On the marvellous

I'm sitting in our bright new flat in Cricklewood. The early June is quite cold. That I shall take with me—the American quite. Panama, lizardskin boots, bolo tie. Every other memory of Arizona is but a dream of an ancient and unreal past. The sun is setting dully over the suburban gardens, over the trampoline, the koi pond and overwrought fountain, and the brick shed with stained glass in the windows, in a vaguely art nouveau style, to match the front doors so common in northwest London. I can still taste my dinner—a little ham and mature cheddar, and tapas olives soaked in garlic and chili. On the table is a copy of Rabelais and his World, purchased today for a mere 4 quid from a shelf of books formerly belonging to Angela Carter. Sadly it lacks annotations. A thousand ideas clamour in me, ideas for posts, let us call them essays, some requests, from the likes of Mencius and Goodwin—the only Valver who, bless his heart, condescends to read the Varieties—requests which I have been admittedly impunctual in fulfilling, but which I have not forgotten.

You know this Seamus Heaney poem, don't you?

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 shinned 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.

(No? Well, it's very famous.) The poem is part viii of his poem 'Lightenings', from the 1991 collection Seeing Things. You know it because Heaney chose to read it when he was given the Nobel Prize a decade or so ago. He evidently considers it very special. Others consider it special too. Apparently there's just something, well, marvellous about it.

The poem is based on traditional Irish materials from the late Middle Ages; the earliest hint of the story comes from the Annals of Ulster for 748. But compare another account of the legend, this one from a Briton in France—Gervase of Tilbury's Otia Imperialia, written for Otto IV around 1215, contains this splendid passage (book I, ch. 13):

A strange [supereminentiam] event in our own times, which is widely known but none the less a cause of wonder, provides proof of the existence of an upper sea overhead. It occurred on a feast day in Britain, while the people were struggling out of their parish church after hearing high mass. The day was very overcast and quite dark on account of the thick clouds. To the people's amazement, a ship's anchor was seen caught on a tombstone [lapido tumulo] within the churchyard walls, with its rope stretching up and hanging in the air. They were advancing various opinions on the matter to each other, when after a time they saw the rope move as if it were being worked to pull up the anchor. Since, being caught fast, it would not give way, a sound [uox] was heard in the humid air as of sailors struggling to recover the anchor they had cast down. Soon, when their efforts proved vain, the sailors sent one of their number down; using the same technique as our sailors here below, he gripped the anchor-rope and climbed down it, swinging one hand over the other. He had already pulled the anchor free, when he was seized by the bystanders. He then expired in the hands of his captors, suffocated by the humidity of our dense air as if he were drowning at sea. The sailors up above wasted an hour, but then, concluding that their companion had drowned, they cut the rope and sailed away, leaving the anchor behind. And so in memory of this event it was fittingly decided that that anchor should be used to make ironwork for the church door, and it is still there for all to see.

Now, whose story is more interesting? Heaney's ending is a damp squib—it lacks power, lacks guts. I was flicking through Seeing Things today, and found it consistently gutless. It is weak to explain the meaning of one's own wordplay, as Heaney does at the end of 'Lightenings'. And tone-poem haikus hardly seem impressive from so established a poet. Likewise, 'So / They did, the freed ship sailed' is pure bathos. There is no tension, in Heaney's poem, between the world of the celestial sailors and the world of men; there is a lack of ideas.

In Gervase's version the people of our world are far less benign. It is telling that the anchor catches not on 'altar rails' but on a tombstone or burial mound. The bystanders do not aid the celestial visitor, but seize and hinder him. Tension between heaven and earth is established by the fact of the sailor's death—suggested as a possibility by Heaney, but daringly actuated by Gervase. It is, for the mediaeval, a dumbshow retelling of the life of Christ himself. Heaney feels the need to make the metaphor obvious—'he can't bear our life here'—but Gervase is happy to remain at the level of the literal; that is the quiet strength of his tale.

Gervase tells the story for a reason. He is attempting to justify the mediaeval doctrine of the 'upper water', follwing Genesis 1.7: 'And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so'. The upper water was, one presumes, originally suggested by the phenomenon of rain. But ever since Augustine's commentary on Genesis, theologians had been hammering away at it. Bede, thinking of the Milky Way, postulated that the water was frozen, for the purpose of cooling the fire of the stars, appearing to us as a 'stretched hide'. William of Conches, writing around 1150, dismisses Bede's theory for the simple reason that fire melts ice; for William the Milky Way is a mere trick of the light, and the upper water is just vapour. Robert Grosseteste summarises more views about the two waters in Part One of his Hexaemeron (1230). But Gervase isn't so interested in the subtle disputations of his forebears; he prefers to tell fables, poetic articles of faith. The story of the celestial sailors is followed by an anecdote in which a seaman drops a knife overboard, and back home, halfway around the world, his wife sees the same knife fall through a skylight onto the kitchen table. This is the marvellous as Gervase knows it.

In huius itaque rei memoriam de ancora illa ferramenta ostii basilice illius prudenti consilio fabricata sunt, que et publico patent conspectui.

Stuck in the world is a remnant of the beyond, reused as 'ferramenta ostii basilice', ironwork for the church door, woven into the fabric of a spiritual architecture, as befits such a fragment. I like to imagine a triple play between ancora (anchor), ancorita (monk) and ancora (hanc horam: still, yet). In Gervase's world—in mine, I think—the sublime must leave a trace of itself, token and totem, in the realm of experience—else it would remain only a dream of an ancient and unreal past. Indeed, the world is itself as a continual accretion and fashioning of the shells of the marvellous, extinct embers of the most divine and most eternal fire. This, therefore, is what I want: a poetry of ideas.

Update: J. J. Cohen, professional academic and founding member of the mediaevalist blog In the Middle, links. Fancy, two posts on Gervase's sailor-mirabilium in the space of a week! Cohen writes: 'When "our" previously invisible air becomes weighty enough to function as someone else's sea, then "our" skies become the currents by which the medieval archipelago exuberantly connects difference to sameness in unanticipated ways.' I have no idea what this means, but it sounds grand, doesn't it?

Update #2: Ray Davis condescends too.