Physician's Tale, Favorite Comments

Detail Filippino Lippi, "Scenes from the History of Virginia," a cassone (c. 1470-80); Louvre

by KARL STEEL

Obviously, read Mary Kate Hurley first. It's a great post.

Maybe you've also just graded your first set of Canterbury Tales papers. Mine were on the Physician's Tale, where I now routinely start because of David Wallace's facetious (?) recommendation at the New Chaucer Society in 2010. He was right, anyway.

The Physician's Tale is short, with a stirring narrative, moral and ironic, graced with an obvious source and as obvious alterations, and without a lot of weird vocabulary: in other words, it's a far better place to introduce students to the tales than the usual slog through the General Prologue.

Apart from my habitual comments about characters being tools and not real people, about literature making culture and not just "reflecting" it, and about upper-class women having a lot less freedom in marriage than women in general, I've landed on some new ideas, because grading is also thinking. Sometimes.

Here's my list of some favorite new comments, maybe of use to you when you next read or teach this tale:

1. Who is responsible here? Apius sins because devils enter into him; Virginius calls his daughter the ender of his life. And the Host dodges the Physician's weird moral about 'sin finding you out.' The men shift responsibility onto anyone but themselves.
2. Virginius's belief that virtue requires female virginity does kill him, in a sense, since it turns him into a killing machine, a zombie working for a patriarchal system that compels him to kill what he loves most
3. human sacrifice simultaneously degrades humans and attests to the supreme value of humans as the greatest sacrifice
4. martyrs are killed by the enemies of God, while sacrifices are offered by his friends: is Virginia a martyr or a sacrifice? And what does that make Virginius?
5. since Virginius is well supplied with money and friends, he could have saved Virginia, especially because Chaucer has cut out the political content of his source material. So, Virginius fails Virginia as a knight and father as much as Apius fails her and the law in general as a judge. The tale's about a systematic failure of masculine authority and the resulting death of a girl who, alone, has done everything right.
6. Why so much attention to Virginia's whole slate of virtues when the threatened failure of just the one means she must die? How shaky is virginity as the foundation of a whole system of virtue?
7. Why is the tale so specific about Virginia's honors and so vague about her father's: full of honor and worthiness, and that's it.
8. Note how Virginius spares Apius and kills his daughter and the various guilty churls: think about the prerogatives of inter-masculine respect.

On Contingency

by Mary Kate Hurley

(this post was written on 9/5/2013, a little over a week ago. The photo is one I took at Yale in Fall 2011.)

I’ve written – and rewritten – this blog post at least ten times in the past two years. It’s not because it’s a particularly hard blog post to write, but rather because it never felt like the story I wanted to tell was complete. Sitting in a plane somewhere between Ohio and California, looking down at the tops of the clouds and feeling like the world’s been turned over somehow, I’m beginning to realize that stories don’t come to a “finish” point. You stop following them, but they continue on in other forms, in ways you can’t quite expect.

It’s fitting that I’ve been returning to Nicholas Howe’s Writing the Map of Anglo-Saxon England in preparation for a conference paper I gave at Berkeley on the Tiberius B.v version of the Wonders of the East.* In his chapter on Cotton Tiberius B v and Cotton Vitellius A xv, Howe writes beautifully of the stories of geography that these manuscripts tell, the stories of “here and elsewhere.” Perhaps problematically, these stories of elsewhere have the “ultimate effect” of returning “you to a more complex understanding of home” (Howe, 191). A more nuanced reading of what that might mean, and what such a reading of the Wonders of the East would ultimately entail, is part of the work I did in that paper. But for now, I want to write about the places – metaphorical and literal – I’ve been for the past two years.

I spent the last two years working as an adjunct instructor of English at several different schools. I spent time at The Cooper Union, Barnard College, Rutgers, and – for the duration of those two years – Yale University. In each of these institutions, I learned as much and more about myself as a teacher and as a scholar than I had in the entirety of my time as a graduate student. That’s not to underplay the role Columbia played in forming my scholarly personality. But there’s nothing like the pressures of a tight job market and twelve hours or so per week on a commute to teach you who you really are, and what you really value.

I suppose, in the end, this post becomes an encomium Yalensis, although I want to write this work of praise by way of suggesting that while Yale may very well be an exception to the experience of adjuncting, it’s one that higher education and the people who populate it can learn from. When I came to the end of Columbia’s very generous funding package in the spring of 2010, no full-time positions materialized. In the end, I suppose it was as much the two years of writing fellowships I’d had as much as anything that kept me from finding a place, but no one who has been on the job market can doubt that there is no formula for success other than “be the best you can be.” And so I took on the academic equivalent of “odd jobs” – it started with a writing center position at Cooper, and began to look more livable when Barnard’s first-year English program gave me a section of Women in Culture to teach.  A late-in-the-game interview for a composition lectureship at Yale became an offer of two writing courses rather than a full-time gig – a quick bit of math revealed that I could afford both train fare and my rent, and I gratefully accepted what would become the job that gave me an academic home for two years.**

So in a way, this is a story of elsewhere becoming home. I landed in a less than ideal position – no “real” job, not teaching in my field, not even sure if a tenure track job would ever materialize. I was, to put it mildly, nervous. Looking back, I’m not entirely sure why: medievalists, as no one reading this blog needs to be reminded, are a friendly sort. Before I’d even taken my first 6.30 AM train to New Haven, I had heard from the Yale cohort of medievalists, welcoming me to their ranks despite my position as contingent, as adjunct.  It took me a month or so to feel at home enough in the department to attend the weekly medieval lunches, but once I got my courage up, I realized I didn’t need it – the medieval community at Yale was willing to have me for however long my in-between job lasted.

Adjunct faculty face a number of conditions that makes scholarly life well-nigh unlivable. Wages that don’t reflect the sheer amount of work being done.  Lack of the benefits that make a healthy life possible.  My position at Yale was, thankfully, one that allowed me a more-than-living wage, and provided the benefits I’d assumed I wouldn’t get until I was a full time faculty member somewhere. One might say, “of course they can do that, they’re Yale.” And in some measure, that’s correct – but it also reflects an ethical position that I wish more universities were able to take – investing in the people who help the university run on a course-by-course basis is as important as any other investment a university makes.

That these material concerns – healthcare, money for rent and food – were less of a worry for me allowed me the time and space to appreciate the less material but equally vital concern of finding a community. Leaving Columbia, spending so much time in other places and teaching as much as I did meant that I felt bereft of an academic home. My first year, the medieval faculty at Yale (including Roberta Frank, Alastair Minnis, Jessica Brantley, and Ian Cornelius) all made me feel at home by welcoming me to medieval events and – that most mundane of tasks – being certain I made it on the right listserves and email lists for events. The graduate students were no less welcoming. Fellow Anglo-Saxonist Eric Weiskott made certain that I found the Old English reading group (even when I didn’t have time to prepare, due to all the marking I had to complete for my first year writing courses). Senior graduate students Samantha Seal (now at Weber State University in Utah) and Andrew Kraebel in particular were models for collegiality. In them, I found not only colleagues but friends – people with whom I could share a coffee or pint, lament the state of the job market or celebrate its small successes, and exchange useful critique that furthered my scholarship even as I spent most of my time on teaching. These names stand out in my memory – but really, all you have to do is scan a list of medievalists, both faculty and graduate students, at Yale, and to each name accrues a myriad of small kindnesses that made an intellectual wanderer feel as though she had a place.***

Finding this community – or more aptly, being drawn into the close-knit medieval community at Yale – was, in many ways, a surprise.  But looking back over the past two years, I recognize the theme that had pervaded my scholarly life – generosity. Institutional generosity brought me to a place where the personal and professional generosity of so many colleagues could be adequately appreciated.

I’m not a wanderer anymore. Three weeks ago Sunday my partner Nick and I relocated to the small town of Athens, OH, home to Ohio University and my first tenure-track job.  I’m not contingent anymore. But I take with me the lessons contingency taught me. As a dictionary might tell us, sometimes what is unforeseen or unexpected can change your life. If you’re lucky, it does so in ways that aren’t catastrophic in the way the colloquial usage of needing a “contingency plan” might suggest.

Sometimes, it takes elsewhere, and makes you feel at home.

_________________________________

* Some will remember that my first contribution to this blog was on the occasion of  Professor Howe’s passing in 2006.

** I should also take the time to say that I felt extraordinarily welcomed at all of the universities I taught at in the past two years – Barnard College and Rutgers University in particular. I write about Yale particularly because I spent so much time there in comparison to these other positions. But the faculty and most importantly the students at Barnard, Rutgers, and Cooper were all engaging, kind, and a pleasure to spend my time with.

*** A myriad of other names – friends and advisers at Columbia, many readers of this blog, my co-bloggers, friends at universities from NYU to Berkeley to Austin – also helped make the path less hard. Those names belong here too, those kindnesses recognized, though to do so in anything but this group format would take far too long, and leave far too many people out.

Nicholas of Cusa and the Kairos of Modernity: Cassirer, Gadamer, Blumenberg

by EILEEN JOY

If modernity is a messianic concept of time, open to an unknown future, then our connection to the present must be restrained. Perhaps we are only sojourning here, poised and waiting for the end of time. On the other hand, just as urgently as during the Renaissance, it would seem that the “heart of modernity” is open to the “heart of antiquity.” The capacity of ruins to communicate, and the interest of ancient writings might be marvelled at again. Nicholas of Cusa demonstrated that a return to antiquity could lead to the discovery of new paths during a historical period of spiritual disquiet and political crisis.

~Michael Edward Moore, Nicholas of Cusa and the Kairos of Modernity

It makes me pretty happy to announce today the publication, by punctum books's Dead Letter Office, of Michael E. Moore's Nicholas of Cusa and the Kairos of Modernity: Cassirer, Gadamer, Blumenberg, which represents a true editorial collaboration between myself, Michael, 2 students in my scholarly publishing course last spring (Brianne Harris and Kate Workman), Daniel P. O'Connell, who helped to review the manuscript, and Dan Remein, who helped to select the fonts. Although some will find it distasteful (or somehow, not properly-critcally distant enough), I like the idea of publishing ventures that grow out of friendly and fully transparent desiring-assemblages, and many (but certainly not all) of punctum's publications are just that -- works produced by groups of friends and friendly acquaintances who are invested in helping each other to bring to light scholarly and other projects in which certain very heavy personal investments have been made; investments, moreover, that may or may not "answer" to what more traditional publishers are interested in publishing at any given moment. Michael's "book" is actually a long essay that would be too long to fit the parameters of a regular scholarly article and too short to constitute a book by most publishers' standards; it is, in short, the sort of scholarly novella for which the Dead Letter Office imprint was developed, and because it is also a commentary on the place of Nicholas of Cusa in mid-20th-century debates over the nature of modernity, and therefore can be used as a strange "device to water the graveyards where, to cadge from Walter Benjamin, some of the dead are turning by a strange heliotropism toward the sun that is rising in the sky of history," it is doubly perfect for the imprint.

Michael is a long-time friend of In The Middle whose work I have commented upon here several times in the past -- e.g., in these posts:  "An Historian's Notes for a Miloszan Humanism,"  "Wolves and Enemy Combatants, Humanism and the Inhuman," "A Time in Which Vagabonds and Skinny Dogs Wander in the Grey Fog: On Sadness," and "Like An Old Inscription That Has Been Scratched and Covered With Leaves: A Meditation Upon the Face" -- and although he is primarily trained as an historian in Carolingian history (see, for example, his recent book A Sacred Kingdom: Bishops and the Rose of the Frankish Kingship, 300-850), much of his scholarly preoccupation and published work is concerned with European intellectual history, especially intellectual events and debates of the 19th and 20th centuries that cluster around issues of humanism, hermeneutics, the legal subject, modernity, sovereignty, and political theology [the above-linked blog posts showcase his work in these areas and also excerpt from it], and further, how this history has been shaped [even when it is not avowed as such] by medieval thought and history.

As such, the current chapbook by Michael will hopefully be a welcome addition to a growing body of work within medieval studies on the ways in which one cannot write a history of modernity, or modern theory, without also considering the uses for which various "Middle Ages" have been put -- e.g., Glenn Burger and Steven Kruger's Queering the Middle Ages, Amy Hollywood's Sensible Ecstasy, Kathleen Biddick's The Shock of Medievalism, Erin Labbie's Lacan's Medievalism, Kathleen Davis and Nadia Altschul's Medievalisms in the Postcolonial World, Bruce Holsinger's The Premodern Condition, and Andrew Cole and D. Vance Smith's The Legitimacy of the Middle Ages, among others. The link between Michael's book and Cole's and Smith's is particularly acute since their book co-opts the title of and also challenges Hans Blumenberg's 1966 The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, in which book's account of modernity Nicholas of Cusa played, in Cole and Smith's words, the "hero" [because, for Blumenberg, as Michael's book also demonstrates, Cusa's thought, although steeped in medieval Christian theology, presaged certain elements of a secular modernism]. And yet, curiously, there is not much actual commentary on Nicholas of Cusa in either Cole and Smith's Introduction to their book, "Outside Modernity," nor in any of the chapters by other authors, except in a few asides, and that's perfectly fine, because every scholar has their own particular preoccupations [for Cole, for example, in this volume, that is Marx and the relation of his thinking on the commodity to Hegel's thinking upon medieval Eucharistic sacramentalism, and for Ethan Knapp, also included here, that is the relation between Heidegger's early phenomenology and his study of medieval scholastic figures such as Thomas of Erfurt]. 

As Cole and Smith write in their Introduction, "the process of modern self-definition in relation to medieval modes has yet to be fully described," and Michael's book on the various roles that Nicholas of Cusa plays in the work of three important figures in 20th-century intellectual history -- Ernst Cassirer, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Hans Blumenberg -- will add something of important value to this ongoing [and somewhat under-attended] work. The work that Cole and Smith call for has to be collective, of course, because no account of modernity's relation to medieval thought could ever be comprehensive, nor can it only travel along certain diachronic routes that one might argue are, at this point, fairly over-determined and also claustraphobically hermetic (i.e., Hegel to Heidegger, Kant to Adorno, medieval theology's relation to secularism's self-definitions, etc., without accounts of such Cole and Smith aver any intellectual history of modernity is greatly impoverished, or just plan wrong, but ... which history, whose history, and in which locations?). Indeed, time is more of a knot, with various discourses of thought [including important processes of forgetting and creative acts of re-memorization] entangled with each other in ways that are not always easy to completely articulate. We pull at the threads, but we never catch the whole picture because ... there is no whole picture. And yet, the attempt to render various accounts of intellectual history [various trajectories of thought, however incomplete] in order to better understand our present moment and the ways in which, as Aranye Fradenburg has written, that "moment is characterized by a veritable explosion of archaic signifiers" ["(Dis)continuity: A History of Dreaming," in The Post-Historical Middle Ages], is important. Even when we also acknowledge, as Fradenburg has also written, that, "No engagement of otherness will preserve either the subject or the other in an identity which should already have been theorized as unstable in the first place; but by that very token, we know, precisely, that the other has been encountered" (Sacrifice Your Love).

And important for Michael in his own book, I believe, as an historian, and as he has written elsewhere, is to provide an account of Nicholas of Cusa's life and writings that is also an effort to preserve and understand an "ephemeral" voice from the past that is not necessarily tied to later uses of that voice, and this is also connected to Michael's larger interests in various of his writings to sketch a history of humanist practices across time as rich and varied forms of ascesis (e.g. Pierre Hadot's Philosophy As a Way of Life and Foucault's Hermeneutics of the Subject), but also of poetic self-knowledge. In Michael's schema, and certainly reflected in his Nicholas of Cusa book, the practice of historical reflection can become a spiritual discipline that opposes the "power of forgetting," as the poet Czeslaw Milosz once described it in his little parable "A Historian's Worries." 

Nicholas of Cusa and the Kairos of Modernity: Cassirer, Gadamer, Blumenberg, as with all punctum publications, is an open-access e-book and is also available in a modestly-priced paperbound edition: see HERE. Please, also, when downloading the book, consider making a donation to punctum books, as all of our publications are made possible through the efforts of volunteer copy-editors, proofreaders, art designers, and the like. Indeed, we are trying at punctum to also resuscitate the arts of very close and loving editorial curatorship of each and every book we publish, and that is hard work undertaken into the wee hours past many a midnight. Purchasing print copies also helps us a great deal. Vive la open access:

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Nature's Ladder, Nature's Vortex

by J J Cohen

This morning I've been agonizing over the opening movement of my essay "The Sea Above" (an excerpt from which appeared here last week). Below, some thoughts on nature, structure, elements, medieval cosmology, and whatnot.

My deep, deep thanks to Steve Mentz for suggesting some clarifications and provoking needed revision.

Scaling Nature

Nature loves a ladder.[i]

Classical, medieval and early modern imaginings of the cosmos describe a Great Chain of Being arrayed of links, steps or rungs.[ii] At the bottom of this scala naturae (nature’s “ladder” or “staircase”) are inert things like stones, matter that merely exists. A natural hierarchy rises through plants, animals, and humans to culminate in supernatural and divine entities, an ascent from simple being to a complexity of life beyond the organic – and it is from this culminating perspective that the scale is articulated, a god’s eye view of universal sequence. Nature’s ladder is, however, formed from slippery steps. Though humans are middle dwellers along the chain, its order inevitably arranges itself around them. The sixth century theologian Pope Gregory I delineated a scale of being in which humans are midpoint, nexus and microcosm, since they share essential qualities with rungs below and above:

In that he has existence [esse] in common with stones, with trees life [vivere], with animals sensation [sentire], with angels rationality [intelligere], man is rightly represented by the title of the ‘universe,’ in whom after all some sort the ‘universe’ itself is contained.[iii]

This upwardly moving arrangement intermixes as it transcends.[iv] Such commingling across category is paralleled by the world’s material structure, laddered in theory but admixed when in motion. Earth provides secure foundation, and its surface is the proper domain of humans: all else is alien space. Across this heavy base flow deep seas, pristine lakes and refreshing springs. Next rises volatile air, an invisible and nearly intangible substance that soars swiftly from mortal realms. In loftiest expanses dwells fire, stuff of celestial spheres. Each of the four elements finds a natural location according to its weight, but none resides exclusively within indigenous space. For matter to be created the elements must promiscuously combine. An emerald, for example, is earth and water locked in durable union, while a human is earth and water (in the form of clay) plus breath and fiery soul. Despite such generative union, however, the vertical arrangement of the Great Chain of Being continually self-asserts, with material as well as moral consequence. The cosmos rises from dark underworld through oceans and air to blazing stars. Each offers a unique ecology. Even if clouds require water to burgeon, their moisture will eventually return to its proper biome, a world for coral, fish and whales. Humans flourish at the boundary where earth, water and air meet. To attempt to inhabit the sea is to drown; earth is a grave; air offers no skyward passage; fire incinerates fleshly forms.

            Yet the elements are as restless as the human imagination, seldom content to remain in their allotted place. They combine ceaselessly to engender new things and in that process of composition disclose surprising worlds, challenging narratives, the tangling of nature’s chain. The ocean divulges merfolk, people who dwell beneath the waves in watery kingdoms or subaqueous monasteries.[v] Subterranean realms intrude wondrously into the everyday: an unremarkable hillock one evening reveals a doorway beyond which revelers feast, inviting companionship; up from the ground rise a boy and girl with green skin, who when taught to speak their words in English describe a distant land where the sun never rises and bread is unknown; a child follows a small man into an underground country where objects are fashioned from gold, and through long acquaintance learns their Greek-like tongue.[vi] Elemental ecologies are fecund spaces, provisioners of food as well as fable. Even the unreachable clouds reveal themselves populated by mortal strangers rather than theological angels.

This chapter explores the invitation to ecological awareness offered by medieval stories that turn the rungs of the scala naturae and behold in the sky a navigated sea. Nature does not love a ladder, or any of the other tidy forms humans build to order their cosmologies. The Chain of Being is full of kinks. Instead of ordered steps that emplace humans as medial creatures awaiting postmortem ascent to a heavenly realm, instead of yielding to upward vectors that urge contempt for the mortal world and embrace only of the life to come, the ladder twists into doubled helices, spirals that in their torsion yield unexpected contiguities. Stories of ships in the sky underscore environmental entanglement, being that is neither enchained nor great, an invitation to wonder at the fleeting and the secular.[vii] Through air that thickens into ocean, tumultuous elemental activity manifests, treacherous as a rogue wave, lively as storm clouds. When sky is traversed by sailors to whom the earthbound are unknown, worldly relations knot, become perilous, open to ethical query. Chains, ladders, scales, steps and other placidly transcendent schematics yield to life lived within the thick of the world, life in a vortex of shared precariousness and unchosen proximities.

* * *

[i] I am playing here on the famous assertion of Heraclitus, phusis kruptesthai philei

 [“nature loves to hide”]. For the complexities inherent within that statement and the perils of its translation see Pierre Hadot, The Veil of Isis: An Essay on the History of the Idea of Nature, trans. Michael Chase (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006).

[ii] “Great Chain of Being” is a modern designation for a progressive, vertical order thought to be inherent in nature and articulated through varied metaphors. The classic exposition is Arthur O. Lovejoy’s The Great Chain of Being: A Study in the History of an Idea (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), [originally published 1936], who stresses the continuity among its gradations as well as its plenitude. Chaucer calls this structure the “faire cheyne of love” (see below) while the Roman de la Rose describes “la bele chaeine doree / Qui les quarter elemenz enlace” (“the beautiful golden chain that entwines the four elements”; see Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la Rose, ed. Ernest Langlois [Paris: Librairie de Firmin-Didiot, 1922] vol. 4 ll. 16707-81; accessed online via http://gallica.bnf.fr/)

[iii] Moralia in Job 6.16, a commentary on Job 5:10; PL 76.1214. Gregory’s formulation was frequently repeated in the Middle Ages. John Gower’s fourteenth century poetic version describes man as a “lasse world” [small world] since he has a “soule reasonable” like an angel,  “fielinge” like a beast, “growinge" like trees, and “the stones ben and so is he” [stones exist and so does he]. See Confessio Amantis, vol. 1, ed. Russell A. Peck (Kalamazoo, Michigan: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000; Second Edition, 2006), lines 945-53.

[iv] Of the combination and commingling inherent to the scala naturae Kellie Robertson writes, “in a physical world where the rock and the human differ more by degree than by kind, where the divide between the material and the immaterial was not yet so indelible, the reciprocity of moral lessons was underwritten by an ontological connection manifest in the scala naturae” (“Exemplary Rocks” Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen [Washington DC: Oliphaunt, 2011] 91-121, at 99).

[v] On fish knights and other land creatures below the sea, see Karl Steel and Peggy McCracken, “The Animal Turn: Into the Sea with the Fish-Knights of Perceforest,” postmedieval 2 (2011): 88-100, and for submarine monasteries, John Carey, “Aerial Ships and Underwater Monasteries: The Evolution of a Monastic Marvel,” Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium 12 (1992): 16-28.

[vi] The story of the tumulus in Yorkshire with an unexpected door to a feast and the narrative of the Green Children of Woolpit are both told by William of Newburgh in his History of English Affairs Book 1, ed. and trans. P. G. Walsh and M. J. Kennedy (Wilthsire: Aris and Phillips, 1988). I have treated them previously in “The Future of the Jews of York,” Christians and Jews in Medieval England: Narratives and Contexts for the York 1190 Massacre, ed. Sarah Rees Jones  and Sethina Watson (Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 2013) 278-93 and “Green Children from Another World, or The Archipelago in England.” Cultural Diversity in the British Middle Ages: Archipelago, Island, England, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) 75-94. The underground realm of gold is described by Gerald of Wales in the eighth chapter of his Journey Through Wales; for an excellent contextualization see Monika Otter, Inventiones: Fiction and Referentiality in Twelfth-Century English Historical Writing (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996) 151.

[vii] I am inspired here by what Stacy Alaimo calls “trans-corporeality at sea,” the revelation than what seems an alien and distanced world is ecologically and even corporeally intimate: “The recognition of these limits, as a suspension of humanist presumptions, may be an epistemological–ethical moment that debars us from humanist privilege and keeps us ‘fixed or lost as in wonder or contemplation’” (“States of Suspension: Trans-corporeality at Sea,” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 19.3 (2012): 3476-93, quotation at 477). Alaimo is here citing the Merriam-Webster definition of “to suspend.”

Seamus Heaney, and Ships that Sail the Air

by J J Cohen

In memoriam Seamus Heaney, 1939-2013

Shortly after news began to circulate of the death of Seamus Heaney, Facebook and Twitter burgeoned with favorite quotations from his oeuvre and memories from his recent readings (especially at gatherings this summer in Edinburgh and Dublin). The generous flow of loved lines seemed perfect tribute. On FB I offered the following personal memory.

RIP Seamus Heaney, who changed Beowulf forever -- among many other poetical wonders. My single personal encounter with him was during a lunch at the Faculty Club to welcome the first year enrollees of the PhD program I was attending. Nothing says "welcome!" like a ridiculously formal meal in an ornate setting with assigned seating, no introductions, and food you don't eat. I nervously took my allotted chair between Seamus Heaney and Helen Vendler as something en croute was served. A chain of silent obscenities swirled through my head. "I don't belong here," I whispered to Heaney, because in my immaturity I did not know what else to say. "Neither do I," he replied.

He was a poet of astonishing talent. He also had a good heart.

On Twitter I wrote that

Seamus Heaney changed Beowulf forever. Some think for the worse -- but for me, he made the poem teachable. Students love his love for it.

I mean that. I've been teaching Beowulf for a long while, and have witnessed a clear divide between classes before and after Heaney's translation: a time during which it was hard work to convince students to desire the poem versus one in which that desire is activated in swift, uncanny, and beautiful ways. His translation of the Old English poem has sometimes been disparaged as Heaneywulf, but that to me is its strength. His Irish intensification of the medieval work as a multi-temporal rumination on postcoloniality, endurance, and long history is why the Heaneywulf works so well. His poetics are conservative and familiar, admittedly, making his popularity too easy to dismiss. But that comfortableness does not mean that his method and content lack complexity. For those who prefer more experimental modes of translation Heaney is also an excellent gateway.

When news of Heaney's death arrived I was hard at work on a section of an essay that explores an Irish and British tradition behind a segment of his poem Lightenings. "The Sea Above" (as my piece is called) is my contribution to the volume Lowell Duckert and I have put together as a follow up to our recent postmedieval issue on Ecomaterialism (I blogged about the conference that launched that project here). Elemental Ecocriticism will be published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2015. You'll find the list of contributors in my blog post. There will also be response essays by Stacy Alaimo, Timothy Morton, Cary Wolfe, Serpil Oppermann and Serenella Iovino. I'll post more about the project here soon.

In the meantime, though, I thought I'd share with you an excerpt from "The Sea Above" that does some work with Seamus Heaney's work. Let me know what you think.

The Sky as Sea

Towards the end of the eleventh century, Bishop Patrick of Dublin catalogued in formal Latin verse the twenty-seven wonders of Ireland. These native mirabilia range from a stone that triggers tempestuous rains and an island where the unburied dead never decay to a fountain that turns hair white, a tomb that when beheld by women causes farting, men who transmigrate their souls into wolves, and a rock that oozes blood. The marvels joyfully violate the presumptions that quietly structure everyday life. Climate is no longer indifferent to human activity, death is not organic oblivion, the tomb fails as a terminus of agency, humans may love the animal for its inhumanity, and the lithic becomes creaturely. As quotidian certainties dissolve, ecologies of the possible wondrously flare. Listed as Patrick’s nineteenth marvel is De naui que uisa est in aere, “Of a ship glimpsed in the air.” The bishop writes:

A king of the Irish once attended an assembly

With quite a crowd, a thousand in beautiful order.

They see a sudden ship sail the sky,

And someone who casts a spear after fish:

It struck the ground, and swimming he retrieved it.

Who can hear of this without praising the Lord above?[i]

An unexpected vessel glides the clouds, celestial intrusion on a day otherwise given to earthbound affairs. An astonished crowd discovers that the air they breathe is sea, that fish, spears, and sky-dwelling swimmers course its elemental materiality. What had seemed a distant expanse for placing angels, fiery spheres and other incorporealities, an emptiness through which things move without encounter or touch, becomes inhabited, substantial, perturbingly entangled with life lived upon the ground. The thin substance through which human bodies move unthinking firms into a support for strange fish and lofty navigators, an ocean turbulent with changed perspective. 

This aerial ship is predictably cited across the Internet as evidence that UFOs once visited medieval Ireland. Yet Bishop Patrick quietly stresses not the futurity the vessel might herald but its arrival from an even stranger place, a compound and heterogeneous past. He provides his Latin lines with a patina of antiquity through deliberate archaism. The Irish are the Scoti, the name the Romans bestowed upon these people when they raided ancient Britain. Though I translated the phrase as “Lord above,” Patrick describes the Christian God as “the Thunderer,” an epithet stolen from the sovereign of Olympus (Jupiter Tonans, god of thunderbolts). The bishop’s story of sailors over Ireland and the blue become the deep possesses venerable textual precedent. In the Irish annals, cloud-sailing craft are recorded for 743, 744, and 748, depending on the source.[ii] The Annals of Ulster, for example, state laconically that “Ships with their crews were seen in the air.”[iii] Patrick may have obtained his story of airborne vessels from such an archive, or he might (as John Carey has argued) have truncated the narrative from an analogue to the account that appears in the Book of Ballymote, which likewise describes an aerial ship. Congalach was a tenth-century high king of Ireland. During a political gathering he spots a vessel in the clouds. Conversing briefly with one of its sailors makes the king realize the dangers of the ordinary world, and offers a chance for him to extend humane affect across what might have been an unbreachable divide:

Congalach son of Mael Mithig was at the assembly of Tailtiu one day when he saw a ship moving through the air. Then one of them [i.e. the ship's crew] cast a spear at a salmon, so that it came down in front of the assembly. A man from the ship came after it. When he seized one end of it from above, a man seized it from below. "You are drowning me!" said the man aloft. "Let him go," said Congalach. Then he is released, and swims upward away from them.[iv]

One of twelve monarchs who were supposed to have held the entirety of the island under their dominion, Congalach reveals here a wisdom lacking in the man who grabs the spear from the navigator and triggers a near drowning. He comprehends that for those aloft the air we breathe is sea, that danger inheres  even in transparent atmosphere.

Bishop Patrick of Dublin writes at a nexus in the transmission of the tale, as it mutates into further versions. For on the ground, historical reasons the episode will eventually be relocated to Clonmacnoise by the Shannon, an important monastery that built a reputation for wonders. Once tethered to this new foundation the narrative comes to feature an anchor stuck in the floor of its chapel and a swimmer who descends from the boat to free the embedded object. Seized by the curious monks, the sailor pleads for his life: “’For God's sake let me go!’ said he, ‘for you are drowning me!’”[v] Once released he swims upwards to his ship with the retrieved anchor. Seamus Heaney culminates this long Hibernian tradition when he celebrates the Clonmacnoise version of the wonder in a sequence embedded in his meditative poem Lightenings:

            The annals say: when the monks of Clonmacnoise

            Were all at prayers inside the oratory

            A ship appeared above them in the air.

The anchor dragged along behind so deep

It hooked itself into the altar rails

And then, as the big hull rocked to a standstill,

A crewman shimmied and grappled down the rope

And struggled to release it. But in vain.

‘This man can’t bear our life here and will drown,’

The abbot said, ‘unless we help him.’ So

They did, the freed ship sailed, and the man climbed back

Out of the marvellous as he had known it.

With sonorous assertiveness Heaney accomplishes fully the perspective shift inherent within the medieval tales of navigated ether. Out of the marvellous as he had known it: when the sky becomes roiled waters for unknown mariners, when firm ground is rendered ocean floor, when unexpected fish, aquatic javelins and wayward anchors turn air to brine and altars to reefs, prospect shifts. Impalpable air thickens to tempestuous surf, creating a denser version of what Julian Yates calls “the mutual or medial impressions left by the confluence of cloud and human person – the imagination become weather report.”[vi] Ecological enmeshment wondrously materializes, and habitual modes of dwelling are upended. Familiar terrain becomes unheimlich, un-home-ly, for (to quote the poet William Carlos Williams), “the sea is not our home .... / I say to you, Put wax in your ears rather against the hungry sea / it is not our home!”[vii]

How much more so when that sea is sky. Displaced from our practices of quotidian habitation – from the assemblies we attend with throngs, from the hushed regularity of the cloister -- we might enact a theological impulse and declare that the stone upon which we raise our houses and the wind against which we secure the door are not ours to own. We might turn our attention to divinity and cry that mundane life is brief sojourn, that the eternal home is elsewhere, that a Paradise after death awaits. Yet paradeisos means “enclosed park”: can we really desire to reside forever behind walls?[viii] In the late Middle English poem Pearl, for example, the narrator twice chooses a life among sorrows over the stillness that holds the gem-hewn dwellings of heaven.[ix] His earthly inclination is at once a religious failing and a powerfully comprehensible human choice to mourn the daughter he has lost and to love the green world in which he dwells. Like that anchor lodged in a world-not-to-be-endured, like that sailor who swims deep air and risks drowning for discovery, we could linger for a while in this dangerous space, this sky become sea, this world that is the world in which we dwell, elementally reconfigured. Upon hearing or reading such a story, we might even cast our eyes cloudward in the hope of glimpsing some vessel glide, unmoored for a few moments from the terrestrial tethering of our lives. If mundane expands to become more fully sublunary, if the “under moon” of which that adjective is composed stretches upwards to embrace a heaving vastness between landed lives and closed, incorporeal heaven, then for a moment we might be loosened from our earthly boundedness, unfastened from what Dan Brayton calls the “terrestrial bias” of our ecological frames.[x]

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[i] From his poem De mirabilibus Hibernie (On the Wonders of Ireland). The Latin is from The Writings of Bishop Patrick of Ireland, 1074-1084, ed. Aubrey Gwynn, S. J. (Dublin: The Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies, 1955) 64-65; the translation, somewhat loose, is my own. Patrick was bishop of Dublin from 1074-84.

[ii] John Carey, “Aerial Ships and Underwater Monasteries: The Evolution of a Monastic Marvel” 16. The references to aerial ships are in the Annals of Ulster, Tigernach, Clonmacnoise, and the Four Masters, as well as some manuscripts of Lebar Gábala.

[iii] Entry for 749, but annals are one year ahead at this point. See the Annals of Ulster in the CELT (Corpus of  Electronic Texts), http://www.ucc.ie/celt/published/T100001A/index.html

[iv] Quoted and translated in Carey, “Aerial Ships” 17.

[v] See Carey, “Aerial Ships” 18ff for the story and the likely historical background to its transfer to Clonmacnoise.

[vi] “Cloud/land – An Onto-Story,” postmedeival 4 (2013): 42-54, quotation at 43. He continues with some lines I will echo but amplify later in this essay: “However, scan the skies, however you may, I defy you to discern a finite agency, the ‘hand’ of this or that divinity, of Providence, a final cause, human or otherwise, even as you place one there. The weather remains an open system – that by your gazing you reduce to a dwelling” (43).

[vii] William Carlos William, Paterson (New York: New Directions, 1992), p. 200.

[viii] Cf. Tim Ingold: “It is perhaps because we are so used to thinking and writing indoors that we find it so difficult to imagine the inhabited environment as anything other than enclosed, interior space” (Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description [London: Routledge, 2011] 119). Though the authors of these medieval stories undoubtedly spent more time outdoors than most readers of this essay, the conditions under which inscription of their texts occurred would have been within enclosed habitation.

[ix] See “Pearl” in The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript : Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 5th edition, ed. Malcolm Andrew, Ronald Waldron (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2007).

[x] Dan Brayton, Shakespeare’s Ocean: An Ecocritical Exploration (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012).