He made a particular study of the reproductive system of his chosen life-forms. His interest in these matters dated back some time—the author of Swammerdam was well aware of the significance of the discovery of the ova of both human and insect worlds. He was much influenced by the work of the great anatomist Richard Owen on Parthenogenesis, or the reproduction of creatures by cell fission rather than by sexual congress. He conducted rigorous experiments himself on various hydras and plumed worms which could be got to bud new heads and segments all from the same tail, in a process known as gemmation. He was greatly interested in the way in which the lovely Medusa or transparent jellyfish were apparently unfertilised buds of certain Polyps. He busily sliced off the tentacles of hydra and lacerated polyps into fragments, each of which became a new creature. This phenomenon fascinated him because it seemed to him to indicate a continuity and interdependence of all life, which might perhaps assist in modifying or doing away with the notion of individual death, and thus deal with that great fear to which, as the certain promise of Heaven trembled and faded, he and his contemporaries were all hideously subject.
His friend Michelet was at this time working on La Mer, which appeared in 1860. In it the historian also tried to find in the sea the possibility of an eternal life which would overcome death. He describes his experiences in showing to a great chemist and subsequently to a great physiologist a beaker of what he called “the mucus of the sea … this whitish, viscous element.” The chemist replied that it was nothing other than life itself. The physiologist described a whole microcosmic drama:
We know no more about the constitution of water than we do about that of blood. What is most easily discerned, in the case of the seawater mucus, is that it is simultaneously an end and a beginning. Is it a product of the innumerable residues of death, who would yield them to life? That is without doubt a law; but in fact, in this marine world, of rapid absorption, most beings are absorbed live; they do not drag out a state of death, as occurs on the earth, where destructions are slower.
But life, without arriving at its supreme dissolution, moults or sheds, ceaselessly, exudes from itself all which is superfluous to it. In the case of us, terrestrial animals, the epidermis is shed incessantly. These moults which could be called a daily and partial death, fill the world of the seas with gelatinous richness from which newborn life profits momently. It finds, in suspension, the oily superabundance of this common exudation, the still animated particules, the still living liquids, which have no time to die. All this does not fall back into an inorganic state but rapidly enters new organisms. This is the most likely of all the hypotheses; if we abandon that, we find ourselves in extreme difficulties.
It can be understood why Ash wrote to this man at this time that he “saw the inner meaning of Plato’s teaching that the world was one huge animal.”
And what might a stringent modern psychoanalytic criticism make of all this feverish activity? To what needs in the individual psyche did this frenzy of dissection and “generative” observation correspond?
It is my belief that at this point in time Randolph had reached what we crudely call a “mid-life crisis,” as had his century. He, the great psychologist, the great poetic student of individual lives and identities, saw that before him was nothing but decline and decay, that his individual being would not be extended by progeny, that men burst like bubbles. He turned away, like many, from individual sympathies with dying or dead men to universal sympathies with Life, Nature and the Universe. It was a kind of Romanticism reborn—gemmated, so to speak, from the old stock of Romanticism—but intertwined with the new mechanistic analysis and the new optimism not about the individual soul, but about the eternal divine harmony of the universe. Like Tennyson, Ash saw that Nature was red in tooth and claw. He responded by taking an interest in the life-continuing functions of the digestive functions of all forms, from the amoeba to the whale.
Maud decided she intuited something terrible about Cropper’s imagination from all this. He had a peculiarly vicious version of reverse hagiography: the desire to cut his subject down to size. She indulged herself in a pleasant thought about the general ambiguity of the word “subject” in this connection. Was Ash subject to Cropper’s research methods and laws of thought? Whose subjectivity was being studied? Who was the subject of the sentences of the text, and how did Cropper and Ash fit into Lacan’s perception that the grammatical subject of a statement differs from the subject, the “I,” who is the object discussed by that statement? Were these thoughts original, Maud wondered, and decided almost necessarily not, all the possible thoughts about literary subjectivity had recently and strenuously been explored.
Elsewhere in his chapter, almost inevitably, Cropper had quoted Moby Dick.
Still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.
Narcissism, the unstable self, the fractured ego, Maud thought, who am I? A matrix for a susurration of texts and codes? It was both a pleasant and an unpleasant idea, this requirement that she think of herself as intermittent and partial. There was the question of the awkward body. The skin, the breath, the eyes, the hair, their history, which did seem to exist.
She stood by the uncurtained window and brushed her hair, looking up at the moon, which was full, and hearing a few faraway airy rushings off the North Sea.
Then she got into bed, and, with the same scissoring movement as Roland next door, swam down under the white sheets.
Semiotics nearly spoiled their first day. They drove out to Flamborough, in the little green car, following their certain predecessor and guide, Mortimer Cropper in his black Mercedes, his predecessor, Randolph Ash, and the hypothetical ghost, Christabel LaMotte. They walked out, in these footsteps, to Filey Brigg, not sure any more what they were looking for, feeling it impermissible simply to enjoy themselves. They paced well together, though they didn’t notice that; both were energetic striders.
Cropper had written:
Randolph spent long hours poring over rockpools, deep and shallow, on the north side of the Brigg. He could be seen stirring the phosphorescent matter in them with his ashplant, and diligently collecting it in buckets, taking it home to study such microscopic animalcules as Noctilucae and Naked-eye Medusae “which are indistinguishable to the naked eye from foam bubbles” but on inspection turned out to be “globular masses of animated jelly with mobile tails.” Here too, he collected his sea-anemones (Actiniae) and bathed in the Emperor’s Bath—a great, greenish rounded hollow in which a legendary Roman Emperor disported himself. Randolph’s historical imagination, ever active, must have taken pleasure in this direct connection with the distant past of the region.
Roland found a sea-anemone, the colour of a dark blood-blister, tucked under a pitted ledge above a layer of glistering gritty sand, pink and gold and bluish and black. It looked simple and ancient, and very new and shining. It was flourishing a vigorous crown of agitating and purposeful feelers, sifting and stirring the water. Its colour was like cornelian, like certain dark and ruddy ambers. Its stem or base or foot held the rock and stood sturdy.
Maud sat on a ledge above Roland’s pool, her long legs tucked under her, The Great Ventriloquist open on her knee. She cited Cropper citing Ash:
“Imagine a glove expanded into a perfect cylinder by air, the thumb being removed and the fingers encircling, in two or three rows, the summit of the cylinder, while at the base the glove is closed by a flat surface of leather. If now on that disc which lies within the circle of fingers we press down the centre, and so force the elastic leather to fold inwards, and form a sort of sac suspended in a cylinder, we have by this means made a mouth and stomach.…”
“A curious comparison,” said Roland.
“Gloves in LaMotte are always to do with secrecy and de
corum. Covering things up. Also with Blanche Glover, of course.”
“Ash wrote a poem called The Glove. About a mediaeval Lady who gave one to a knight to wear as a favour. It was ‘milky-white with seed-pearls.’ ”
“Cropper says here that Ash supposed wrongly that the ovaries of the Actinia were in the fingers of the glove.…”
“I couldn’t understand, as a little boy, where the knight wore the glove. Still can’t, as a matter of fact.”
“Cropper goes on about how Ash meditated on his own name. That’s interesting. Christabel certainly meditated on Glover. It produced some fine and disturbing poems.”
“Ash wrote a passage in Ragnarök about the time when the god Thor hid in a huge cave which turned out to be the little finger of a giant’s glove. That was the giant who tricked him into trying to swallow the sea.”
“Or there’s Henry James on Balzac, saying he wriggled his way into the constituted consciousness like fingers into a glove.”
“That’s a phallic image.”
“Of course. So are all the others, in one way or another, I suppose. Not Blanche Glover, exactly.”
“The Actinia’s withdrawing. It doesn’t like me poking it.”
The Actinia presented the appearance of a rubbery navel, out of which protruded two or three fleshy whiskers, in the process of being tucked away. Then it was there, a blood-dark, fleshy mound, surrounding a pinched hole.
“I read Leonora Stern’s essay ‘Venus Mount and Barren Heath.’ ”
Maud hunted for an adjective to describe this work, rejected “penetrating” and settled on “very profound.”
“Of course it’s profound. But. It worried me.”
“It was meant to.”
“No, not for that reason, not because I’m male. Because.
“Do you never have the sense that our metaphors eat up our world? I mean of course everything connects and connects—all the time—and I suppose one studies—I study—literature because all these connections seem both endlessly exciting and then in some sense dangerously powerful—as though we held a clue to the true nature of things? I mean, all those gloves, a minute ago, we were playing a professional game of hooks and eyes—mediaeval gloves, giants’ gloves, Blanche Glover, Balzac’s gloves, the sea-anemone’s ovaries—and it all reduced like boiling jam to—human sexuality. Just as Leonora Stern makes the whole earth read as the female body—and language—all language. And all vegetation in pubic hair.”
Maud laughed, drily. Roland said, “And then, really, what is it, what is this arcane power we have, when we see that everything is human sexuality? It’s really powerlessness.”
“Impotence,” said Maud, leaning over, interested.
“I was avoiding that word, because that precisely isn’t the point. We are so knowing. And all we’ve found out, is primitive sympathetic magic. Infantile polymorphous perversity. Everything relates to us and so we’re imprisoned in ourselves—we can’t see things. And we paint everything with this metaphor—”
“You are very cross with Leonora.”
“She’s very good. But I don’t want to see through her eyes. It isn’t a matter of her gender and my gender. I just don’t.”
Maud considered. She said, “In every age, there must be truths people can’t fight—whether or not they want to, whether or not they will go on being truths in the future. We live in the truth of what Freud discovered. Whether or not we like it. However we’ve modified it. We aren’t really free to suppose—to imagine—he could possibly have been wrong about human nature. In particulars, surely—but not in the large plan—”
Roland wanted to ask: Do you like that? He thought he had to suppose she did: her work was psychoanalytic, after all, this work on liminality and marginal beings. He said instead, “It makes an interesting effort of imagination to think how they saw the world. What Ash saw when he stood on perhaps this ledge. He was interested in the anemone. In the origin of life. Also in the reason we were here.”
“They valued themselves. Once, they knew God valued them. Then they began to think there was no God, only blind forces. So they valued themselves, they loved themselves and attended to their natures—”
“And we don’t?”
“At some point in history their self-value changed into—what worries you. A horrible over-simplification. It leaves out guilt, for a start. Now or then.”
She closed The Great Ventriloquist and leaned over the ledge on which she was curled, and extended a hand.
“Shall we move on?”
“Where? What are we looking for?”
“We’d better start looking for facts as well as images. I suggest Whitby, where the jet brooch was bought.”
My dearest Ellen,
I have found much that is curious in the town of Whitby, a prosperous fishing village at the mouth of the river Esk—it is a sloping town, crowding down in picturesque alleys or yards and flight after flight of stone stairs to the water—a terraced town, from the upper layers of which you seem to see, above a moving sphere of masts and smoking chimneys all about you, the town, the harbour, the ruined Abbey and the German Ocean.
The past lies all around, from the moorland graves and supposed Killing Pits of the Ancient Britons to the Roman occupation and the early days of Christian evangelism under St Hilda—the town in those days was called Streonshalh and what we are accustomed to think of as the Synod of Whitby, in 664, was of course the Synod of Streonshalh. I have meditated among calling gulls in the ruins of the Abbey and have seen older darker things—the tumuli or houes on the moors, and temples perhaps druidical, including the Bridestones, a row of uprights at Sleights, thought to be one side of an avenue of a stone circle, such as Stonehenge. Certain details may bring these long-vanished folk suddenly to life in the imagination. Such are the finding hereabouts of a heart-shaped ear-ring of jet in contact with the jawbone of a skeleton; and a number of large jet beads cut in angles, found with a similar inmate of a barrow, who had been deposited in the houe with the knees drawn upward to the chin.
There is a mythical story which accounts for the standing stones which appeals to my imagination, as suggesting the liveliness of ancient Gods in comparatively modern times. Whitby has its own local giant—a certain fearsome Wade, who with his wife Bell, was given to tossing about casual boulders on the moors. Wade and Bell were, like the Hrimthurse who built the wall of Asgard, or the fairy Melusina, builders of castles for ungrateful men—they are credited with the construction of the Roman Road across the moor to the delightful town of Pickering—a regular road, built of stones on a stratum of gravel or rubbish from the sandstone of the moor. I intend to walk this road, which is locally known as Wade’s Causey, or Causeway, and was believed to have been built by Wade for the convenience of his wife Bell, who kept a giant cow on the moors, which she travelled to milk. One of the ribs of this monstrous ruminant was on show in Mulgrave Castle and was in fact the jawbone of a whale. The tumuli or houes on the moorland are heaps of boulders carried by the diligent Bell in her apron, whose strings occasionally broke. Charlton believes that Wade is simply a name for the ancient God Woden. Thor was certainly worshipped in Saxon times at the village of Thordisa which stood at the head of the Eastrow beck. So the human imagination mixes and adapts to its current preoccupations many ingredients into new wholes—it is essentially poetic—here are a Whale and Pickering Castle and the old Thunder God and the tombs of ancient Briton and Saxon chieftains and the military greed of the conquering Roman armies, all refashioned into a local giant and his dame—as the stones of the Roman road go to the construction of the dry stone walls, to the loss of archaeology and the preservation of our sheep—or as the huge boulder on Sleights Moor, thrown by Bell’s giant child and dented by her iron ribcage—was broken up for road-mending—and I came along that road.
I have been visiting the local jet industry here, which flourishes and has produced work of a high standard of craftsmanship. I have sent you a piece—with a little poem to accompany
it—with my great love, as always. I know you like well-made things; you would be truly delighted, for the most part, by the curious manufactures that go on here—adornments may be made from many things—ancient ammonite worms find new lives as polished brooches. I have been interested also by the reformation of fossil remains into elegant articles—a whole burnished tabletop will display the unthinkably ancient coils of long-dead snail-things, or the ferny stone leaves of primitive cycads as clear as the pressed flowers and ferns that inhabit your prayer-book. If there is a subject that is my own, my dear Ellen, as a writer I mean, it is the persistent shape-shifting life of things long-dead but not vanished. I should like to write something so perfectly fashioned that it should still be contemplated as those stone-impressed creatures are, after so long a time. Though I feel our durance on this earth may not equal theirs.
The jet, you know, was once alive too. “Certain scientific thinkers have supposed it to be indurated petroleum or mineral pitch—but it is now generally accepted that its origins are ligneous—it is found in compressed masses, long and narrow—the outer surface always marked with longitudinal striae, like the grain of wood, and the transverse fracture which is conchoidal and has a resinous lustre, displays the annual growths in compressed elliptical ones.” I cite this description from Dr Young, though I have seen such raw lumps of jet in the working-sheds, yes, and held them in my hands, and been moved unspeakably by the traces of time—growing time long, long, unutterably long past—in their ellipses. They may be contaminated by an excess of siliceous matter in some cases—a craftsman carving a rose, or a serpent, or a pair of hands may suddenly come across a line or flaw of silex or flint in the material and be driven to desist. I have watched such craftsmen work—they are highly specialised workers—a carver may pass a brooch on to another who specialises in incising patterns—or gold or ivory or bone-carving may be joined to the jet.