Lights on the Horizon: Part 4

Shimmery, Slithery Things that Live in the Sea

Her beams bemocked the sultry main,
Like April hoar-frost spread;
But where the ship's huge shadow lay,
The charméd water burnt alway
A still and awful red.
 
"By the light of the Moon he beholdeth God's creatures of the great calm." 
 
Beyond the shadow of the ship,
I watched the water-snakes:
They moved in tracks of shining white,
And when they reared, the elfish light
Fell off in hoary flakes. 
 
Within the shadow of the ship
I watched their rich attire:
Blue, glossy green, and velvet black,
They coiled and swam; and every track
Was a flash of golden fire.
 
"Their beauty and their happiness. 
He blesseth them in his heart."

S.T. Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1817)

Based on actual travel documents of sailors who had sailed the Southern Oceans, Samuel Taylor Coleridge transforms the naturalistic descriptions of phosphorescent creatures into something more symbolic in his Romantic poem of “The Ancient Mariner.”  The entire voyage becomes a symbolic journey, not just into guilt and obsession, but also into the appreciation of the vitalistic meaning of Nature itself.  The water-snakes that gather round the becalmed ship in the days and weeks following the killing of the albatross by the foolish mariner manifest his sense of fear and anxiety, his realization gradually coming upon himn that in his sport he had violated more than the ancient taboo of his fellow sailors, wherein the large birtd that hovers over them as they cross the ocean, acts as a protective shield to their duties, mission and lives.  The shimmery creatures indicate to the guilty man that he has violated the sacred bond between all life-forms in a world that is in itself a living thing.  Nightmarish visions of the luminous qualities of the sea—in the fish and snakes, in the white-foamed waves, and in the reflections of heavenly light on the surface of the waters—bring him to a point where, instead of cursing his bad luck or of lapsing into despondency for a terrible sin against Life itself—he now blesses the beauty of the phosphorescence.  

Putting aside the quasi-Christian implications of Coleridge’s poem and the spiritualism lurking within the Romantic movement as it attempts to re-invest the secularized industrial and bourgeois world poets in Western Europe began to despair of, the aura of supernatural and extra-mundane wonder permeates the ancient mariner’s compulsive need to tell his story to passers-by on the beach, more than the wedding party which forms the immediate occasion of the telling Coleridge repeats in his rime—in the act of creating a poetic experience, a creative act, that rises out of the leaden-weight upon life, blighted by dissociation from Nature’s vital forces—the Industrial Revolution, the mechanical urbanization of the landscape, and the numbing of sensibilities through an ideology and a teaching methodology Dickens will soon call Gradgrindism or Logical Positivism.  

As we have seen before, Michelet’s approach to Nature—in his books on the sea, birds, insects, mountains, people, women—shifts the focus of historiography away from the politics and militarism of academic writing on to a Natural History, wherein , to be sure, Nature has a history—and an evolutionary one that will be explored and expounded by Darwin and his followers, but even more so wherein History is treated as part of Nature, human motivations, accomplishments and productions form part of the universal order of creation.  This kind of revolutionary and democratic approach finds in the substance and forces of the natural world, including humble folk, the distant nations and exotic customs, a different kind of significance than the doings of great warriors and generals, kings and queens, priests and wonder-workers: a meaning in the hunting and gathering of food, of farming and fishing, building houses and bridges, raising and educating families, living and dying in communities.  

But where George Sand, representing another aspect of Romanticism, explores the simple and secret life of peasant and charcoal-makers in rural and apparently backwards France, and finds insight into the workings of her own imagination.  She does not merely coordinate and assimilate the minds and feelings of children, savages, madmen, poets and other visionaries all with a pulsating vitality and creativity barely present except as a weakening residue in the great cities of Europe, in the stultifying and patriarchal academies of science and art.  Orblutes are thus projections seen in and produced by the mind—individual and collective—that symbolize and constitute (as metonyms and spiritual signs) art, beauty and truth which, as Keats pointed out in The Ode on a Grecian Urn, are all you need to know, in other words the pristine and original knowledge revealed philosophically by Neo-Platonism and Gnosticism.

But this kind of Romantic gush, with its attendant irrationalism and regressive fall into anti-science and anti-urban behaviours, cannot sustain more than a very superficial glow of poetic glory.  It leads only towards confusion, madness and death.

Lights on the Horizon: part 3

Luminous Things: 

Natural, Unnatural and Metaphysical

At dusk on November 18 [1863] the sky became pitch-black except for a band of phosphorescence on the horizon that delineated a ragged, heavy sea.[1]

In Jules Michelet’s La Mer (1861) the phenomenon of mysterious lights at sea is introduced in this way:

Si l'on plonge dans la mer à une certaine profondeur, on perd bientôt la lumière; on entre dans un crépuscule où persiste une seule couleur, un rouge sinistre; puis cela même disparaît et la nuit complète se fait, c'est l'obscurité absolue, sauf peut-être des accidents de phosphorescence effrayante. La masse, immense d'étendue, énorme de profondeur, qui couvre la plus grande partie du globe, semble un monde de ténèbres. Voilà surtout ce qui saisit, intimida les premiers hommes. On supposait que la vie cesse partout où manque la lumière, et qu'excepté les premières couches, toute l'épaisseur insondable, le fond (si l'abîme a un fond), était une noire solitude, rien que sable aride et cailloux, sauf des ossements et des débris, tant de biens perdus que l'élément avare prend toujours et ne rend jamais, les cachant jalousement au trésor profond des naufrages.[2]

If one dives into the sea to a certain depth, the light is soon lost.  One enters into a twilight where a single colour persists, a sinister red; then even that disappears and the night is completed, an absolute darkness, except perhaps for an accidental and frightening phosphorescence.  The mass, which extends its enormity into enormous depths, covers almost the entire globe and seems a world of shadows.  Here is what seized and intimidated the first humans.  They assumed that life ceased everywhere where light was gone;  and lay outside the earliest settlements. The whole sea was an immeasurable thickness, the bottom (if the abyss has a bottom)  a black solitude, made of nothing but dry and pebbly sand, save for a few bones and other debris, all valuables lost in the clutches of the greedy elements that took and never returned, hiding them jealously, the dark treasure of shipwreck.

In this passage, phosphorescence stands for the final flickering light and life before the greedy, implacable force of the sea swallows up all colours, all remnants of life. 

In another place in this same book Michelet is more particular and less metaphysical when he describes what herring fishermen experience when they set sail on the sea at night.  It is precisely on Saint John’s Eve, 24-25 June, five minutes after midnight, he tells us, that the great herring fishing expeditions into the North Sea begin, the scene composed of a mixture of moonlight reflected off the waves and the shimmery gleam of the multitude of fish:

Des lueurs phosphorescentes ondulent ou dansent sur les flots. «Voilà les éclairs du hareng,» c'est le signal consacré qui s'entend de toutes les barques. Des profondeurs à la surface un monde vivant vient de monter, suivant l'attrait de la chaleur, du désir et la lumière. Celle de la lune, pâle et douce, plaît à la gent timide; elle est le rassurant fanal qui semble les enhardir à leur grande fête d'amour. Ils montent, ils montent tous d'ensemble, pas un ne reste en arrière. La sociabilité est la loi de cette race; on ne les voit jamais qu'ensemble. Ensemble ils vivent ensevelis aux ténébreuses profondeurs; ensemble ils viennent au printemps prendre leur petite part du bonheur universel, voir le jour, jouir et mourir. Serrés, pressés, ils ne sont jamais assez près l'un de l'autre; ils naviguent en bancs compactes. «C'est (disaient les Flamands) comme si nos dunes se mettaient à voguer.» Entre l'Écosse, la Hollande et la Norvège, il semble qu'une île immense se soit soulevée, et qu'un continent soit près d'émerger. Un bras s'en détache à l'est et s'engage dans le Sund, emplit l'entrée de la Baltique. À certains passages étroits, on ne peut ramer; la mer est solide. Millions de millions, milliards de milliards, qui osera hasarder de deviner le nombre de ces légions? On conte que jadis, près du Havre, un seul pêcheur en trouva un matin dans ses filets huit cent mille. Dans un port d'Écosse, on en fit onze mille barils dans une nuit.

Phosphorescent gleams undulate or dance on the waves.  “Behold, the lightning of the herrings!”  This is the consecrated cry which all the boats have been waiting for.  From deep below the surface a whole living world mounts up, attracted by heat, lust and light.  That from the moon, pale and soft, pleases the timid tribe; the reassuring signal that seems to embolden them to this great festival of love.  They rise, they rise together, not one lingering behind.  Sociability is the law of this race.  Together they live shrouded in the profound depths; together they come in springtime to play their part in universal joy, to see the day, to find ecstasy and to expire.  Locked in an embrace, pressed against one another, they are never close enough to each other, they ride the sea in a compact shoal. “It is,” say the Flemish sailors, “as though our very dunes set sail.”  Between Scotland, Holland and Norway, it seems that a great island were heaving, and as though a whole new continent were about to emerge.  One arm detaches itself in the east and attaches itself to the Sund Islands, filling the entrance to the Baltic Sea.  In certain narrow straits, it is impossible to row; the waters are solid.  Thousands upon thousands, millions upon millions of them who dares to count the number which is legion.  It is told that in ages past near Le Havre a single fisherman found himself one morning found in his nets eight hundred thousand.  In a Scottish port they filled eleven thousand barrels in one night.

Though mentioned only in the first sentence, the entire passage implies that in addition to the heavy mass of the herrings, their filling up of almost the entire surface of the water between Brittany and the North Sea, and the heaving bodies of a countless number of sexually active bodies, this whole phenomenon is glowing with phosphorescent light.  Whether the light comes from the shiny surface of the sea reflecting moonlight in this season the year, the writhing swarm of herrings, or some other inherent glow in the water itself, it is part of a great springtime carnival of happiness for the fisherfolk and their families.

After this, Michelet soon returns to another aspect of phosphorescent light of the sea, this time explaining it as a kind of electrical phenomenon :

Dans la grande féerie d'illumination que la mer déploie aux nuits orageuses, la méduse a un rôle à part. Plongée, comme tant d'autres êtres, dans le phosphore électrique dont ils sont tous pénétrés, elle le rend à sa manière avec un charme personnel.

In the great magical illuminated show that the sea puts on during stormy nights, the medusa plays its role.  Plunged, like many other creatures into the electric phosphorescence and which penetrates their being,  they perform their parts with a personal charm.

Not only does the term “féerie d’illumination” allude to a festival or carnival sound and light show which forms a magical entertainment, such as pyrotechnical displays and other illusions developed in phantasmagoria during the early nineteenth century to tease and mystify audiences, but it also suggests something magical and mysterious in nature herself, as here in lightning flashes across the turbulent sky.  His focus turns to the medusa or jellyfish which like other denizens of the deep swim through and form part of the son et lumière show. 

Then a short time later, Michelet speaks of what the sea would be like if it did not have this secret secretion of light to illuminate the endless darkness.  The world would be very bleak, lacking all sense of magic, and only fraught with unbearable fears.

Qu'elle est sombre, la nuit en mer, quand on n'y voit pas ce phosphore! Qu'elles sont vastes et redoutables, ses ténèbres! Sur terre, l'ombre est moins obscure; on se reconnaît toujours à la variété des objets qu'on touche, ou dont on pressent les formes; ils vous donnent des points de repère. Mais la vaste nuit marine, un noir infini! rien et rien!... Mille dangers possibles, inconnus!

How sober is the night at sea when we don’t see this phosphorescent light ! They are vast and full of terror, these dark evenings! Upon the earth, a shadow is less obscure; it is always possible to recognize the objects one touches, or which press in upon us; they have some form of familiar shape to them.  But the vast maritime night, an infinite darkness! Nothing at all! … A thousand possible dangers, all unknown!

This leads him to speculate on what causes the phenomenon:

                                                                                                                                                                  

On sent tout cela sur la côte même, quand on vit devant la mer. C'est une grande jouissance quand, l'air devenant électrique, on voit au loin apparaître un léger ruban de feu pâle. Qu'est-ce cela! On l'a vu chez soi sur le poisson mort, par exemple le hareng. Mais vivant, dans ses grandes flottes, dans les grandes traînées visqueuses qu'il laisse derrière, il est encore plus lumineux. Cet éclat n'est point du tout le privilège de la mort.—Est-ce un effet de la chaleur? Non, vous le trouvez aux deux pôles, et dans les mers Antarctiques, et dans les mers de Sibérie. Il est dans les nôtres, et dans toutes.

We can sense that on the coast too when we look out on to the sea.  It is a great pleasure when, the air is electrified, we can see appear in the distance a faint ribbon of pale fire.  What can it be! It may be seen close on a dead fish, for example, a herring.  But living, on the great tides, in the great viscous trails that it leaves behind, it is even more luminous.   This flashing light is no means the privilege of death.—Its it the effect of heat? No, you find it at both poles, and the Antarctic oceans, and in the waters of Siberia.  It is in our own seas, and in all of them.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   

Having indicated what it is not—neither the result of putrefying bodies nor the consequence of season warming of the oceans—Michelet tries to explain what the phosphorescence is and where it comes from.

C'est l'électricité commune dont ces eaux, demi-vivantes, se dégagent aux temps orageux, innocente et pacifique foudre dont tous les êtres marins sont alors les conducteurs. Ils l'aspirent et ils l'expirent, la restituent largement à leur mort. La mer la donne et la reprend. Le long des côtes et des détroits, les froissements et les remous la font circuler puissamment. Chaque être en prend, s'en empare plus ou moins selon sa nature. Ici, des surfaces immenses de paisibles infusoires font comme une mer lactée, d'une douce et blanche lumière, qui ensuite  plus animée tourne au jaune du soufre embrasé. Ici, des cônes de lumière vont pirouettant sur eux-mêmes, ou roulent en boulets rouges. Un grand disque de feu se fait (pyrosome),[3] qui part du jaune opalin, un moment frappé de vert, puis s'irrite, éclate dans le rouge, l'orange, puis s'assombrit d'azur. Ces changements ont quelque chose de régulier qui indiquerait une fonction naturelle, la contraction et dilatation d'un être qui souffle le feu.

It is common electricity which these waters, half-alive, take in from the raging storms, the innocent and peaceful thunder for which all marine creatures act as conductors.  The inspire and expel it, losing it mostly at t heir death.  The sea gives and it takes back.  Along the coasts and in the narrows, the clashing and the back flow make it circulate it powerfully.  Every living creature absorbs it and according to  its nature masters it more or less.  Here, immense surfaces of peaceful infusoria become a milky sea, with a soft and white light. Which then becomes animated and turns yellow as burning sulphur.  There, cones of light pirouette on themselves, or roll in crimson balls.  A large disk of fire is made (pyrosome) which then divides into an opalescent yellow, for a moment and then is struck into green, irritated by this and explodes into red, orange, and finally relaxes into azure.

What Michelet seems to be describing is a process whereby the currents of the sea, with its heaving waves, circulating tides, and constricted racing through straits and channels creates a friction, an electrical charge which passes into the various marine animals who swim through it.  An interesting guess, to be sure, but the writer offers no proof and no mechanism by which the living beings absorb the electricity.  He does not understand the chemistry and physics of bioluminescence.

Cependant, à l'horizon, des serpents enflammés s'agitent sur une infinie longueur (parfois vingt-cinq ou trente lieues). Les biphores et les salpas, êtres transparents qui traversent et la mer et le phosphore, donnent cette comédie serpentine. Étonnante association qui mène ces danses effrénées, puis se sépare. Séparés, ses membres libres font des petits libres encore, qui, à leur tour, engendreront des républiques dansantes, pour répandre sur la mer cette bacchanale de feu.

However, on the horizon, flaming serpents are tossed about across a limitless convoy (sometimes twenty-five or thirty leagues). Biphores and salpas, transparent creatures travel over the sea and through its phosphorous element join in a serpentine comedy. An astonishing collaboration creates these unrestrained dances, and then the participants draw apart.  Separated, these now free members engage in other free movements, which in their turn engender new dancing republics in order to spread over the sea this bacchanalian fire.                                

                                                                                                                                                                                         Michelet moves to a new topic somewhat later in La Mer.  Speaking of whales in the Southern Oceans, he describes the phenomenon of phosphorescence yet again, adding significant new information:

Ils vont ensemble volontiers. On les voyait jadis naviguer deux à deux, parfois en grandes familles de dix ou douze, dans les mers solitaires. Rien n'était magnifique comme ces grandes flottes, parfois illuminées de leur phosphorescence, lançant des colonnes d'eau de trente à quarante pieds qui, dans les mers polaires, montaient fumantes. Ils approchaient paisibles, curieux, regardant le vaisseau comme un frère d'espèce nouvelle; ils y prenaient plaisir, faisaient fête au nouveau venu. Dans leurs jeux ils se mettaient droits et retombaient de leur hauteur, à grand fracas, faisant un gouffre bouillonnant. Leur familiarité allait jusqu'à toucher le navire, les canots. Confiance imprudente, trompée si cruellement! En moins d'un siècle, la grande espèce de la baleine a presque disparu.

They willingly travel together.  Formerly they were seen sailing side by side, sometimes in big of ten or a dozen families in lonely seas.  Nothing was so magnificent as they great tides, sometimes lit up by their phosphorescence, spouting columns of water thirty or forty feet into the air which, in polar seas, rose up in a vast fuming spray.  They approached peaceably, curious, observing a vessel like new brotherly species; they took pleasure, celebrating the new arrival.  In their frolicking, they shot upright and fell from those heights, a great tumult, creating a boiling chasm.  Their familiarity went so far as to touch the ship and its pinnaces.  Imprudent confidence, cruelly tricked!  In less than a century, the large species of whale has virtually disappeared,

These giant cetaceans are another species of marine life Michelet sees as participating in the spectacle of phosphorescence.  Their huge size, their vast numbers, their overly-trusting natures as they greet the very sailors who will make them all but extinct in a small space of time, are an integral part of that same natural harmony the author describes throughout his book, a process in which all creatures interact with their environment and all the forces of the sea no matter how storm-driven or threatening balance each other out.  Human interference is the negative presence, however.  The thoughtlessness of the whales is one thing, an instinctive desire to associate with other creatures; the thoughtlessness of mankind, especially in the rising bourgeois world of trade and industry, another, a malevolent and violent lack of awareness of where they stand in the scheme of things.

Il semble qu'eux-mêmes ils sachent qu'à ce moment ils sont sacrés: ils perdent leur timidité, ils montent à la lumière, ils approchent des rivages; ils ont l'air de se croire sûrs de quelque protection.

It seems that they themselves know at this moment that they are sacred ; they lose their timidity, they rise into the light, they approach the shore; they have the appearance of believing themselves to be certain of protection.

The great whales are not merely naive or innocent.  They cannot understand the breaking apart of natural harmony.  When they rise up to the surface, into the light, they make themselves vulnerable, for this ordinary daylight takes away their sacred place in nature—a sanctity which is embedded in nature, a nature which is sacred in the Romantic paradigm that has replaced for many early modern Europeans the certainties of a religion where God the Creator controls the world, who stands above natural things and gives them meaning in relation to what humans need.  Thus for Michelet—more so perhaps than Herman Melville in Moby Dick—the power, grace and significance of the whales is found in the phosphorescence they emit and through which they swim.

C'est l'apogée de leur beauté, de leur force. Leurs livrées brillantes, leur phosphorescence, indiquent le suprême rayonnement de la vie. En toute espèce qui n'est point menaçante par l'excès de la fécondité, il faut religieusement respecter ce moment. Qu'ils meurent après, à la bonne heure! S'il faut les tuer, tuez-les! mais que d'abord ils aient vécu.

It is the apogee of their beauty and of their power. Their brilliant liveries, their phosphorescence, indicates the supreme radiance of their life.   Om every species which offers no menace by the excess of its fecundity one must religiously respect this moment [of procreation].  Let them die afterwards and soon!  If it is necessary to kill them, kill them! but first let them live.

What is phosphorescence, how is it related to bioluminescence, and to the imagination?  In other words, what did sailors see when they sailed in foreign seas or fisherman along familiar coasts?  What was shining out from the darkness in the countryside, down below the surface of the soil, and flitting or slithering over the fields, hills and mountains?  Was it something that was inherent in the objects and beings observed or an illusion created by atmospheric conditions, a reflection or refraction of something in the heavens?  Perhaps rather it was a product of the optical organs, a result of mental events, a dream or hallucination.  Or did it arise from a spiritual realm of experience, a return of life-giving lights from beyond the grave, a small remnant of exploding stars millions of light years distant at the very beginning of time, a signal of intelligence in another dimension of space and reality?

---

[1] Joan Dreyett, Island of the Lost: A Harrowing True Story of Shipwreck, Death and Survival on a Godforsaken Island at the Edge of the World (Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2007) p. 11.  Originally published in the USA as Island of the Lost: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World (New York, NY: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2007)

[2] Jules Michelet, La Mer, 5^eme ed. (Paris : Michel Lévy Frères, 1875).

[3] One scientific website gives this description: “Pyrosomes and salps are pelagic (free-swimming) tunicates or sea squirts. All species are open ocean animals that rarely come close to shore, and all are colonial, although many salps can also be solitary. Pyrosomes are colonies of tiny animals that form hollow tubes sealed at one end ….Pyrosomes get their name (Pyro = fire + soma = body) from their ability to emit light (bioluminescence) - colonies can glow or flash light at night, particularly if touched.”  See http://www.youtube.com/ watch%3Fv%3D5EQGA_4BZ5s.

Lights on the Horizon, Part 2

Part 2

These different kinds of lights, metaphorical and natural, phosphorescent gleams, biolumiscent flickering, slippery and shiny illusions, figures of speech and figures of thought, some become metaphors for how the mind works.  Are these illustrations no more than comic book style symbols, like the lightbulb that appears above the head of a character when she gets an idea, or they deeper and more meaningful insights into the various explanations of the workings of the imagination itself?

The next section is based on longer discussions of George Sand’s experience of orblutes in her autobiographical and other writings.  I there give further examples contemporary to Sand and other enriching explanations of this phenomenon.

George Sand and the Ignis Fatuus

In her autobiography Histoire de ma vie George Sand recounted one of the first examples in her life when she experienced the imagination at work.  As a young child she—still known by her birth name Aurore Dupin[1]—travelled with her mother to Spain where her father had been stationed during the Napoleonic Peninsula Wars.  Playing on the roof an old palace in Madrid where they lived, the little girl saw a myriad of sparkles, lights reflecting off different features of the building.  These painfully blinding gleams—and she wonders in her book of reminiscences, as an adult recalling this event, how she did not actually lose her sight—were not merely playful sparkles that fascinated her; they caused her to see images she knew were not real, hallucinatory phenomena.  That is, there was something between what common sense perceived through the naked eye and the completely inner illusions of dreams and memories in her mind.  These secondary visions caused by brilliant reflections of sunlight were created in processes she would later learn to call her imagination.[2] 

A ma droite, tout un côté de la place était occupé par une église d’une architecture massive, du moins elle se retrace ainsi à ma mémoire, et surmontée d’une croix plantée dans un globe doré.  Cette croix et ce globe étincelant au coucher du soleil, se détachant sur un ciel plus bleu que je ne l’avais jamais vu, sont un spectacle que je n’oublierai jamais, et que je contemplais jusqu'à ce que j’eusse dans les yeux ces boules rouges et bleues…[3]

On my right, along the side of the place was filled by a church with a massive architecture, at least it is thus traced into my memory, and surmounted by a cross planted in a golden globe.  This cross and globe sparkling in the setting sun detached itself from the bluest sky I have ever seen, made a spectacle I will never forget, and that I contemplated until I had these red and blue bubbles in my eyes...[4]           

At first, Aurore enjoys the phenomenon itself as a kind of magical game she can play by herself; but then the mature George Sand considers the absence of an appropriate modern term and the lack of a scientific explanation for its occurrence as part of the education she was acquiring as a person preparing to be the writer of fiction was to be become, an author sensitive to psychological activities in the sensoria and in the inquiring mind.

Then, after describing this optical illusion of her infancy, George Sand turns her attention to the absence of a word for this phenomenon in modern French.  The only term that seems appropriate occurs in her own local dialect (Berrichon) derived through Old French and ultimately from medieval Latin.[5] 

…que par un excellent mot dérivé du latin, nous appelons, dans notre langue du Berry, les orblutes.  Ce mot devrait passer dans la langue moderne.  Il doit avoir été français, quoique je ne l’aie trouvé dans aucun auteur.  Il n’a point d’équivalent, et il exprime parfaitement un phénomène que tout le monde connait et qui ne s’exprime que par des périphrases inexactes.[6]

…which we call, by an excellent word derived from Latin, in our dialect of Berry, orblutes. This word could pass into our modern language.  It could have been French, although I have never found it in any author.  It has no equivalent, and yet it expressed perfectly a phenomenon that everyone knows and which can only be expressed by inexact periphrasis.

It is not a matter, very Romantic in its origins, that if a person or a language does not have a specific word for some experience or object, then such a phenomenon has not been recorded before, as though each language were a hermetically-sealed historical code of reality for its speakers; but rather that cultural filters have been at work to suppress older expressions and images or the experiences themselves have been denied for ideological reasons.  In the search for their “roots” in peasant culture and archaic rituals, many nineteenth-century poets began to search for the pristine knowledge of the “race” in folklore and anthropology by collecting fairy tales, interviewing rural peasants, and delving into their own dreams and hallucinations.  Children, women, country people and “savages” in unfamiliar places were classified along with hysterics, madmen and poets as sources of this vital information that would make boruegois readers able to escape into nostalgia and become more human, it was thought.

Thus George Sand continues with her childish recall of the orblutes when she first saw them in Spain:

Ces orblutes m’amusaient beaucoup, et je ne pouvais pas m’en expliquer la cause toute naturelle.  Je pensais plaisir à voir flotter devant mes yeux ces brûlantes couleurs qui s’attachaient a tous les objets, et qui persistaient lorsque je fermais les yeux,  Quand l’orblute est bien complète, elle vous représente exactement la forme de l’objet qui l’a causée ; c’est une sorte de mirage.  Je voyais donc le globe et la croix du feu se dessiner partout ou se portaient mes regards, et je m’étonne d’avoir tant répété impunément  ce jeu assez dangereux pour les yeux d’un enfant. [7]

These orblutes gave me a great deal of pleasure, and I could not explain their natural cause.  I thought it enjoyable to watch these burning colours that were attached to all the objects float before my eyes, and which continued when I shut my eyes.  When an orblute is finished, it represents to you exactly the form of the object that created it; it is like a mirage.  I could thus see the globe and the cross of fire making pictures of themselves everywhere and carried them in my perceptions, and I am astonished to have repeated this dangerous game so often without harm to my infant eyes.[8]

Sand at this point adds a “scientific” footnote to her text suggesting a slight orthographical change to allow the word to enter into standard modern French.

Pour que le mot fût bon, il faudrait changer une lettre et dire orbluces.[9]

To make the word acceptable, one need only change a single letter and say orbluces.

A modern French editor of the Histoire de ma vie points towards two further novels in which Sand employs the word orblute in the sense first found in her childhood memories.

George Sand emploie ce mot dans La Petite Fadette et Les Maîtres sonneurs, dans un sens assez proche de l’expression populaire « berlue ».[10]

George Sand uses this word in Little Fadette [1851] and The Master Pipers [1853] in a sense very close to the popular expression “burlue”.

The use of the term orblutes in George Sand’s other pastoral novel Les Mâtres sonneurs[11] is even less developed and appears in the text with neither the author herself nor the modern editors offering any gloss. The narrator of the thirty two evening conversations constituting the book finds himself in the middle of the forest, some distance from his own native area where woodcutters and hemp collectors live, among muleteers and more unsavoury types make their livings.  He is there with his female cousin Brulette, and one evening at a celebration, the young woman is insulted by one of the roughnecks, a giant by the name of Malzac, who has approached her too familiarly.  Instead of Tiennet defending her honour, the local host Huriel literally takes up the holly cudgel in her defence, the one-on-one combat according to the rules of that part of the forest.  The fight occurs in near darkness with only two wind-blown torches providing light and it is almost impossible for the narrator to see who is knocked down after a crushing thud is heard.

Lequel était-ce?  Je ne voyais plus, j’avais des orblutes dans les yeux ; mais j’entendis la voix  de Thérence qui disait : —Dieu soit béni, mon frère a gagné ![12]

Which one was it ?  I could no longer see, as I had some orblutes in my eyes; but I heard to the voice of Thérence say:—Bless  the Lord, my brother has won!

In this fictional scene, orblutes represent at least two kinds of blurring of the speaker’s vision during the fight: first, physically, the darkness, the swaying flames of the torches, and the sweat in front of his eyes create the small particles of light; second, in a more psychological sense, anger, fear and confusion at the nature of the combat generate an hallucinatory experience embodied in the appearance of spots or specks.

The term orblutes is also to be found in some of Sand’s accounts of her own studies of folk customs and beliefs which she, like many other European Romantic writers, collected and discussed as the bedrock features of each nation’s racial identity.  While she knows, on the one hand, that the customs and beliefs associated with orblutes has no scientific basis and is more or less pure superstition—relics of an archaic mentality and mythical ways of thinking (what would later be termed la pensée sauvage, primitive thought, she also argues that these narratives, traditions and modes of intellection, though forgotten or rejected by modern Europeans, nevertheless contain within them spiritual truths and insights that will serve to re-humanize the growing bourgeois cities and the technological society that no longer satisfies the poetic imagination.

Other European artists and fiction writers in the course of the nineteenth century attempted to discover in similar phenomena an area and a way of creating an alternative to the common sense perceptions shown by enhanced mechanical technologies (photography and x-rays, for example) and theories of science to be limited, distorting and often altogether false (Darwinian evolution, cellular biology, germs as the cause of disease, for example) and the dynamic, hallucinating and diseased individual mind revealed by psychoanalysis and the collective, traumatized and primitive group mind opened to discussion by anthropology.  Moreover, whereas modern painters, sculptors, composers and other artists (e.e., Impressionists) sought to break away from the structures of academic codes of beauty and classical form by turning their attention to the role of atmosphere, light and distance on what can be seen and reproduced or utilizing advances in chemistry and physics to find new practical methods of using colour and texture, novelists and dramatists

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 NOTES

[1] Fuller annotations appear in my studies of Alfred Dreyfus In his own Time and Alfred and Lucie Dreyfus in the Phantasmagoria.

[2] Within the same few pages where Sand recalls this experience of the orblutes, she also speaks of how she first came to recognize echoes, thus suggesting an intimate relationship between sound and sight for aesthetic purposes.

[3] George Sand, Histoire de ma vie, ed., Brigitte Diaz (Paris : Le Livre de Poche, 2004) pp. 163-164.

[4] All translations my own unless otherwise indicated.

[5] See L. Vincent, La Langue et le style rustiques du George Sand dans les romans champêtres (Paris: Librairie Ancienne Honoré Champion, 1916). 

[6] Sand, Histoire de ma vie, p.  164. If the derivation is from orbluces, it can yield on the one hand  orb (globe) + lux (light), i.e., globes of light, or as in the Old French orb, from orbum = bereft, something like blind, obscure or dark and so: bright  blinding light.  Cp. Kenneth Urwin, ed., A Short Old French Dictionary for Students (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1963) p. 67.

[7] Sand, Histoire de ma vie, p. 164.

[8] Thelma Jurgau edited a group translation of the book for SUNY Press in 1991; they choose to leave orblutes in its original form, but translates mirage by “after-image”. 

[9] Sand, Histoire de ma vie, p. 164, note *.

[10] Diaz in Sand, Histoire de ma vie, p. 164, n.1.

[11] Vincent points out that this is the novel whose language is most distant from modern French (La langue et les style rustique, p. 15).  He sees this novel as “l’apogée des ses essays rustiques.  C’est dans ce roman qu’elle s’éloigne le plus de sa manière d’écrire habituelle…elle la cherche des sites de style plus encore que dans les romans précédents » (Vincent, p. 39). ; « the highpoint of her rustic excercises.  It is in this novel that she distances herself most from her normal way of writing...she seeks out such sites here more than her former novels.”   It is not just a matter of occasional local words or idioms but much more of capturing the syntax and rhythm of speech.  Sand travelled through the regions close to Nohant and spoke with local folk, sensitive to the nuances between the speakers in one village and another (Vincent, p. 21).  Though she did not conduct scientific surveys of the various versions of the patois and indeed often played with the lexicon and grammar she listened to, she was almost unique among nineteenth-century French novelists in taking seriously the sensibility and culture of the country people she engaged with.  Balzac and Flaubert, for example, used dialect as part of the background for local colour and still treated the folk as comic characters (Vincent, pp. 35 ff.).

[12] George Sand, Les Mâtures Sonneurs, p. 200.  In this modern edition, the events occur in the fifteenth evening conversation.  An earlier edition published in1857 by Librarie Nouvelle in Paris places this whole episode into the fourteenth evening (p. 159).

Lights on the Horizon, in the Sea and through the Mind: part 1

Carnivals of Lightand the Fairytales of Inspirationand the Mysteries Imagination

No fairy tale of human relate to us more fascinating scenes than are realized in Nature’s carnivals of the sea.  Not only is the surface of the ocean, when lashed into foam by the tempest, luminous, but the greater depths, where the water is cold, near the freezing-point, and subject to pressure so great that instruments of glass are shattered and reduced to powder, abound in living lights.[1]

This is a study of strange phenomena of light which throws light on some aspects of the imagination and how to study figurative language in poetry and dreams, symbolic action and unconscious social relationships.  As writers in the nineteenth and early twentieth century attempted to describe and understand such phenomena, they also questioned how they were able to perceive these flashing and sparkling visual occurrences and what processes of thought became involved in their attempts to draw meaning from the mystery.

 

Although we cannot draw on actual events before our own eyes and thus rely on verbal documents, confessional, fictional, poetic and scientific, with some occasional glimpses at paintings, photographs and other illustrations, our goal is something other than literary criticism or discourse analysis in a psychoanalytical sense.  We are limited by the fact that we cannot interfere or interact with the material we are discussing, and thus do not seek to change either the circumstances of history nor the conditions under which they were recorded in words and images: our understanding, however, will, I hope, change the way in which we can see, feel, think, remember and act on what we deal with.[2]  As Herman and Vervaerck put it: “It seems to us that it is impossible to see the present properly unless one sees it in its dynamic, productive relation with the past, and not as a sort of container of the past.”[3] Memory is now known to be recreated almost creatively each time one engages in a recall or is subject to the unconscious influences of such a memory stimulated by current circumstances, and therefore our actions, including those of analysis, interpretation and application, do not spring either from a conscious act of the will based on an objective or accurate reproduction of the past nor do they operate freely with no regard or response to memories, documentary records, illustrative mnemonics—but in a far more complex way. Unlike the Freudian paradigm of psychoanalysis where the analyst has to provoke transference, resist the temptations of counter-transference and deal in a symbolic way with the present in order to fill out the discourses of the past and change the structures of the personality which were originally shaped by the misapprehensions and misprision of trauma,[4] our goal is to work with the ongoing relationship to the past event or character. 

For that reason, I will draw on such processes and concepts drawn from Aby Warburg’s art history: processes such as the after-life (Nachleben) of icons and ideas, the emotional charging and recharging of remembered and institutionalized concepts (Pathosformeln) whereby primary and secondary formations of those conventional formulations are kept alive both on the surface where they fulfil conscious needs and the deep inner levels of suppressed or repressed remembrance where they keep irritating and deforming the flow of psychological and social significance.  To be sure, the flow itself does not consist only of surface currents in a progressively articulate stream of memories: there are such interferences as ruptures, disconnections, discontinuities, breaches and misarticulations rather than smooth narrative progress and logical progress to be taken into account,[5] matters that cannot be argued away or filled in by sentimental dream-work; for they are not necessarily signs of madness, ignorance, perversity or structural amnesia—they are, in fact, the essence of the problem (and not the problem itself) to be discussed. We deal with palimpsests, collages, split-screens, and other multi-layered combinatory and encrypted texts of human experience.  Moreover, behind this complexity and conflictual terrain there does not lie a single originary moment or event or memory to be disclosed, cleansed of extraneous materials or filled in from other distant and embedded sources.[6]  That kind of reconstructed text—that mode of repairing the intricate relations between inner and outer worlds of human experience—would be a fiction or a work of art. and while satisfying to see performed on stage or in dreams would do no good to anyone trying to understand how historical reality works.  Such a tikkun ha-olam is a reduction (sometimes a reductio ad absurdum), an abstract, poetical pattern, a subjection of the inner tensions and anxieties to the external laws of philosophical logic.

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[1] Charles Frederick Holder, Living Lights: A Popular Account of Phosphorescent Animals and Vegetables (London: Samson Low, Marston, Searle and Livingston, 1887). Preface, p. vi.

[2] Compare these remarks on theory and method with Luc Herman and Bart Vervaeck, “The Schreber Connection: Interpretation in Psychoanalysis and Literature,” a review of C. Barry Chabot, Freud on Schreber: psychoanalytic Theory and the Critical Act (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1982) in the Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire 61-3 (1983) 591-608; available through Persée online at http://www.persee.fr/revues/hpome/prescript/article/rbph_0035-0818_1983_num61_3_3433

[3]Herman and Vervaeck, “The Schreber Connection” 599.

[4] Herman and Vervaeck, “The Schreber Connection” 600.

[5] Herman and Vervaeck, “The Schreber Connection” 601.  Here the authors follow Michel Foucault, whom they cite, along with his followers.

[6] Herman and Vervaeck, “The Schreber Connection”  602.