No 46 - Cobras and poems

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:

 

(NELM)

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?

***********

No.45 - The geology of Dante's Inferno

Did Satan become a meteorite?

"Creation/Fall" (Dan Wylie 2017; acrylic on canvas)

In the early 14th century Dante Alighieri, author of the matchless Divine Comedy, would not have known about meteorites. Yet the rocky architectures of his Inferno ironically suggest something just like that.

Inferno fascinates me for many reasons besides the religious and the ethical questions it raises. While teaching it again recently, it struck me how pervasive is the presence of rock in the poem, how elaborate its depiction, how intricate its relationships to both ancient mythologies and the geographies of Dante’s real Italian life.

Google “Dante’s Inferno + rock” and you’ll discover some pretty odd stuff, including some hard-rock bands who favour spicing their songs with diabolical imagery, and a route-map to a rock climb named Dante’s Inferno on Old Reservoir Wall in Eden Park, Ohio. Not many seem to have written at length about this aspect of the poem, though: I found one sketchy article, and a chapter in a book on mediaeval geology that I can’t presently access. No doubt there’s more out there, but why take the fun out of having my own run at it? I’m also having fun re-imagining the vivid landscapes in paint: as the character-pilgrim Dante and his guide Virgil descend the multiple, narrowing circles of Hell, they are constantly encountering geological features: valleys and fissures and giddying cliffs, rivers of blood and swamps of boiling mud, jagged ridges and ditches, embankments and screes and a series of stone bridges. Those famously appalling words, Abandon hope all ye who enter here, are carved on a gateway of rock.

Oddly – and inexplicably – some features seem to have been built by the hand of man: the walls of the City of Dis halfway down, seemingly of “cast iron”, with “deep-dug moats” and huge towers sending undeciphered signals into the void; sarcophagi with carved lids; pathways. But even these apparently manufactured features, despite the paradoxical implication that eternal Hell is subject to change through time, have all the force of a terrible geological permanence.

Geological? The word ‘geology’ was only invented in 1795, and in Dante’s time knowledge of earth processes was still primitive. Much of what passed for science then was derived from the Greek philosophers such as Aristotle – and even his unflagging curiosity was available to Dante only indirectly through commentators such as the Persian Ibn Sina (a.k.a. Avicenna, d.1037) and Isidore of Seville. Aristotle had proposed something like continental tectonic-plate movement in his Meteorology (circa 350 BC); Isidore in his Etymologies (circa 610) aired the current theories of why the earth was demonstrably unstable:

The earth’s natural attribute is that of dryness, for if it is moist, that comes from a union with water. Of its motion some say that it is the wind in its hollows that, itself moved, moves the earth. ... Others maintain that lifegiving water moves in the earth and simultaneously shakes it, like a vessel, as for instance Lucretius (see On the Nature of Things). Yet others are of the opinion that the earth is “spongy”, and that its mostly hidden, collapsing interior shakes everything placed upon it. Also, an opening in the earth is created through the movement of water in the lower regions, or through repeated thunder, or through winds that erupt from cavities of the earth.

And Isidore, in his encyclopaedic geographical survey, notes the volcanic activity and visible lava of Mount Etna on Sicily and on the neighbouring Aeolian islands which “burn like Etna” and were “riddled with caves and tunnels” – real precedents for Hell which Dante would have read about, if not actually visited. Isidore, who took the actual existence of ancient mythic figures and places for granted, also described Paradise (“in the east”), thus:

A spring which bursts forth in the centre irrigates the whole grove and it is divided into the headwaters of four rivers. Access to this location was blocked off after the fall of humankind, for it is fenced in on all sides by a flaming sword, that is, encircled by a wall of fire, so that the flames almost reach the sky. Also the Cherubim, that is, a garrison of angels, have been drawn up above the flaming sword to prevent evil spirits from approaching, so that the flames drive off human beings, and angels drive off the wicked angels, in order that access to Paradise may not lie open either to flesh or to spirits that have transgressed.

 Isidore seemed to envisage a wheel-shaped Earth, but most, including Dante, knew it for a sphere, even if no one knew the full nature of its core. It is this mundane sphere with which the rebellious Satan, booted out of Heaven, calamitously collides. So massive is the impact that it at once creates the entire, funnel-shaped hollow of Hell, from one side of the planet to the other. In fact, only in the closing lines of Inferno, after they have traversed all nine terrible circles, does Virgil explain to Dante how this worked. They have just scrambled over the hairy flanks of Satan himself, locked in ice, and are about to emerge at the foot of Mount Purgatory, directly opposite on the globe from Jerusalem (I like to fancy this is Table Mountain):

On this side he fell down from Heaven; the earth,

Which till then had stood out here, impelled by fear

Veiled itself in the sea and issued forth

In our own hemisphere. And possibly,

What now appears on this side fled its berth

And rushing upwards left a cavity:

This hollow where we stand.

(Canto 34; Robert Pinsky’s translation)

In short, the shape of Hell is formed by the very earth shrinking from the repellent presence of evil.

As for the details of the resulting stony architecture – Dante strikes an extraordinary balance between mathematical precision in the arrangement of sins-to-circles, and an atmosphere of monstrous chaos – these are often paralleled with geology on the surface:

Where a wall of mountains rises

To form fair Italy’s border above Tirolo

Lies Lake Benaco, fed by a thousand sources: ...

There, all the cascades Benaco cannot contain

Within its bosom join in one river that flows [and]

Soon spreads to a marsh...

(Canto 20)

Descriptions of parts of the underworld are similarly precise:

 

"Transitions" (Dan Wylie, 2017)

                                    We travelled across

            To the circle’s farther edge, above the place

            where a foaming spring spills over a fosse.

            The water was purple-black; we followed its current

            Down a strange passage. This dismal watercourse

            Descends the greyish slopes until its torrent

            Discharges into the marsh whose name is Styx.

                        (Canto 7)

This kind of precision is deftly melded with the landscapes culled and modified from the various Classical accounts of others’ visits to imagined Underworlds: Orpheus, Ulysses, Theseus, Aeneas. So, for example, the pilgrims cross two of the rivers of the Greeks’ mythical Hades, Acheron and Styx, with their respective grumpy boatmen. But Dante also draws on apocryphal Christian texts (there is surprisingly little about hell in the Bible itself). Of these, the most geologically interesting is the so-called “Harrowing of Hell”, first related in the Gospel of Nicodemus. This is a mythic event in which Christ, between Crucifixion and Resurrection, visits Hell in order to liberate a clutch of deserving souls – and in so doing causes a substantial earthquake. Dante knew about earthquakes in seismically unstable Italy, describing one in Canto 12:

                                    This side of Trento

There is a place a landslide fell and struck

The Adige’s flank: because of unstable ground

Or earthquake, rocks once tumbled from the peak

And formed a passage where people can descend –

Such was the footing we had in that ravine...

Indeed, on the bank of Acheron “the earth of that grim shore/ began to shake: so violently / I shudder and sweat recalling it now” (Canto 3). Earth tremor as psychological terror. At several points in the narrative Virgil and Dante have to negotiate the damage of the Harrowing: at one juncture, Virgil sort of slaloms down a loosened scree holding a terrified Dante in his lap like a baby; at another, the sixth of the ten rock bridges across the ditches of the Eighth Circle has collapsed, necessitating some awkward and exhausting climbing. The lithic architecture of this realm – Malebolge – is precise:

A wide deep pit: concerning its design

"Trust" (Dan Wylie, 2017)

I shall say more in time. A belt remains

Between the base of that high wall of stone

And the central pit, a circular band divided

In ten concentric valleys, as in a plan

Where guardian moats are successively graded

Around a castle’s walls.

            (Canto 18)

The sixth bridge was shattered, as one resident of Hell informs the pilgrims, 1265 years previously – that is, when Christ was 35, the poem being set at Easter, AD 1300. By negotiating the wreckage of the bridge, Dante and Virgil are in a way re-celebrating that event: the 35-year old Dante, following Christ into Hell, is in the process of resurrecting his own sin-bedevilled soul.

            One could write a lot more, but suffice it to end with a speculation that rock itself is so present in the poem that it is virtually a character in its own right. It almost has agency. In an unremittingly over-written but provocative recent book, Stone: An ecology of the inhuman (2015), Jeffrey Jerome Cohen avers:

The philosopher Michel Serres argues that stone is the foundation of story at every archaeological level of human history. ... Stone becomes history’s bedrock as lithic agency impels human knowing. Neither dead matter nor pliant utensil, bluntly impedimental as well as collaborative force, stone brings story into being, a partner with language (just as inhuman), a material metaphor.

Though he has little to say about Dante or Inferno, Cohen pertinently adds:

Thinking geologically brings the mediaeval and the modern into unaccustomed proximity and reveals how, when imagining deep time, a shared vocabulary of cataclysm reveals an abiding inclination to stories of rocky entanglement, to the making of exigent and unexpected art.

*******

No.44 - Swimming off Cape Town: Unexplored theme #23

Like most middle-class touristic people who visit Cape Town, I guess, I have now and then dunked my semi-naked body in one or another of the surrounding seas. Always there is someone in the water off Fish Hoek or Muizenberg, Kommetjie or Clifton Beach. What does it all mean? Why do some perform this strange ritual, while others are terrified? What is the social meaning of this liquid sensuality? How has the sheer geography of this ocean-girt city inflected the behaviour of its inhabitants? Can the disparate motivations of all those individuals add up to a pattern, an identifiable ripple in the fabric of our society?

Naturally, there are more writers in Cape Town than you can shake a fresh steenbras at, and many of them have written about swimming off Cape Town – as far as I know a wholly unexplored literary motif. 

I started thinking about this – or doing something in my head resembling swimming more than thinking – because in browsing the poetry journals, as one does, I couldn’t help noticing how many swimming poems there are. These are quite distinct from poems about the ever-present ocean itself – what Finuala Dowling called in one poem the “Mad Atlantic” – and distinct from perhaps equally numerous beach-walk poems. It’s the act of immersion that intrigues me, the contact of human skin and salt water, and the relations of this immersion to gender, class and race, to sharks and gulls and kelp, to pleasure and fear, to athleticism and escape, to baptism and reverence. Poems and novels begin to hint at the layered meanings that swimming bears for its various practitioners.

One might start with two extracts from poems by well-known Capetonian poet and academic Kelwyn Sole. In “Poems of the sea for me”, the ocean is both “motherland” and “fatherland”:

Here

to run closer

and dive in

means to

come to

a jolt of blindness

a mordancy of salt

that only shocks

until it passes, and

the swimmer

can perceive

differently

to before

- my fatherland’s the sea (New Contrast 39:48)

Sole’s poem “Ocean” sounds more cynical about our condition. Perhaps the sea (as Natal poet Douglas Livingstone repeatedly suggested) is our ultimate origin, to which we subconsciously long to return – so we at some level feel weirdly in exile on land:

                                    the sea

does not coddle its children;

we hunker down through squalls,

trust to skidding compasses

past sleeting rain and windscream

merely to be exiled, again and again,

finally stranded ashore: and come

to ourselves walking upon doctrines

of rock                         or sand

Often immersion in the sea is used as a metaphor for something else – the progression of a love-relationship, for example.  This is the case in Rosamund Handler’s “Letter from...”

the cowed hush of waves

made me feel

ephemeral at twenty-two

the lichened rock

to which I clung

rigid as the face of a dead man

winter again

so many seasons untraceable

yet I recall how it was:

how I could have let go

if only you had held fast 

(New Contrast 148:19)

Sarah Frost’s “From the sea” takes this kind of figuration a bit further, here depicting the struggles of the poet herself:

You, poet, alone, immobile, at your keyboard,

the night sighing, a stranger at your back.

You wrestle the anger of the invisible,

lay it down. Stop picking at the scab of ‘not good enough’,

that makes you mute, look around.

Poets shoal within reach,

also surfacing to breathe. (New Contrast 151:11)

This makes for a nice segue to a novel which is also centrally about a poet and the sea, Finuala Dowling’s lovely What Poets Need, whose cover actually depicts a man swimming. The novel’s protagonist, struggling poet John Carson, regularly escapes into the water. Sometimes he has kids in tow:

Another still, hot day dawned, buzzing with the expectations of school holidays. This morning I took Sal, Harriet and Vera’s Alan with me when I went down for my swim at Dalebrook pool. Alan so loved it he stood before me shivering and thin in his towel, asking could we stay there all day ... On the slippery back wall of the tidal pool, Sal fights with him (hand to hand combat) but then steps back in her little Speedo costume and says, ‘I’m the princess. I don’t fight’. (176)

The following passage is particularly suggestive.

I swim there [Fish Hoek] at least once a week, usually because the tidal pool here is empty of water or too full of people. The men who swim at Fish Hoek corner in the morning are very interested in the water temperature. ’16.9’, they like to say, heartily, reading from a thermometer pendant. The women just stride in, adjusting their bathing caps and laughing as they catch waves on their boogie boards. I’m sort of friendly to them, but quite relieved once I’ve passed the breakers and am alone.

            I thought today about those few seconds before you’re properly ‘in’ cold water: how unpleasant it feels as you stand there clutching your unwilling sides. It must be fear of the evolutionary step backwards: back to the old amphibian life. Then, when you’re in, how lovely it is, all cares gone.

In that, you can feel the subtle pressures of gender roles, tensions between companionship and solitude, dress fashions, the imprint of scientific models. And there are more (so to speak) undercurrents in the next extract: sensitivity to seasonal changes, seaborne occupations, modes of leisure, the interface of sea and human architectures – and the internally liberating effect of the swim itself:

In October, you can still see whales breaching, and hear them blowing. Always on calm days there are kayaks gliding, and in almost all weathers, a fishing boat near the horizon. I rest my arms on the wet wall, look across at Simon’s Town bay in the distance and the harbour with its protective dolosse in the foreground, and say to myself, This is your life. It is hard to believe I am so lucky. (195)

The assumption that “swimming is always therapeutic” can be deceptive, though. John Carson takes his ailing 70-year old mother swimming:

 ... I stayed with her till she seemed to be swimming at her ease. Then I struck out as usual, aiming for the round house at Sunny Cove as my marker. I turned back at one point to check on her, but she wasn’t there. I was puzzled, peering. Something was wrong. I swam back inshore as rapidly as I could. Two men – a father and son, I think – were lifting my mother’s frail, limp body out of the water. She’d decided to cut her swim short, she’d been returning to the shore, when a wave had come from behind and felled her.

            We helped her to her feet. She spluttered and staggered ... She hardly spoke again after that, though she lived another two weeks. (204)

The antithesis between the therapeutic and the dangerous swim is also featured in perhaps the best-written of the novels I touch on here: Justin Cartwright’s White Lightning (2002). The rather unfortunately-named James Kronk has returned from England to the Cape to tend his dying mother. He tries to reintegrate by, among other things, connecting with ‘nature’ through mountain walks – and swimming:

The fuzzy lights on the lower levels of the mountain are visible in the biscuit twilight as i enter the water. I catch a wave easily – they are strong but benign, rolling resolutely to the beach – and then another. The water always feels warmer after the sun has set, warmer and more viscous. I emerge from the waves a better man, towel myself, and sit at the water’s edge. (180).

But the mad Atlantic is fickle, and late in the novel Kronk’s own internal and societal unravelling (I won’t reveal too much) is reflected in turbulent weather. He is chased into the sea by some angry pursuers. This is escape for real, rather than escapism:

The grey waves are huge. The wind is holding them back so that they rise and fall sharply, their crests dispersed by the wind. Gulls cry in their cold-hearted fashion. Here on shore the rain and the mist are so low that the tops of the sand dunes are obscured, but out to sea, some miles away, a filtered light strikes the water, forming a silver island within the bay. ... I run in up to my waist  and then dive into a breaker. As I emerge from this mountain of water, another huge wave follows and tumbles me over, so that I am rolled towards the beach, where the seven men are waiting. ... I am beyond the breakers now, swimming steadily, breast-stroke. My plan is to swim far out of sight and wait until night falls, perhaps an hour away, and then come ashore in the dark. ... I keep swimming ... out to where my father nearly caught the biggest Red Steenbras ever seen ... (237).

I won’t spoil the ending for you. But it’s a reminder that for all the swimmers taking their pleasure, there are those who failed to swim, and died: so many shipwreck victims, the Xhosa chieftain Makana, who drowned trying to escape from Robben Island in 1819, to the famously suicidal Afrikaans poet Ingrid Jonker, who walked into the ocean to drown in 1965. In the very first poem of André Brink’s selection of translations, Black Butterflies (2007),  entitled “Escape”, Jonker wrote of death in water as a liberation from her own mental distress:

From this Valkenberg [mental hospital] have I run away

and in my thoughts return to Gordon’s Bay

...

Washed out my body lies in weed and grass

in all the places where we once did pass.

So, more or less, it transpired. But let’s end on a more cheerful note – a scene from, of all places – Agatha Christie’s one southern African-set crime thriller, The Man in the Brown Suit (1924):

I caught a fast train to Muizenberg and got there in about half an hour. It was a nice trip. We wound slowly round the base of Table Mountain, and some of the flowers were lovely. My geography being weak, I had never fully realized that Cape Town is on a peninsula, consequently I was rather surprised on getting out of the train to find myself facing the sea once more. There was some perfectly entrancing bathing going on. The people had short curved boards and came floating in on the waves. It was far too early to go to tea. I made for the bathing pavilion, and when they said would I have a surf board, I said “Yes, please.” Surfing looks perfectly easy.  It isn’t. I say no more. I got very angry and fairly hurled my plank from me. Nevertheless, I determined to return at the first possible opportunity and have another go. I would not be beaten. Quite by mistake I then got a good run on my board, and came out delirious with happiness. Surfing is like that.  You are either vigorously cursing or else you are idiotically pleased with yourself. (94)

So much for being at sea on a “plank”.

*****

No.43 - Great White Stories

I thought it wasn’t going to happen. They phoned to say the weather was too bad.  It was: an icy wind was blustering in off the South Atlantic, whipping the sea into opaque soapy breakers, offshore a blistering of whitecaps. I settled for a peek at a huddle of miserable-looking African penguins on the old slipway of the Betty’s Bay whaling station. Plinths carried blurry sepia photos of the historic slaughter. This little group of penguins is also the remnant of a far larger population, drastically reduced because the over-fishing of their food sources. There are few oceanic species that have escaped the depredations of humans – not even the great predators.

The following day another call: the weather looks to improve, perhaps we are on after all; would I like to make myself available? For a mere 1600 clams, why not? I drive down to the coast again; the day is overcast and a little ruffled, not ideal but calm enough for the boats. Sightings are possible though not guaranteed. After a briefing delivered with rough humour, seventeen of us board the rather diminutive boat: an international coterie of hopeful and slightly nervous gawkers: an English accountant, a Spanish couple (she gung-ho, he reticent), a pair of American women, a family group of over-exuberant Mancunians. We churn and bounce out across the green swells, cold spray slashing back across the sides.  Then slow and drift to a stop.  There are several boats out here already, slopping fish oil into the sea and attracting flocks of gulls and skuas.  And, hopefully, great white sharks.

We have been divvied into small groups, the none-too-substantial looking cage winched around to the side and roped tight, and we have wrestled ourselves into the clammy rubber of wetsuits.  Mine has a rent in the shoulder I hope wasn’t the result of a bite.  We wait.  The chum slicks the surface of the sea to the west; a sailor is dunking the head of a tuna on a rope and dragging it back and forth hopefully. (Tuna is also pretty endangered, incidentally.)  The time seems ripe: we don masks and clamber over the side. This is not so much a shark-dive as a human-dunk. I am caged in with the raucous group from Manchester. Perhaps big fish don’t worry about squeaking yells and appalling jokes, but I do wish they’d shut up; it seems disrespectful.

At any event, more or less on cue, a couple of great whites make passes at the tuna head in front of us, two-metre whipping shapes. People yell “Down!” but there’s not too much to be seen under water, visibility poor after the storms of the day before. Still, one shark bangs up against the cage a foot from my nose, a slick of violent grey, the raked gills, the famously indifferent eye, gone in two seconds. I know they must be tough animals, but it can’t be good thrashing into corners of metal.

Indeed, emerging from this mildly exciting encounter, I feel deeply ambivalent about the whole enterprise. There are too many tourist boats out here, greasing the sea with fish-oil and guts and noise. The sharks attracted in expend a good deal of energy for no reward, and with unpredictable effects on their hunting and communal lives, and thus on the ecosystem more generally. I understood we would have a marine biologist on board, underlining putative links between the tourist outings and research; but we have only a professional diver effectively on vac from repairing North Sea oil rigs. I ask him about the allegation that chumming has exacerbated shark attacks on humans; he predictably denies it, claiming that tagged sharks show they only stay in the bay for 4 to 7 weeks, too short to learn any dependency on chumming. The chum is pure fish, no mammal material permitted.  In any event, attacks on humans are minimal to almost vanishing-point: according to posters back at the office, 419 people die annually from faulty toasters, maybe 4 in shark attacks – and up to a hundred million sharks are killed by humans.  Not even our great oceans can sustain that level of slaughter.

The arguments for and against cage-diving are fierce and various (see here). The usual argument ‘for’ is that the experience is uniquely educational – but in fact one learns little from watching a three-metre shark thrash at the tuna head for a few violent seconds. Not that I’m not glad to have seen it, but the situation is shot through with a certain artificial contrivance, a edge of intrusiveness. There’s a certain kind of education best accessed through film and literature, and through just leaving the animals alone.

Of course, being that kind of guy, I started fossicking about for shark literature. There are numerous web sites advertising “shark poems”, most of them for kids and a large number of them very bad. I did find one poem, by Australian Rachel Mead, which captured my own feelings about the shark dive beautifully – we are “human bait”, she says, “exhibiting ourselves to the wild”, ultimately unable to remember much about the vibrant glimpse one is accorded:

It’s difficult to know what to tell you, what I saved

from that oddly geometric world, the hard blue planes

speared with light, the hollow toll of cage on boat,

those plates of cold sliding between wetsuit and skin.

South African writing on sharks seems as sparse as the sharks themselves. Such references as exist are usually more symbols of something else, something in ourselves, not about the sharks themselves. Sydney Clouts’s poem “The Shark”, for example, is about lovers in a forest, the circling shark an image of some unspoken inner fears.  In Henrietta Rose-Innes’ novella Shark’s Egg, we are a little closer, though inevitably land-bound.  On the opening page, the protagonist Joanna recalls beach-combing near Cape Town and finding

a curious black pod, with a spine the length of her little finger at each corner.  When she picks it up it leaves a neat impression in the damp sand.

            Look, look here, what’s this?

            Her mother turns it over carefully with her pale fingers. It’s a shark egg, she says, her voice regretful, handing it back to the child. Some people call them mermaid’s purses.

            ... At home, sceptical, she cuts the object open with a pair of nail-scissors. Inside, the embryo is still alive, a perfect little shark no bigger than a new tadpole. It gapes and thrashes its tail, at last expires. ... Joanna is shaken, and for days feels deeply guilty.

            But also powerful: she has killed a shark.

Later in the novel, Joanna works in an aquarium, and sees real sharks – but always in their entrapment, separated from them by translucent glass.

South African-born writer Basil du Toit has a poem about a shark.  It, too, is dead: the poem is entitled “Unravelling a Shark”, depicting a post-mortem in which the shark is reduced to the mechanical:

Slabs of plumbing run the length of its body

like the dust bag in a vacuum cleaner;

its works are as plain and practical

as the rubber windpipes in a car’s engine.

And then the shark becomes symbolic of humans once again:

...sometimes we use the mauling ethics

of the shark: betraying, and moving on,

leaving behind us the shocked and shattered meat

of marriages, girlfriends, daughters.  (Older Women, Snailpress, 1996)

Not much justice accorded the deceased shark.  In 1987, Etienne de la Harpe wrote “Shark”, in which the speaker descends in a dive through a rainbow of watery lights towards a vision of death itself,

And meeting the true host of this

dark ocean sky:

all long-lethal lethargy, of tapered steel-grey,

and blunt with a deadness of eye. (25/25, 1989)

I haven’t searched much further – but isn’t there a work out there that honours the shark, for the shark’s sake?

*****