No 48 - The Ecca Poets

In memoriam Norman Morrissey

(Quilt by Mariss Everitt)

Eastern Cape denizens often speak of the Hogsback with an obvious affection – its humped dolerite ridges, its forest walks and waterfalls, its eco-shrines and oddball potters and painters, its famously tiny chapel and soggy leaf beds and quaint seclusions. It’s one of the special little havens of green high leisure on the edge of the more gaunt Karoo.

It has also for decades been the haunt of a unique cabal of productive poets, who call themselves the Ecca Poets, after the name of the regional shale that undergirds much of the area, and the pass that curls through the dramatic hills between Fort Beaufort and Grahamstown. There isn’t to my knowledge another group quite like it in the country, at least not in the rural areas. (The Batsotso Jesters may be an urban equivalent.) Over many years they have produced almost annual collaborative volumes: they started up in 1989, and I suspect that the National English Literary Museum’s database is incomplete. NELM’s earliest record is of Cast (1996), followed by (amongst others) Holdall (2002), Passover (2003), Dispositions (2004), Keynote (2008), Spaces (2009), Brood (2010), Gold in Spring (2016). Add to the collaborative collections a number of  two- or three-partner publications, occasional pamphlets, and a goodly number of individuals’ volumes. There is a lot of very good poetry in this steady and devoted stream, amounting I imagine to at least several hundred poems. Yet the Ecca poets have been almost entirely neglected by the critical establishment. Even Jeanette Eve, in her sumptuous A Literary Guide to the Eastern Cape, while including some of the individual poets, makes only a passing mention of the group's earliest manifestation as the “Echo” poets. It’s high time someone did a major study.

I’ve known many of the poets, more or less tangentially, been to a number of their readings and launches, occasionally reviewed one of their volumes. Inevitably over the years the composition of the group has waxed and waned. Steady at the centre stands the owlish bonhomie of Brian Walter, in whose strongly ecologically-aware poetry I have taken most interest. Like other Hogsback residents and writers, he taught at Fort Hare University in Alice in the dry valley below, before some years ago moving to Port Elizabeth. Another is the robustly humorous Catholic priest Cathal Lagan, who brings a particular theological depth to some of the poetry. To judge by the number of poems these two dedicate to each other, they are especially close comrades. There was founder member Basil Somihlalo, the only other member of the band, as far as I know, to have passed away so far (in 1994). Mzi Mahola, once attending Fort Hare university, later mostly occupied with running a museum in New Brighton, contributed for a number of years, as well as producing individual volumes. Of roughly the same generation is Quentin Hogge, who a while ago was (at least by his own account in his recent volume, More Poems, Boet) ostracised for publishing a particularly non-PC poem. Hogge has a uniquely wry, colloquial and forthright – one might say distinctively Eastern Cape – voice. Norman Morrissey’s voice is not dissimilar: punchy, pithy, colloquial, at times sardonically wise.

Leavening the gritty voices of these older gents are some younger voices. Lara Kirsten, when she isn’t on tour playing the piano, contributes a vigour and theatricality in Afrikaans. Mariss Stevens (Everitt), on the strength of owning a Hogsback house, joined in for a while, until (despite having produced a lovely volume of her own, On Gardening) she decided she’s a better quilter than a poet. And in recent years Silke Heiss, already an established poet in the little journals, fell in love with Norman; together they energetically promoted poetry through readings and workshops, even as she supported him in his last years. Both their latest productions, including Norman’s last volume, Strandloop, are saturated with their love for one another.

Only an extensive survey could do justice to the range of voices, concerns, ideas, subjects, forms and settings covered by this vivacious bunch. Few of them do not ruminate at some point on the purview, power and purposes of poetry itself. Brian Walter, for example, sets out a succinct manifesto, or methodology, that would help many a baffled student, in “Memo”:

            Try not to say too much,

            but with a Keatsian hand of chance

            trace with a light touch

            a sketched instance;

            cut and shade, tone and hue;

            close with a Janus glance.

            (Bookmark)

Cathal Lagan ends his poem “Tickler” this way:

            I wanted to be a tickler of fish,

            catch the sprung muscle of it

            with a fearsome grip,

            but in that there was no art.

            Now it is mine to play with words –

            figuring them out.

(Bookmark)

That “sprung muscle" - lovely. But for now, the story is the celebration of the words and hefty presence of Norman Morrissey. In a poem dedicated to Norman, Quentin Hogge touches on a theme common to many Ecca poems – disdainful suspicion of corrupting urbanism and commercialisation in contrast to the rich organic belonging of the paradisal Hogsback.

            Paradise

Airports respect no dreams:

the taxi terminus

and subway stations stink,

these human sewers,

where canteens serve

soya sossige and acorn coffee.

Machines go berserk.

sensing steel fillings

in obsolete teeth,

while terror climbs aboard unnoticed.

CNN will take you there –

don’t leave your lounge.

Unless,

where you want to be

is where the loerie

floats the synapses of forest,

a scatter of scarlet wings

in the ganglions of light,

where the silent boomslang

rules,

a pause of utter command.

(Borderline 2002)

Perhaps in belated response to this, Morrissey wrote “Eden”:

 

(Quilt by Mariss Everitt)

My boomslang

would lie hammocked atop the hedge

- thick as my wrist,

two metres and more in the lounging –

and let me get near

as she basked.

Then I got a gardener

and she suddenly

disappeared

- which is a slash ahead of Yahweh,

he left the Serpent at least

at peace in Eden.

There’s that trademark wry humour, the little sardonic twist of wisdom. So although many of the Ecca poets might be regarded as modern-day pastoral organicists, they were hardly oblivious to the serpents in the garden – the technologies and politics that interpenetrate everything, the ills that bedevil the blood itself. As he aged (though he was ‘only’ 68 when he died), Norman attended to the voices of his own body. He wrote in “Just Sound?”:

There was a hip-replacement

then a long, deep pneumonia

that nearly got me – body and soul

- that set me on crutches.

The legs are weak and stiff

and the lungs I must have to walk again

need legs to strengthen them.

Doesn’t it all sound

just like life?

He wasn’t about to collapse into maundering self-pity, though, reminding himself in the very next poem in Bookmark, entitled “Bitching”:

Cervantes wrote Don Quixote

in a dungeon,

Malory’s Morte d’Arthur

came out of a gaol;

and here I am

bitching

about writing

from

a mere sick-bed!

There was always something of the twinkle-eyed grumble about Norman, as he delivered his poems with a ponderous gruffness from behind his whitening beard, affecting something of the air of an oracular sage. At the Grahamstown launch of his last volume, Strandloop, in May last year, he read more slowly and gruffly than ever – we were beginning to suspect even then that the sick-bed was getting the better of him. But so much of his poetry is about beauty, and love, and the holy delicacy of the natural world and its denizens. Like so many of his poems, “Wind” is as short and direct as a tossed pebble:

I once saw the wind

a stream

like crystal water

flowing

You may be out in the invisible wind now, Norman, but the words flow on, crystalline as a Hogsback stream.

*****

No.47 - Back to the Amazon

All photos: Dan Wylie

"The Amazon is dying!” trumpets one of the endless stream of online petitions. Corruption, greed, collusion between politicians and moguls hungry to cash in on beef or minerals or electricity ... Not much has changed over three centuries in that quarter. But at the same time – this time of global environmental crisis – many voices are being raised in a kind of love for ‘Grandmother Amazon’.

What a change this is from the attitudes of earlier European travellers, ethnographers and missionaries who, in their smug and self-sacrificial way, gave themselves over to trying to haul remote and isolated ‘Indian’ tribes bodily into modernity.  Those intruders, coming from an industrially-developing Europe which largely thought of wilderness as a blight to be conquered or held at a safe aesthetic distance, found the Amazonian jungle terrifying. And they took their fear out on the hapless indigenous peoples, even as they enslaved them to leach the forests of rubber.

Michael Taussig’s gritty and unsparing book, Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man, relates the cycle of violence against both nature and natives in the colonial Amazon:

[T]he image of stark opposition and of otherness in the primeval jungle comes forth as the colonially intensified metaphor for the great space of terror and cruelty ... working its way in the ancient forests of the tropics ... such that the brutal destructiveness imputed to the natural world serves to embody even more destructive relations in human society.

In the 1820s (just as Thomas Pringle & Co were settling in another wilderness in our own Eastern Cape), the British explorer Charles Stuart Cochrane experienced the jungle as a riot of predatory violence:

[E]ach shrub or tree weakens or destroys its neighbour, by its excess of produce, which is greater than the space will admit. One plant springs up to destroy its predecessor, and is doomed to the same fate itself by the growth of its successor. It appears as if a war existed amongst plants, similar to that which devastates the human world, and prevails even amongst brutes and insects. ... Why it should be so – what great or good object is gained by it, we know not; we only perceive that all are under some irresistible influence, and impelled by some invisible power.

And this thirty years or more before Darwin published On the Origin of Species.

A hundred years later, responses remained often the same.  The Colombian Joaquin Rocha descended into the Amazon basin from the Peruvian Andes. Down in the jungle, he wrote:

The silence hangs heavy, broken only by the clanging clamour of the torrents, the growling of tigers, and the swarming of infinite vipers and venomous insects. In [the village of] Descanse begins the plague of vampire bats that extends until Brazil, treacherously sucking in the hours of dreams the blood of men and animals. There also, by the side of Brassymum galactodendron whose trunk when incised yields milk as delicious and nutritive as the cow’s, grows the Rhus juglande folia whose mere shade puffs up and scars the careless wanderer. There one begins to suffer the privations and calamities of the wilderness, that in the Caqueta and the Putumayo grow so as to at times make of life there scenes whose horror could figure in the Dantean pages of Purgatory and Hell.... There the person in perpetual contact with this savage wilderness becomes just as savage.

A strange mix of  botanical accuracy and revulsion.  It was the lack of controllable order that seemed to space visitors out most.  The indigenes had to be subjected to the same order, too (or elevated into it, as some thought of it).  The result, as Roger Casement was almost simultaneously documenting in both the Congo and the Peruvian Amazon, the impact on local populations was vicious to the point of genocide.

Oddly, at much the same time as Rocha was quaking in his boots, and Casement was irritating the British Government with the grim truths of colonial invasion, the great English Modernist writer Virginia Woolf was composing The Voyage Out (1915). The characters in this early novel voyage to a fictional holiday resort on the South American coast; most of the ‘action’ consists of intricate conversations about one another, but at one point some of them do take a boat trip up a major river into the forested hinterland. As one might expect from a writer who had never been there, the descriptions of the jungle are rather generalised. At first, this forest which, Woolf writes, had scarcely changed since Elizabethan times, overwhelms:

They seemed to be driving into the heart of the night, for the trees closed in front of them, and they could hear all around them the rustling of leaves. The great darkness had the usual effect of taking away all desire for communication by making their words sound thin and small ... The trees and the undergrowth seemed to be strangling each other near the ground in a multitudinous wrestle; while here and there a splendid tree towered high above the swarm, shaking its thin green umbrellas in the upper air.

And one character, Hirst, bursts out:

“It makes one awfully queer, don’t you find ... These trees get on one’s nerves – it’s all so crazy. God’s undoubtedly mad. What sane person could have conceived a wilderness like this, and peopled it with apes and alligators?”

But other characters do find glimpses of beauty in the forest, moments of meditation, fabulous butterflies. This party of displaced and introverted English makes a boat trip to an “Indian village”, evidently rather set up for the titillation of foreign voyeurs. A sad and depleted community, the scene saddens them, makes at least one character even more aware of the essential fragility of their lives.

Much the same happened to me when I descended on the Amazon almost exactly a century later in 2013. I had the advantage of a jet liner that landed me in Manaus, a city of half a million right in the middle of the Amazon basin. I shacked up at little tour outpost on a tributary of the Amazon itself, with a dining room mounted on great floating logs and reed-walled cabins. I was mainly there to research caimans for my book on crocodiles – which I did to the extent of going out with a guide at night, boating among the reeds with eyes gleaming back in our torchlight, until we caught a little fellow who had to suffer the indignity of being manhandled by everybody and photographed before being released. 

Like Woolf’s characters we also dropped in on the obligatory ‘Indian village’, watched women weaving house walls from palm fronds, lamented the thinness of the scabrous dogs, and felt obliged to buy a necklace adorned with a piranha jaw. It was all rather dispiriting and faintly artificial – a sense of a kind of “slow violence” (the phrase is Rob Nixon’s) inflicted on a reluctant people.

With motley international companions I also boated through various channels in the complex waterways, looking for grey and pink dolphins in the ochre waters, sloths and howler monkeys in the trees, jacanas in the water-lily beds. The river was in flood, so we could kayak almost through the lower canopy of the huge trees – what they call the varzea – where all horizons and directions and depths are lost in a shimmering maze of bewitching reflections melting into more reflections.

And we walked in the jungle. Unlike my predecessor travellers, I absolutely loved it. For all the sweat-drenching humidity, the startling thorns, and stinging ants, and tarantulas we coaxed out of their burrows, and the possibility of jaguar and anaconda (I didn’t get to see either, sadly), I felt utterly at home there. I was raised in forest – albeit nothing so gigantic as this – so my soul was prepared, despite the radical differences in vegetation. I couldn’t stop taking photos of light through palm fronds, and luminous fungi, and fringes of feathery leaves, and marvellously symmetrical creepers snaking up the massive buttresses of towering trees. We slept out, in a row of hammocks under a reed lean-to: I could scarcely sleep for the multiplex, layered sounds of the forest’s insects and frogs and creaking night birds and subtle whisperings of wind and nearby water. Struggle and competition there surely is out there, but also a riot of symbioses, mutualities, supports and sharings. What I could hear of it through the snoring, that is: I just wanted to be alone out there, in the not-silence.

Back in Manaus, I attended part of a jazz festival in the incongruously huge, gold-domed opera house – an opera-house in the jungle! This of course was the subject of Werner Hertzog’s film Fitzcarraldo, in which the hero Fitzgerald humps the materials for an opera-house over a jungle-encrusted ridge between rivers to construct his dream (wholly unnecessarily, in real life). Hertzog captured the experience of filming Fitzcarraldo in another film – a meta-film – called The Burden of Dreams, in which he had this to say about the jungle:

 

There is some kind of harmony. It is the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder. And we in comparison to the articulate vileness and baseness and obscenity of all this jungle.

            We in comparison to that enormous articulation, we only sound and look like badly pronounced and half-finished sentences out of a stupid suburban novel, a cheap novel.

            And we have to become humble in front of this overwhelming misery and overwhelming fornication, overwhelming growth and overwhelming lack of order. Even the ... stars up here in the sky look like a mess. There is no harmony in the universe. We have to get acquainted with this idea that there is no real harmony as we have conceived it. But when I say this, I say this all full of admiration for the jungle. It is not that I hate it. I love it. I love it very much. But I love it against my better judgement. ... fornication and asphyxiation and choking and fighting for survival and growing and just rotting away...

Some love. Obscenity and fornication – really? I suspect the problem was that the jungle, unaccountably, failed to stroke Werner’s overweening ego.

Likewise even the most lyrical and insightful of all Amazonian ethnographers, Philippe Descola, whose book The Spears of Twilight relates his time of living with the fabled Putumayo people. He cannot but feel rebuffed, his very sense of self disintegrating, if he approaches the forest wearing European artistic lenses:

Submerged in its green monotones, nature here is not of the kind to inspire a painter. Only at twilight does it deploy its bad taste, in line with Baudelairean aesthetics, exceeding the artifice of the gaudiest of coloured images. The inhabitants of the forest become exceptionally agitated during this brief debauchery of colour. The animals of the daytime noisily prepare for sleep while the

nocturnal species awaken for the hunt, their carnivorous appetites whetted. Smells are also more definable now, for the heat of the long late afternoon has given them a consistency that the sun can no longer dissipate. ... [T]he sensual organs are suddenly assailed at dusk by a multiplicity of simultaneous perceptions that make it very difficult to discriminate between sight, sound and smell. Thanks to this brutal onslaught on the senses, the transition between day and night in the forest acquires a dimension of its own as if, for a brief moment just before the great void of sleep takes over, the human body is no longer separate from the environment.

When acres of clear-felling (for rubber and hamburgers), pollution from mining operations (mercury turning up in the tissues of caimans), and proposals to build dozens of dams on Amazonian tributaries, this sense of being overwhelmed is waning. The ecological consequences of decimating the “lungs of the world", and the planet’s highest reservoir of biodiversity, are one thing. We are also destroying the very sense of mystery on which our psyches seem to long for, like an inner Eden.  Michael Taussig is sensitive to its fragility, but even his perception is shadowed by a sense of threat:

Yet all around in the forest nothing is fixed. The rain is beating. The water drips off the shining leaves in the dark forest. Rivulets form into streams and rivers gather force to form the muddy Amazon swirling past the Italian marble and Polish prostitutes of rubber-rich Manaos ... Onward swirls the river to the sea close by where Columbus’s boats met the heaving chop of the currents of the Orinoco, one of the four rivers of Paradise...

What have we come to, when the very health of our planet is perceived as alien to us...

******

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.

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