther Pendragon. Arthur's cousin and successor to the throne, Constantine, will be interred there as well ("They buried him by the side of Utherpendragon, within the circle of stones called Stonehenge in the English language, which had been built with such wonderful skill not far from Salisbury"). Arthur, of course, will find no resting place, assumed as he is to the mysterious Isle of Avalon.

From Africa to Ireland to Britain, from giants to men, a ring of megaliths that should be so massive as to be immobile moves through time and across geographies. Merlin's gift is his ability to recognize the ancient history of the stone circle and add to that story another one, a living story oriented as much towards present and future as it is towards the commemoration of the past. Merlin sees in the stones the life they harbor: they are not dead remnants of a lost race, but the living incarnation of that race's presence, and mediators of new relations to history and remembering. Though full of giants and battles that never were, the narrative also conveys something of the truth of Stonehenge. Medieval people knew very well that stone ring was the product not of magic but ancient technology. A manuscript illustration in the 1440 version of the Scala Mundi contains a fairly accurate, birds-eye depiction of four trilithons (two immense pillars capped by a lintel); tenon joints are shown graven the lintels. The rocks of Stonehenge were not transported from Ireland, but they did arrive from a distance: perhaps twenty miles across Salisbury Plain for the sarsen stones, and an unknown distance for the outer rings, fashioned from bluestone that originated in the Preseli mountains, 135 miles distant in west Wales.

Geoffrey added Hiberno-African origins to Stonehenge, an addition that at least acknowledged the alien provenance of some of the structure's stones, as well as granting the whole of the architecture an origin a time and culture different from Geoffrey's own. Geoffrey was no Augustine, and his Stonehenge has no story to tell about the Great Flood or anything else found in the bible. His Latin phrase for the transported monument is chorea gigantum, a "Giants' Circle" but also a "Giant's Dance." That kinetic wording seems especially appropriate considering the life Geoffrey discerns in the stones, the vitality he insists resides in their depths.

(the image of a giant helping Merlin to construct Stonehenge is from British Library Egerton 3028 Fol30r. It is taken from a 14th C version of Wace's Brut and is the first known illustration of Stonehenge)