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.