Snakes and judgement: my imagining of Dante's imagining of Minos, the judge of the Inferno |
Cobras: such beautiful and energy-efficient animals, but not
to be trifled with. I recall one vivid
evening when I was a boy. I was pacing the lawn in front of our Vumba house, in
discussion with my father, when we suddenly heard my mother bellowing for help
from down the hill. For my courageous and
powerful mother to scream like that was unprecedented – we ran. Fifty metres down the driveway we encountered
her, staggering up and clutching her face. She had gone down to tuck our
free-range chickens into bed in the hen-house; counting them in she had spotted
an aberrant dark shape in a gloomy nesting-box, bent down to look – and was
treated to a dose of cobra venom smack in the eyes. We flung her down next to
the fish-pond and hosed her face; got milk from the kitchen and splashed that
under her lids. The three dogs were all over us with worry and excitement, lapping
at the milk and getting shrieked and snapped at by the banded mongoose Chiri. It was a riot.
Loaded up
with antihistamines and eye-wash, mum’s eyes came right eventually.
Naturally dad went down immediately with the .410 shotgun
and blew the Mozambique spitting cobra’s head to bits.
It’s an
age-old conflict, or course, and the cobra’s venom and spectacular hooding
behaviour have made it a vector for legends and religious ritual for millennia.
In India, Shiva drapes a cobra round his shoulders for protection; the Egyptian
goddess Isis was just one of a complex of ancient Egyptian to feature the
cobra, its gilded hood overseeing the passage of souls to the afterlife, among
other spiritual duties.
In
sub-Saharan Africa, the cultural significance of the cobra seems poorly
explored, at least in comparison with the python. An admittedly quick shimmy
through the internet hasn’t turned up much: an article on African snake myths
dating back to 1929, a few fragments scattered largely through tourism
websites.
Snakes,
both real and imagined, often appear in our literatures, including many stories
based on misconceptions which the conservationists are still frequently at
pains to debunk. Cobras spray rather than spit with aim; and no, the mate of a
deceased cobra will not ruthlessly hunt you down.
As with my
mother’s cobra, it’s the snake that usually comes off worst in encounters with
human fear and misunderstandings (the mythology of cold predation and even
judgement that goes at least as far back as Greek legends and to the Biblical Garden
of Eden). Yet in more modern poetry, distinctly different, more knowledgeable
and compassionate strands of feeling emerge.
As a young man Roy Campbell
(1901-1954) injected a vivid and sinewy new strand of poetic diction into the
South African literary scene – which he despised. This disdain is the driving force behind an
early cobra poem (I’d be interested to know if there were any earlier ones), “To
a Pet Cobra”:
With breath indrawn and every
nerve alert,
As at the brink of some profound
abyss,
I love on my bare arm, capricious
flirt,
To feel the chilly and incisive
kiss
Of your lithe tongue that forks
its swift caress
Between the folded slumber of
your fangs,
and half reveals the nacreous
recess
Where death upon those dainty
hinges hangs.
This is Campbell, in his characteristically flamboyant way,
flirting with death, apparently (I don’t know if he really had such a pet).
Whatever the case, there’s a distinct admiration for the reptile that informs
the sounds and rhythms: I love the quick “i” alliterations in the phrase “chilly
and incisive kiss”. The contrast between “deadly” power and a “dainty” beauty
are reinforced in a later stanza in the poem:
Dainty one, deadly one, whose
folds are panthered
With stars, my slender Kalahari
flower,
Whose lips with fangs are
delicately anthered,
Whose coils are volted with
electric power,
I love to think how men of my
dull nation
Might spurn your sleep with
inadvertent heel
To kindle up the lithe
retaliation
And caper to the slash of sudden
steel.
The contrast of fangs and flowers is perhaps not entirely
convincing (I have a sneaking suspicion it was impelled by the rhyme that
occurred to him between “panthered” and “anthered”), but interestingly informed
by the relatively recent advent of electricity. Then Campbell reveals his hand:
he want to be like the cobra, to be
the cobra, a potentially deadly but aesthetic force in the “dull nation” of
letters: he could then, he later puts it, “sting these rotted wastes into a
flower”.
In other
poems, the cobra still suffers. Campbell
got fed up and left to live in Spain, but Grahamstown doyen Guy Butler
remained, meditating obsessively on the place and role of the English-speaking
settler in South Africa, and in the Eastern Cape in particular. In one such
poetic meditation, his well-known poem “Myths”, the cobra makes a brief
appearance, victim of unthinking settler violence:
Alone one noon on a sheet of
igneous rock
I smashed a five-foot cobra’s
head to pulp;
Then lifting its cool
still-squirming gold
In my sweating ten separate
fingers, suddenly
Tall aloes were also standing
there,
Lichens were mat-red matches on
glinting boulders,
Clouds erupted white on the
mountain’s edge,
All, all insisting on being seen.
“Sweating ten separate fingers” – wonderfully captures the heightened
awareness, the sudden revelation of the there-ness
of the whole landscape; it’s not quite compassion, but a recognition of a
certain illegitimate sacrifice that has been made before the poet-speaker really looks at what’s around him,
demanding to be seen.
Butler’s friend and
part-contemporary Sydney Clouts (1926-82) also saw the cobra as iconic of an Africa
– or at least a localism – that resists European imperialism: it’s best
captured in his famous, uncharacteristically sardonic poem “Salute”:
Very Profound Men have lived in
Europe.
On the world’s perimeters,
sharkfins, anteaters, kangaroos,
pearloysters,
bears,
and others (fit for smiles).
It was the Wolf of Europe that
went prowling.
Good morning, gentle cobra, are
you well?
Who speaks that final line? Is it threatening, appealing, fearful?
Satisfyingly ambiguous.
Douglas Livingstone remains our
most ecologically-aware poet, and he wrote a few times about snakes. In “The
Killers” there is no doubt as to which creature is the more dangerous, the
human or the cobra:
You know how it is – fishing –
your bare feet
in the warm mush of dead leaves
near the edge
of the water, back against mossed
tree-bark,
beer cooling in the river, and a
wedge
of sandwiches, wondering when to
eat.
Then this small crackling move in
the steamed air,.
Out one eye-corner: seven feet of
snake,
of black-necked cobra, smoothly
slickly dark,
moving slowly down to drink,
half-awake,
her dusty brown eyes dim and
unaware. ...
I chose my time and jumped past
the fanned hood.
I got the shotgun and blew her
head clean.
I watched her lively dead
knottings. High birds
began to sing. I had to shoot: I
mean
that now her limp grey life lies
understood.
Isn’t that just typical of modern culture: things only
regarded as a comprehensible once they’re dead?
Livingstone extended these thoughts in the haiku-like, suggestive
stanzas of “Thirteen Ways of Looking at A Black Snake” (modelled on the
American Wallace Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”).
II
After the barbecue, a hubbub:
someone has caught a black snake.
The half-drum of coals is still
glowing.
XI
A pair of youths find a black
snake.
There is stick nearby. One has a
plastic bag.
At the other’s home there is a
microwave oven.
XII
After the day’s grime: a shower,
a drink,
the campfire, a meal:
an exhausted slide into the
sleeping bag
which resists with a chilled
muscled presence.
Part of it all is surely that snakes retain a certain
mysteriousness, an impenetrability, a resistance to anything we might call ‘communication’. And why should they be so dangerous anyway?
What god endowed them with fatal venom? How
on earth did it evolve? Cyril Edelstein in
his poem “Venom” writes:
When one begins to think
About strange phenomena of Nature
Such as the venom of snakes
Among thousands of instances
One finds one’s amazement
Subverted by claims
That these are no more
Than might be expected
Theirs being an inevitability
Arising from mutated genes
And continued by natural
selection.
... they speak far more strongly
to us
Of mystery than of sequence.
All too often, we give in to fear and an unwillingness to
live alongside such danger – but now (perhaps ever since D H Lawrence regretted
his killing one in his famous poem “Snake”) the death of a snake induces guilt
and regret – the polar opposite, it may be, of the moral implications of the
Eden story. Thus Karoo poet Clive
Lawrance echoes Livingstone in “Cape Cobra”: his caring is implied in the
uncaring exposed by the poem:
They caught sight of him outside
the village,
head high and proud, like the
prow
of an ancient craft
sailing through waves of sand...
The blood of their first mother
stirring,
with curses and blows, they
scuttled him
and beached him in dense bush
where his venom could evaporate,
his long hull crumble in time...
Will we humans ever be able to hold our heads up high and proud in the grand unfolding of Earth’s nature
– or will the cobra have the last laugh, and scuttle us?
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