ISABEL CHENOT has loved, memorised, and practised poetry all her remembered life. Some of her poems are collected in The Joseph Tree, available from Wiseblood
spectred land
A single star – a pentacle cut from the moon’s frill, or some future dawn – flew near our car. The sky was simple on one drowsing hill. Beyond,
grazed mountains – ghosts of mastodon.
dawn, the coast, mid-September
Far out, the seabirds
in the silver braids
wink like white ash. The ocean swerves
dawn-slung and early.
How slight, their mirrored legs – and how kaleidoscoped,
reflected curves of wading curlews,
closer, over tide-roped
shore. Each wave re-centers and re-blurs dilating curlews.
The middle distance spins and shimmers like a dime.
A seagull skims the fallow instant before shock:
the crack in time, when a wave crams its hollow
on a rock.
And closer by, prone shadows etch down-sill
of casements flushed with sand. Touch the bright rush –
ISABEL CHENOT has loved, memorised, and practised poetry all her remembered life. Some of her poems are collected in The Joseph Tree, available from Wiseblood
ALISTAIR NOON’s recent publications include Paradise Takeaway (Two Rivers, 2023) and two further volumes of his translations from the Russian of Osip Mandelstam (The Voronezh Workbooks and Occasional and Joke Poems, Shearsman, 2022). His poems, reviews and translations have appeared in Poetry Wales, Poetry Review, the Guardian and New Statesman, and he’s published essays on translocality and poetry, Wuhan Punk and the fall of the Berlin Wall. He lives in Berlin.
ALISTAIR NOON’s recent publications include Paradise Takeaway (Two Rivers, 2023) and two further volumes of his translations from the Russian of Osip Mandelstam (The Voronezh Workbooks and Occasional and Joke Poems, Shearsman, 2022). His poems, reviews and translations have appeared in Poetry Wales, Poetry Review, the Guardian and New Statesman, and he’s published essays on translocality and poetry, Wuhan Punk and the fall of the Berlin Wall. He lives in Berlin.
Derek Turner sojourns in Andalusia and Extremadura
I started awake as the plane came into land. The cactuses along the edges of the runway suggested even to my stupefied senses that we were no longer in Birmingham. Distinctly un-English heat fell heavily on our heads and draped itself around our shoulders as we walked into the terminal below the giant, magic word, “Sevilla.” As our taxi whizzed along the Avenida Kansas City into the long sought-for metropolis, we moved surreally sideways in culture, space and time.
Once established in Seville’s old town, we ventured out for a first foray into a streetscape which had not altered in its essentials for several centuries – narrow calles, often cobbled, lined with white several-storeyed houses, with a whiff of drains, interspersed with baroque churches of gilt-encumbered altars, wounded Jesuses and weeping Virgins.
In August, these churches are eerily expectant, open only briefly in the evening, lavish theatrical sets for rare individual worshippers. It is hard to visualize them in Holy Week, when they thrum with eldritch energy, as hundreds of pointed-hooded ‘penitents’ parade monstrances and lurid Passion tableaux into the streets under the regard of thousands – phone-pressing tourists of course, but among these also true believers, witnesses to a faith that still subsists in this land long ago hard-won from Islam.
Wilting after our early start, and unaccustomed to 38˚ heat after an English summer hitherto notable only for its almost complete absence of sunshine, we dined gratefully on Greek salad in the Alameda de Hercules, under the gaze of the Greek god and Julius Caesar standing on the tops of Roman columns – statues of the mythical founder of the city, and the emperor who gave it its first urban statute.
Seville is ancient indeed, its locale inhabited by ‘Celtiberians’ at least a millennium before Christ, who founded a town called El Carambolo (later absorbed into Seville’s western suburbs) and traded in precious metals mined in the hills around. Greeks and Phoenicians came to trade in copper, silver and gold, and some settled along the banks of the broad river then called the Tartessos.
The Phoenicians’ settlement was called Hisbaal (a reference to their deity Baal) or Spal, the dankly powerful remnants of which underpin one of Seville’s latest landmarks, built between 2006 and 2011 – the huge wooden structure (perhaps the world’s largest) nicknamed ‘Las Setas’ (The Mushrooms) because of its shape, from the top of which on an August afternoon there are near-blinding views of the brilliant-white contemporary skyline.
The Romans took Spal from the Phoenicians’ Carthaginian successors (Hannibal’s wife is said to have come from this area), and dubbed it Hispalis – although their chief settlement hereabouts was the colony of Itálica, founded by Scipio, whose well-preserved ruins are just northwest of the present city. They renamed the Tartessos the Bætis, and the surrounding province of Hispania Ulterior (later Hispania Bætica) became prosperous and prestigious, with Emperors Hadrian and Trajan both born in Itálica (possibly also Theodosius) – and the poet Martial a long-time resident, who interestingly records seeing castanet-clicking Tartessian dancers some seventeen centuries before the word ‘flamenco’ was first recorded.
The name Andalusia comes from the Arabic term for the entire Iberian peninsula, al-Andalus, ‘land of the Vandals’ – a reference to the Germanic tribe that overran Iberia after the fall of the Western Empire, and then fought enthusiastically among themselves. One eighth century Visigoth kinglet had the bright idea of requesting military assistance from nearby North Africa, within view just across the Pillars of Hercules. Like many an importer of mercenaries before and since, the unhappy kinglet then found himself unable to get his ‘guests’ to go.
From 711 onwards, Moorish armies surged across much of present-day Spain and Portugal, and famously menaced even France, before ultimate downfall more than seven centuries later, in Europe’s pivotal year of 1492. The Moors were more than formidable fighters; they were also agricultural innovators, instigating impressive irrigation schemes and introducing lemons and the oranges with which Seville is now synonymous. They gave the Tartessos/Bætis its ‘final’ name, Guadalquivir, derived from the Arabic for ‘wide river,’ erected some still-extraordinary edifices and presided over some highly cultivated courtly cultures which both perpetuated Greek learning and encouraged new intellectual experimentation (within politic limits).
Moorish Andalusia is often adduced as an historical example of ‘tolerant’ Islam – a rhetorical counterpoint to other portrayals of Islam as a narrow-minded and rebarbative force bent on global domination. One suspects this is overdone; many of the Christians and Jews who lived under Moorish suzerainty cannot have seen their situation so sunnily. They were subject to onerous special taxes, and there would have been daily indignities. Even by the standards of the early Middle Ages, the annual tribute of one hundred Christian virgins to the Moorish monarch must have grated, while the most tendentious Moorish apologist cannot deny the frequently vicious internecine conflicts of the courts. Some Moorish dynasties were ostentatiously brutal, like the 11th century Abbadid ruler who ‘decorated’ his forts with flowers planted in the skulls of enemies.
Moorish influence is nevertheless everywhere to be seen in southern Spain, and indelible – from repurposed former mosques, and the characteristic castellation of their forts, to the plashing fountains in private courtyards that afford psychological as well as visual relief amidst August’s punishing heats. The Mozarabic Christians living under and influenced by Islam were later mirrored by the Mudéjar Muslims living under and influenced by Christianity, and their cultures run into each other in all kinds of ways – from architectural styles and the colourful azulejo tiles for which modern Spain and Portugal are noted, to cuisine and language. Even the Spanish national hero known as ‘El Cid’ – the eleventh century warrior Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar – fought both with and against Moorish forces, depending on circumstances. Andalusia’s still notable Christian ardency may also be a paradoxical legacy of Islam – its defensive fervency a reaction to humiliating centuries of second-class status.
It is probably impossible to separate ‘Moorishness’ from a more generic ‘Mediterranean’ culture, where modes of living on all coasts have always borne similarities, because of the shared climate and geography on top of millennia of intellectual or more violent interactions. But there is ‘un-European’ exoticism to be found in the culture of Andalusia – a culture which for many outsiders has become a kind of shorthand for all of Spain. Specifically Andalusian traditions such as flamenco, bull-fighting, and tapas – as well as its arid, olive-treed, ruined castle-dotted landscapes – have become stereotypical images of the whole country, which must surely irk many Aragonese, Asturians, Basques, Castilians, Catalonians, and Galicians.
The Moors, so long militarily dominant, eventually became etiolated – divided among themselves, and some of their rulers possibly too ‘civilized’ to worry about their frontiers. Burgeoning Christian kings of an increasingly self-conscious and gradually coalescing Spain placed ever-growing pressure, and Seville was retaken by the Christians in 1248. In 1492, the last Moorish ruler in Spain, King Boabdil of Granada, was forced to hand over the keys of the Alhambra – famously weeping as he looked back on Granada for the last time, for which his mother rebuked him, “You do well, to weep like a woman for what you failed to defend as a man!”
Seville’s most expansive days were now to come, as it became first the launching pad of epic expeditions, and then chief port for the Spanish Empire, safely upriver from dangerous Barbary corsairs, but with easy access to the Atlantic. Audacious navigators set off down the turtle-haunted waterway, most celebratedly Columbus, who may have been Italian but had a crew made up largely of local men. A modern statue of one local boy, Rodrigo de Triana, stands in the Triana riverside district, his plinth bearing the laconic inscription “Tierra!” (Land!) – the single word he shouted when he was the first to espy the Americas.
Magellan’s equally world-altering expedition set out from here in August 1519, five tiny (approximately 50 tons) carracks like the Victoria, tasked with finding a western route to the spice islands. The Victoria was the only one to return, in September 1522, the first ship to circumnavigate the world. Magellan had been killed in the Moluccas, and the Spanish are proud that it was one of their own, the Basque captain Juan Sebastián de Elcano, who completed the voyage. As he wrote in his none-too modest memoirs, “I was the first to close the globe in my wake…my journey has become a legend.”
A seaworthy replica of the Victoria – harbinger of whole Indies fleets – is tied up alongside at Seville, beside a small museum explaining something of the context and consequences of that world-changing voyage. Coloured late fifteenth century portolan charts show carefully inked coastlines as far north as Britain, as far south as the Cape of Good Hope and all around the Mediterranean littoral – but blank or simply sketched spaces almost everywhere else, conveying the immensity as well of excitement of the navigators’ tasks.
The Golden Tower nearby, which was once used to store the vast treasures brought home from the Americas, now holds a small naval museum, in which the achievements of earlier Spanish sailors are linked proudly to the modern navy. By the late sixteenth century, Seville had become fabulously wealthy, with a population of over 150,000. Between the 16th and 18th centuries, the Spanish controlled an estimated 80% of the world’s silver, mined in South America (Argentina is named after the Spanish word for silver).
A less well-known commodity was cochineal, which arrived in Seville by the shipload (in 1587 alone, an estimated 72 tons – equivalent to over 10 billion beetles), and sold on under Spanish monopoly – dyeing the famous velvets of Venice, crimsoning cardinals’ robes across the Catholic world, and even Buddhist temples in Siam. This is not to mention Spain’s long domination of the tobacco trade – symbolized in Seville by the Antigua Fábrica de Tabacos, where Bizet’s gypsy Carmen rolled cigars and dreamed of her toreador.
In Spain – at least, in Andalusia – there is little public evidence of the angst presently eating at other Western countries with colonial pasts. To make an anecdotal but possibly not wholly worthless point, many obvious tourists as well as residents (we met Seville residents from Colombia and Venezuela) appear to bear Mesoamerican physical traces, suggesting not just the length of these connections but also an ease with them. Road names and statues referencing the Empire remain sturdily in situ, and buildings like the many national pavilions built for 1929’s hugely ambitious (but unluckily-timed) Ibero-American Exposition retain their original names. Evocative documents like the crew lists, cargo manifests and royal charters of globe-redrawing expeditions are guarded by serious-faced security at the Archive of the Indies, beside the Cathedral. Epic imperial undertakings are almost as intertwined with ‘Spanishness’ as Catholicism.
Inside the Cathedral – built on the site of a grand mosque, and the world’s largest church by cubic area – is the late 19th century tomb of Columbus designed by the sevillano sculptor, Arturo Mélida. This was originally intended for the cathedral at Havana, but was erected here instead after the Spanish-American War showed Spain’s imperial glory-days were finally over. Columbus’s coffin (which may not actually contain his remains, which were moved several times) is upheld by four imposingly inhuman figures, symbols of the kingdoms of Aragón, Castile, León and Navarra. The lance held in Castile’s free hand once impaled a secondary symbol, a pomegranate – Granada in Spanish, a lapidary insult to the last of the Moors.
The main surviving part of the old mosque is the Cathedral’s bell-tower, the Giralda, which was once the minaret. Those uneasy with such old Christian triumphalism ought to recall that the mosque itself had been a triumphalist structure, symbolically built on a base of smashed Roman statuary. The Giralda – named after its sixteenth century giraldillo (weather vane) – is now the stereotypical symbol of Seville, seen everywhere on tourist ephemera, and more lastingly in the many old paintings seen around the city, showing the city’s two patron saints, Justa and Rufina, upholding the tower to prevent it falling during the Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755. The Cathedral displays a fine Justa y Rufina by Goya – although the most famous painters associated with Seville are Murillo, Velázquez and Leal, all born in the city, with examples of their works on display in churches, museums and former palaces.
The most beautiful artwork in the Cathedral itself is undoubtedly the altarpiece designed by the Flemish carver Pieter Dancart, which was begun in 1482 and took 80 years to complete (the Spanish controlled all or most of modern-day Holland and Belgium between 1556 and 1714). Showing 45 scenes from Christ’s life, it is the world’s largest altarpiece at almost 90 feet high and 72 feet wide, and is coated with an estimated three tons of gold. The Spanish love of precious metals also extends to silver, with the word “Plateresque” (‘in the manner of a silversmith’) coined to describe first Spanish, and then any architecture, of the 15th-17th centuries that combines Gothic proportion and scale with especially ornate or flamboyant designs.
The ponderous lugubriousness of the Spanish brand of Catholicism is everywhere evident in Seville – perhaps most searingly in the Hospital de la Caridad, founded by Don Miguel de Mañara (1627-1679), and completed in 1674. Mañara had been a notorious youthful libertine, until one day he had a terrifying ‘preview’ of his own funeral procession. Shaken to his soul by this ‘sight’ (and an outbreak of plague, which killed thousands of Sevillians), he joined a local brotherhood, whose avocation it was to inter the bodies of criminals, plague-victims and vagrants, and used his family fortune to found the Hospital for the relief of the poor and dying – for which it is still used. Dignified venerable men saunter in and out of the stately complex, or sit outside the front in short-sleeve shirts, composedly awaiting destino.
The Hospital’s magnificent chapel was decorated by eight paintings by Murillo, and four of his works are still here; the others, looted by the French during the Peninsular Wars, ended up ecumenically in London, Ottowa, St. Petersburg and Washington. There are also two striking paintings by Leal, on the theme of the Triumph of Death – one showing a trampling skeleton pointing to the words In ictu oculi (‘in the blink of an eye’), and the other, inscribed Ni más, ni menos (‘no more, no less’), showing a rotting coffin and a decomposing bishop so gruesomely realistic Murillo marvelled “you have to hold your nose to look at it.”
Mañara himself decomposes in the crypt, although his stone was set at his request in the chapel’s doorway so it could be stepped upon by all comers. He also left a small body of disconsolate writings, translated as Discourse on Truth. Here is a characteristic extract:
Seek out Alexander, call for Scipio, and perhaps their ashes will be in some mud wall or in the soil of a garden…Who would believe that the body of Julius Caesar, whom the whole world feared, is now growing cabbages in an orchard?
From Seville’s Roman fathers, Mañara came even closer to home:
Consider a vault; enter it with consideration, and set yourself to looking at your parents, or your wife (if you have lost her), or the friends you knew; consider the silence. Not a sound is heard; only the gnawing of the maggots and the worms can be heard. And where is the noise of pageboys and lackeys? Everything comes there; observe the jewels of the palace of the dead: some spider webs.
Upstairs in the Hospital’s hot, still and silent treasury, possibly overcome by the horror of the human condition, a security guard dozed at his desk.
Alcazar is another word derived from Arabic, and examples may be found in many Spanish towns. Seville’s Alcazar is one of the best known and largest of these citadel-palaces – begun in the eighth century on the site of a Roman barracks, and later strengthened and adorned by the Abbadids, and then the 12th/13th century Almohads. The Alcazar we see today is however mostly a Christian construction, begun not long after 1248. King Pedro I of Castile and León (r. 1350-69), amusingly nicknamed both “The Cruel” and “The Just,” carried out major reconstruction cannibalising other Moorish buildings, and much of this is still visible today.
Pedro was certainly capable of cruelty, notoriously murdering the Archbishop of Santiago – and, here in the Alcazar, his own cousin (Pedro himself was later murdered, stabbed to death in a tent). On the other hand, he generally protected Jews, merchants and peasants, and sided with the Moors on occasion. One emir gave him an enormous ruby as reward for assistance rendered, which ended up in the English Crown Jewels. The English took Pedro’s part in the Castilian Civil War of 1351-69, the Black Prince personally helping him win the Battle of Navarette of 1367. Two of the daughters Peter had with his pulchritudinous mistress, María de Padilla – so beautiful it was said courtiers vied to drink her bath water – married sons of England’s Edward III, so becoming wives to the first Dukes of both York (Edmund of Langley) and Lancaster (John of Gaunt). He is honoured in Chaucer’s ‘Monk’s Tale’ – “O noble, O worthy Petro, glorie of Spayne.”
Back in Pedro’s dream-palace, there are marble-columned windows, arched and vegetation-shaded verandas, pierced pendant friezes and fretwork and overhanging rooves, and syncretical juxtapositions, with Christian lion symbols ‘guarding’ the gates, and Holy Roman Emperor Charles V’s personal motto Plus Ultra (‘Yet Further’) appearing on walls near older Kufic inscriptions still lauding Allah. The frantic and repetitive geometric patterning of Moorish wall-tiles seen here and in many other places strongly suggest artistic frustration of not being allowed to depict figures; beautiful though the tiles undoubtedly are, they offer little human interest.
Through a great door to the right is the Salón del Almirante, named in honour of Columbus’s official title of Gran Almirante (Great Admiral). In this suite of rooms, Columbus, Balboa and others discussed and plotted some of the earliest American voyages, and changed the world. In the Capilla de los Navigantes, a striking 16th century altarpiece shows the Virgin protecting precisely-drawn Spanish ships under her cloak, as well as Columbus and Charles V.
Outside, sun-punished brick walls and Roman-to-medieval columns surround green rectangles of water gulped by goldfish, while red dragonflies oviposit eggs doomed too to be engulfed. Tourists wearing alarming ensembles sip endlessly from plastic bottles, dutifully press audio-guides to moisture-beaded ears, and photograph themselves with fountains. Green parakeets make a similar chattering commotion high up in the crowns of palm trees and among the prickly pear and rosemary, and higher still screaming swifts dash in search of dipteran dinners. Choruses of cicadas chirr and click halfway-down, and ground-level grasshoppers perform prodigies of propulsion flying from your feet. Blackbirds bounce across browned grass, sparrows spik in verdant box-hedges, and geckos charge up the plinths of classical heroes.
Trees are among the chief adornments of southern Spain, valued by enlightened planters over the centuries not just as shelter-givers and food-providers, but often for their own sakes. These trees come from everywhere – Africa, Asia, the Americas and even Australia – planted by botanical benefactors but now abundantly naturalised in this country which scarcely knows snow. Cypresses and pines define boundaries, and mark out classical prospects. Oranges and lemons aromatise and stud even the severest streets, offering festive-hued fruits among arsenic-green foliage. Three-hundred-year-old planes peel picturesquely and susurrate in public squares. Bays and laurels offer flavours for gazpacho, and evergreen crowns for victors. Almonds, avocados, bananas, figs, pears and pineapples prosper in gardens and parks. Enormous rubber trees with writhingly restless trunks spring dynamically skywards and drop hard small seeds with a clack onto the pavements. Cactuses stand stark as skeletons, and palms like punctuation marks, their fronds often fondly intertwined in city balconies by those recalling Christ coming to Jerusalem.
The Holy City comes to mind again not far from the Alcazar, in the Casa de Pilatos – ‘Pilate’s House’ as conjured by the Marqués de Tarifa upon his return from Jerusalem in 1519, where he was said to have seen the study in which the Roman decided the Galilean’s fate. A charmingly anachronistic ‘replica’ of this room stands within a ducal home rich in realer antiquities, including a statue of Athene that may go back to the fifth century BC. Black and white mosaics and reflecting fountains cool down courtyards, and creeping plants climb vermilion walls towards unbroken blue. A column in the chapel is supposed to represent the one at which Christ was flogged at Pilate’s order. Another Rome-recalling tradition tells of an orange tree in the garden sprouting from the spot where a servant unthinkingly dumped the ashes of the Emperor Trajan.
Out beyond the city limits, old olives define the rustic scene, twisted veterans of countless droughts somehow still standing on red earth and endlessly recirculating dust, offering oils for the people and shade for black belligerent bulls. Holm oaks shed acorns for the long pigs whose desirable dried jamón hangs from hooks in supermarkets and delicatessens alike, sweetened and wizened from air-curing, or stained by old smokes.
We come into Cádiz – which claims to be the oldest city in Europe, founded in the second millennium BC – from the north, along an equally venerable highway. Navies of Carthage, Rome and Spain were stationed here, and still are (it is also the base of the US Sixth Fleet) – sleek grey frigates visible from the road, elegantly dangerous presences among the Atlantic haze. Its strategic importance attracted unwelcome English attentions often during England’s long wars against ‘the Don.’ In 1587, Drake made havoc in the harbour, ‘singeing the king of Spain’s beard’ as he exulted to Elizabeth, provoking the metaphorically scalded Spaniard to launch the following year’s unlucky Armada. In 1596, the Earl of Essex did more singeing, and Nelson in 1797.
Cádiz shimmers with sea-longing, poised perfectly on the very edge of Europe, every azure horizon beckoning to adventure. A botanical garden along the front contains rare trees from as far away as the Antipodes, and huge cruise ships bulk along the seafront. We raced across burning beach sands to plunge into welcome waves, among tourists but also natives (gaditanos) – a very ‘continental’ blend of highly respectable matrons in voluminous one-pieces, and tattooed and topless young. Salt affects the very stone of Cádiz, coating, pitting and weakening buildings, including the austerely grand Cathedral, which towards the end of the 20th century began weeping stone onto the congregation.
We downed paella in the plaza before the Cathedral, the sun refracting through soap-bubbles blown by a children’s entertainer. Small children chased these sprites across the square, while a saxophonist playing pop excited epidemic chorea among slightly older tourists, with groups of up to 50 dancing along despite the heat. It seemed appropriately Saturnalian in a city celebrated for exuberant Carnaval.
The Cathedral crypt contains the remains of Manuel de Falla, born in Cádiz in 1876, composer of Nights in the Gardens of Spain and most famously, El Amor Brujo – notes from which sound out upon the hour from the clock of the town hall. His cantata La Atlántida is inspired by the view of the Atlantic from Cadíz, and the tenth of Hercules’ Twelve Labours, the task of capturing the cattle of the three-bodied monster Geryon, whose island of ‘Erythia’ is identified with this area.
As well as evocative, the city is elegant and prosperous, chic with 19th century promenades and smart restaurants, and famously liberal in its politics. In 1812, the Cortes of Cádiz was set up as the first Spanish parliament which aimed to represent all classes, and all parts of Spain and its dependencies. It ratified the Constitution of Cádiz, Spain’s first constitution (and one of the world’s first written constitutions) – which established the country as a constitutional monarchy under Joseph Bonaparte, theoretically with almost universal male suffrage and a free press. It was suppressed just two years later, after the French had been expelled and Fernando VII restored – at the urgent demand of the populace. That Constitution is now, arguably ironically, seen as something of a democratic landmark.
In 1832, the American writer Washington Irving published his fourth book on aspects of Spanish history, Tales from the Alhambra. The bestselling author of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip van Winkle had been much influenced by Walter Scott, and it shows in all his Spanish works, which range from highly romanticised histories to straightforward historical fiction. He sparked a huge interest in what had long been an overlooked era, in a poor part of a declining country. He was besotted with Spain, which he had first visited in 1826 while attached to the American Embassy, and saw the Alhambra as the country’s mystical heart. Granada in particular captured his imagination, and he had already published The Conquest of Granada (1829), which fictionalised the centuries-long struggle which ended in 1491, with the capitulation of Boabdil the Unlucky. As he wrote in Tales, “To the traveller imbued with a feeling for the historical and poetical, the Alhambra of Granada is as much an object of veneration as is the Kaaba or sacred house of Mecca to all true Moslem pilgrims.”
He spent several months in the dilapidated and war-damaged old fortress, in a state of exaltation, sleeping fitfully in former palatial apartments and breaking fasts in the celebrated Court of the Lions. His panegyrics encouraged other writers to come, and so ineluctably today’s tourists, who descend on the town by the million each year.
The 2023 edition of Rough Guide to Andalucía waxes Washingtonian in calling the Alhambra “the most exciting, sensual and romantic of all European monuments.” But were Irving to visit now, he would find it stripped of most of its melancholy mystique, erased by sheer numbers of sightseers – including, of course, ourselves! But it is still a highly suggestive silhouette in reddish stone – a place seemingly worth toiling towards although on top of a steep hill, even at noon in August when the sun beats back up at you from the flinty cobbles, and even the trees have been stunned into stupor.
There was a Roman settlement here, which the 711 invaders renamed and reused, but it was always less important than Cordoba. It was not until the 1240s that Granada would become prominent, and over the next 250 years ever more precious to the Moors as their other kingdoms went under one by one. Most of the present complex dates from the middle of the 14th century, when the Emirate was at its apex.
By 1491, Granada was the last Muslim state in Europe, and embroiled in civil war even as Fernando and Isabella’s forces encircled the city. After a ten-month siege, by November all was over, and Boabdil’s vizier handed over the keys to the fortress on 2 January 1492. Boabdil was granted an estate not far away, but the same year left Spain forever, along with many other Muslims, and he died in Morocco in obscure circumstances sometime between 1518 and 1533.
The Christian monarchs treated Boadbil and his retinue chivalrously, but a triumphal reaction was inevitable from the moment their silver cross banner first fluttered from the fortress’s ramparts. They converted the last of Spain’s mosques into churches, and stipulated the expulsion or forced conversion of Spain’s Jews, and then those Muslims who hadn’t left, understandably regarding them as a potential fifth column.
Fernando and Isabella lived and worked in the Alhambra for some time – it was allegedly at the Alhambra that Columbus first broached the idea of sailing west in the hope of finding India – and they are both buried in the city, in the nearby Capilla Real. This is a moving building in its own right, where the monarchs’ unpretentious lead coffins may be glimpsed (but not photographed) through the gate of their vault below their showier effigies above. The sacristy contains central national-religious relics that still radiate romantic force – Fernando’s sword, Isabella’s crown, and even the banners that flew on 2 January 1492.
Back at the Alhambra, Fernando and Isabella’s grandson Charles V built a Renaissance palace (now containing an excellent late medieval art collection) by demolishing one of the palace’s wings. Napoleon’s troops wreaked terrible damage between 1812 and 1814, and planned to destroy the whole complex on their retreat, but a crippled Spanish patriot (and benefactor of all humanity) named José García removed the fuses. What remains after these vicissitudes is as beautiful as it is stately.
Visitors enter through the remains of the 13th century Alcazaba, a fortress built on top of an earlier fortress. There are stupendous views from the Torre de le Vela (Tower of the Bell) down over the Rio Darro, the vast white-brown vega, and the stage-set-like Sierra Nevada, whose peaks in winter can be capped with snow. This is a landscape of the grandest proportions, that might have been designed equally for acts of great chivalry or acts of great cruelty. Many famous Western films were made in central Spain, to transfer the toughly uncompromising psyche of Spain to even more epic vistas.
A garden softens and sweetens the senses, an ordered paradise of creepers, myrtles and roses – leading to the Palacios Nazaríes, a strange confection to find amid such mighty walls. Built quickly, and intended partly as a pleasure house, the suite of splendid rooms is decorated with Islamic calligraphy and motifs, below which successive rulers held court, conducted business, received guests and relaxed. In the case of Yusuf I (1333-54), it was also a place to die, the sultan stabbed to death while he prayed.
The harem is approached through Irving’s favourite Court of the Lions, named for the twelve stylized beasts supporting the fountain, which, an ingratiating inscription insists, are held in check only by their respect for the sultan. The Sala de los Abencerrajes has a ceiling of almost impossible ornateness – a sixteen-sided dome with frothy stalactite tracery and high windows covering a reflecting fountain, the delicately incongruous scene of an atrocious if apocryphal crime, when a sultan is said to have murdered 16 members of the Abencerraj family.
A set of atypically Islamic figurative portraits look down on the Hall of the Kings, followed by the domed hall of the favourite wife, and the quarters of all the others, ending in the Royal Baths, where sultans and sultanas would disport themselves to the strains of blind singers. At the end we reach the geometrical gardens of the Generalife, a high-up demi-paradise for fretful Berbers, a place to watch festive fireworks, stroll away the cares of state or plan a tryst, under the guardianship of great walls and the gaze only of eagles.
We hired a car and headed north from Seville to see family, grateful to swop ring-roads for ever emptier highways. We were heading for Iberia’s parched and less-known heart, and the borderlands of Extremadura. Quiet roads, and even quieter fields – mile after mile after mile of olives, oaks and thorn trees, mile after mile after mile of thirsty terrain stretching to blue and purple distance or unreal mountains, the whole expanse almost without movement, except for rare and vast birds of prey gliding along on baking thermals – griffon vultures, coldly viewing the campo, Roc-reminiscent even in the distance, their very name suggesting fabulous creatures.
Armies have marched and counter-marched this way since always, trudging sandals or boots caked with dust, sweating and swearing in armour or uniform, from the Romans via the Visigoths, Moors, Christians, Wellington’s Britons and Soult’s French, up to Franco’s ‘Army of Africa’ who in 1936, in an early setback for the Republic, took the town of Mérida – our first stop outside Andalusia, and one of the most impressive Roman sites in a country with many such.
Founded in 25 BC, its original name of Augusta Emerita indicates its importance as imperial foundation, and nature as colony for ex-soldiers. It was one end of the Silver Way, the Roman road that ran to the mines of the south, and became capital of the province of Lusitania. Its aqueduct, bridge, triumphal arch and theatre are wonderfully complete, and the columns, walls and other features that are found in unexpected places all over town suggest much remains to be uncovered. A memorable museum preserves monumental sculptures and mosaics – a melange of classical culture, from fauns, funerary steles, huntsmen on the trail of fabulous beasts, satyrs and river deities, to a Laocoon and a massive bull’s head still so full of force it might be about to burst from the wall.
The theatre, which was built around 15 BC and seated 6,000 spectators, is the most striking structure, with its fantastically well-preserved first century AD façade of two tiers of Corinthian columns, with statues of gods. The more downmarket neighbouring amphitheatre was used for gladiatorial contests and held 14,000. Standing in its ring amid the great silence of Spain’s high summer, it is difficult to visualise such violence, to think of those thousands of tense or shouting voyeurs, to think of this sand spattered with gobbets of gore. Yet real men, pumped with adrenalin or in a state of terror, once had to run down these now largely unroofed walkways and blinking out into the sun, amid the bloodthirsty roaring of the town, to kill others who had done them no harm, or transfix bristling but terrified beasts from boars to Barbary lions.
More pacific thirsts could be slaked by waters brought from several miles north, along the city’s second greatest landmark – the 1st– 3rd century Milagros aqueduct. The 2,700-foot-long structure is one of the most intact of all aqueducts, its double deck arched outline proudly emblazoned on tourist ware, and attractive to nesting storks. Nearby is the 60-arched bridge over the Guadiana, at 2,600 feet one of the longest of surviving Roman spans.
Oblivious to architectural distinctions, the Guadiana flows on to the handsome if obscure town of Olivenza, whose chief claim to national fame is as having been a Portuguese possession between 1297 and 1801. In that latter year, French and Spanish troops invaded Portugal to prevent it supporting Britain, and the Spanish commander plucked oranges as trophies to send back to the queen (reputedly his lover), which has resulted in it being called the ‘War of the Oranges.’ The Spanish kept all the territory they took on the east bank of the river, although the Portuguese government’s official position even now is irredentist. The sundered nature of the area is emblematized by the late medieval Ajuda bridge on the road to the Portuguese town of Elvas, destroyed in 1709 during the War of the Spanish Succession, and never rebuilt. When we swam in the Guadiana’s opaquely green waters one evening, we were floating in international legal limbo.
Hispanicization programmes pursued by Spanish governments from the Bourbons to the Francoists are now being quietly dropped, with renewed interest in the area’s Portuguese heritage symbolised in bilingual street signs, and Portuguese nationals in the area permitted to vote in Portuguese elections. Olivenza’s best known son is probably Paulo da Gama, older brother of Vasco da Gama, who commanded one of the ships of Vasco’s fleet on the famous 1497 voyage to India, which opened up the sea route from Europe to the East by way of the Cape of Good Hope. Deep roots and spreading branches are to be found even in Olivenza, and could be symbolized by the unique Jesse Tree carving in the town’s chief church – at 45 feet tall probably the world’s largest, and filled with rich fruits.
Cáceres has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1986, and its intact medieval Ciudad Monumental attracts film-makers, most recently those responsible for Game of Thrones. But medieval artefacts seem almost modern when compared with the prehistoric hand-prints in the close-by Cave of Maltravieso, at more than 67,000 years old the oldest known anywhere. Crude Celtiberian figures in the city museum speak of stories told and forgotten before the Romans were heard of – who got here as ‘late’ as 25 BC.
Pigeons and crows rise with a sudden flapping and fly in flocks across the otherwise deserted Plaza Mayor, their shadows accompanying them companionably across the cobbles, clearly outlined by the hardness of the light. The Cáceran cityscape suggests massy strength, with its parapeted towers and turrets of convents and grand houses, red-brick or limestone or white stucco, red-roofed and almost completely lacking vegetation. Rare windows look onto worn stone steps and burning back-alleys where every tall wall or gateway or church pavement may carry vaunting coats-of-arms of caballeros once militant in faith and family pride. Bears, castles, crosses, eagles, putti, swords and suns are everywhere in evidence – armorial cliches, but still strength as well as melancholy.
Carvings seen in Cácere’s churches are sometimes stranger, from the archway graffiti of centuries ago choristers (as artless as the hands of Maltravieso), to a rampant lion with an inconveniently erect penis, beset by snarling disembodied dogs’ heads. In one hushed interior is a startlingly sable Jesus close to a preternaturally pale one of alabaster, whose fine blue cracks could almost be the ‘blue blood’ once so prized by hidalgos.
Hidalgos were often also conquistadores, like Vasco Núñez de Balboa. His statue is one of the first things you see on entering his birthplace of Jerez de los Caballeros – although the caballeros in this case were the Templars, whose town this was. The Jerez of today is deathly still even by Spanish summer standards, at the junction of unimportant roads in a landscape as bereft of people as it is full of toponymic significance, with place-names referencing the nearby frontier with Portugal, as well as spiritual frontiers, on the boundaries of reality and reason – Eremita de Nuestra Senora de los Santos, Convento de Rocamador, Salvatierra de los Barros, Valle de Santa Ana, and the ominously evocative Valle de Matamoros (‘Valley of the Moor-Slayer’).
Balboa came from the lower nobility, a class often fiercely proud of their descent, but rarely rich. In 1500, he joined in an exploratory voyage to present-day Colombia. He tried farming in Hispaniola but failed, escaping creditors by stowing away back to Colombia, and then moving to Darién in present-day Panama. Here with a few others, he founded Santa María de la Antigua, the first permanent European settlement in all the Americas, and began to grow rich by barter or war with the local tribes. By 1511, he was Darién’s governor and captain general. He organized expeditions into the interior in search of gold and slaves, often using brutal methods, such as torture or using dogs to tear enemies to pieces.
Hearing folk-tales of a fabulously wealthy kingdom somewhere to the south, governed by an emperor who was initiated in gold (“El Hombre Dorado”), Balboa requested reinforcements, but although these were forthcoming, enemies at court ensured he was not given command. He started out without them, and in September 1513, standing with “wild surmise / silent, upon a peak in Darién,” (as Keats described the moment famously, although giving the credit erroneously to Cortés) was the first European to see the Pacific, which he promptly claimed for Spain. He was restored to royal favour, and named governor of this exciting new sea, and of Panama.
But rivals continued to intrigue against him, even as he persisted in his exploratory endeavours – in 1517/8, masterminding the transportation of a fleet of ships overland across the isthmus in pieces, to explore the Gulf of San Miguel (1517–18). In 1518, he was summoned home to Spain, whereupon he was indicted on trumped-up charges of rebellion and treason, and executed in January 1519.
Not content with birthing one restless spirit, this little town also gave rise to Hernando de Soto, the first European to penetrate deep into the territory of the modern United States, and the first to encounter the Mississippi River.
De Soto’s father wanted him to be a lawyer, but when Hernando was still a teenager he informed his father he wanted to be an explorer instead, and left for the New World in 1514. He prospered in Panama through daring and slaving, and came to control the area we now know as Nicaragua. Tiring of 16th century respectability, harum-scarum Hernando loaned Pizzaro two ships and sailed with him to Peru as his captain of horse. He was instrumental in the Incas’ downfall, but thereafter fell out with the less gentlemanly Pizarro, and returned to Spain.
Jerez must have seemed terribly limiting after such expansive experiences, although he dutifully endowed a chapel in the town’s church. Unsurprisingly soon he was back across the Atlantic, as governor of Cuba, with added extravagant royal remits – to conquer what we now call Florida, and explore modern Ecuador, plus special rights to whatever riches he could find along the Amazon. Seen from today’s perspective, it all seems like a fever dream, which makes it rather appropriate that de Soto should have died from that cause in 1543, in the hut of an Indian chief, about as far from parched Extremadura as it was possible to get in the 16th century. Many today would probably argue both men should have stayed in Jerez.
Cordoba rose to eminence in the second century BC, as the Romans’ Corduba, the capital of Hispania Ulterior. It supported Pompey, and was accordingly destroyed by Caesar, but rebuilt itself to become capital of the new province of Hispania Baetica. Lucan was born here in the first century AD, nephew of his fellow Corduban, Seneca the Younger. After the Moors conquered the area, Cordoba became a cultural and political powerhouse, one of the three chief cities in the Muslim world (after Baghdad and Cairo). In the 12th century, it was the birthplace of both the Muslim polymath (and pioneering interpreter of Aristotle) Averroës, and the Jewish philosopher Maimónides, although the latter had to leave Spain after refusing to convert to Islam (he later became Saladin’s astronomer).
The Mezquita, Corduba’s world-renowned mosque, which is now the city’s cathedral, was begun (and finished!) in 785. The ingenious architect economically re-used columns from the former Visigothic cathedral, and close examination of capitals reveals some ‘un-Islamic’ figurative carvings, including a demon, a monk and a bare-breasted woman. The Mezquita was originally open along one side, but that side was bricked up after conversion to cathedral, leaving a rather crepuscular interior.
A forest of columns, in a variety of handsome stones, stretches away in all directions, all made uniform in height and given aesthetic unity by alternating light stone and red brick in tiger-striped arches. Even crowded with tourists, the effect is very impressive, its stripped-down simplicity clearly designed to induce a state of raptness.
In the gardens of the old Alcazar, there is a statue showing Columbus meeting Fernando and Isabella here in 1486, and other kingly or classical sculptures define lines of sight, or stand at the tops of steps. Clipped cypresses give shade for shrill cicadas, and carp cluster in the warm baths of rectangular pools. Some of the prisoners of the Inquisition, which used the Alcazar buildings between the 16th and 19th centuries, could probably get tantalizing glimpses of the gleaming garden, although by the 19th century the whole town had become shabbily poor. Those sad buildings remained in use as a prison into the 1950s, but now shelter instead tremendous Roman mosaics, evidence of Augustan glory days.
Battling through thick undergrowth along the banks of the Guadalquivir, I looked out for snakes, but happily only disturbed ducks, egrets, and a frog, which hopped disgustedly away as I approached – a pleasingly amphibian touch for so dry a land. Another amphibian landmark then loomed into view – the reconstructed and seized-up Albolafia waterwheel, the last of many to whirl in these waters, grinding grain and pumping water for the Alcazar. Ungrateful Isabella found it too noisy, and demanded it be disabled during her stays – a circumstance demanding Tarot metaphors about Wheels of Fortune and a Queen of Swords.
I stepped outside Spain, to be greeted with a breezy “Good morning, sir!” by a burly West Midlander policeman. This is another of Spain’s disputed borders – the airport runway that both bridges and divides Spain from Gibraltar. Hundreds of tourists were streaming over from the Spanish side to sample the anomalous state of the Rock, so geographically Spanish, so culturally caught in a hard place.
This has often been a controversial frontier, as befits so unignorable and strategic a promontory – for ancient heroes, one of the limits of the known world, and even for moderns, a key to the Mediterranean. Even before the ancients, there were heavy-browed hominids here, who left their skulls for us to find – in 1848, the first adult Neanderthal skull ever discovered. Joint ancestors of ours still reside here – the several hundred Barbary macaques on the upper reaches of the Rock, which grab food and gurn and publicly clean their private parts to delight and disconcert visitors.
The duty-free shops for which Gibraltar is renowned seem like excrescences when seen against the massive ruggedness of the Rock, its notorious egg-and-chips and British newspapers more than usually unpalatable. But such are inevitable accompaniments to long British expatriate presence since its capture in 1704 – flavours of home for old-time sailors and soldiers and modern financial consultants alike.
Other British traces are pleasingly Ruritanian – a neat little courthouse, the Governor’s mansion, a modest cathedral, seat of the delightfully named Bishop in Europe, and Union flags everywhere. But there is seriousness here too, the colony a source of invisible earnings through taxation and e-gaming, a centre for ship repair and real wargaming and, not least, a psychological salve for British bad feelings about a century of ineluctable decline.
The mariners in the Trafalgar Cemetery would have scarcely understood this busy pleasure-seeking Gibraltar, which in their day must often have felt Godforsaken, a limit to their known world. They nevertheless defended it resolutely, right from the start when the Spaniards tried to take it back; on one occasion in late 1704, the whole defence rested on just 19 marines and one officer in one redoubt, who somehow held on as their numbers were whittled down to six. Generations of British army engineers since have used their service-time shrewdly to mine the monolith with batteries, emplacements, roads, stores, tunnels and walls to deter potential retakers.
Naval frigates still call here, but now most shipping is more pacific – cruise liners and yachts, and far more importantly, cargo vessels beating up or down the Inner Sea for Suez or Atlantic. Africa beckons beyond those storied Straits, almost within swimming distance, a blue coast once of legendary danger, but now just bad conscience for well-fed Westerners eating ice-creams at Europa Point.
The close-at-hand Catholic Shrine of Our Lady of Europe is in a fairly modern building, earlier incarnations having been sacked more than once. But it contains a fortunate 15th century wooden icon, a Virgin and Child so venerated the Shrine would be saluted by ships – except those of the English in 1704, who looted all the silverware and threw the decapitated icon into the sea. The pieces were fortunately found by a fisherman, who gave them to a priest. The statue was kept across the bay at Algeciras until 1864, when it was returned to the Rock, although unrestored until 1997. In 2009, Benedict XVI gave the much-tried Shrine a much-coveted (and surely deserved) Golden Rose.
We came back to Seville with the days ticking down, and too much still unseen, or unseeable. But there was time, just, for some secular shrines – shrines like the Palacio Lebrija. The countess who bought the 16th century house in 1900 was an inveterate collector, lucky enough to live before laws were brought in to protect historic sites. Perhaps the collected items were also ‘lucky,’ because they could have been scattered or destroyed by less appreciative discoverers.
Countess Lebrija lavished prodigious pesetas on antiquarian and artistic loves, making her house a salon for the most cultivated sevillanos, floored with mosaics from Itálica, remaking rooms to fit their floors rather than the other way around. She ransacked her own ancestral home too, removing hundreds of 18th century tiles from her country place, to give her sophisticated town interiors charmingly naïve rustic verticals. There are affectionate caricatures of countryfolk in the fashions of 250 years ago, got down with rapid strokes by journeymen painters – farms slumber on vanished afternoons, hunters pursue the hart, and hounds harry hares – glimpses of a Spain disappearing even in 1900.
The Palacio de las Dueñas is the Seville home of the Dukes of Alba, one of Spain’s oldest grandee families, prominent since the 12th century. The Dukes of Alba are descended from James II of England, and the family name Stuart recurs in their history. Behind the bougainvillea which blankets the façade are peaceful patios leading off state rooms holding an art collection dominated by 16th and 17th century Italian painters. There is also a later, uglier collection of bull-fighting ephemera, ranging from lurid posters to the stuffed heads of rare bulls that wreaked revenge on their tormentors.
Antonio Machado was born at the Palace in 1875, son of the Palace caretaker. Machado would become a Modernist poet, friendly with Verlaine and Wilde, earning a reputation for evocations of lost places and overgrown gardens. On a plaque on the Palace front is an extract from one of his poems: “This light of Seville … is the palace / where I was born with his rumour of fountain. / My childhood are memories of a patio /and a bright potager where the lemon tree ripens.” The lemons are luckily still there – and even more flavoursome, the chapel where Amerigo Vespucci may have married.
On our last evening, we found ourselves by ‘chance’ eating outside the oldest tavern in Spain, Las Escobas (The Brooms), close to the Cathedral – so named in allusion to a local broom-maker whose manufactures were bought by a whimsical former landlord to be stuck on the tavern ceiling.
A more famous habitue is said to have been Cervantes, who came to Seville in 1587 in search of work, and would stay there until around 1600. He applied several times to go to the New World, but was turned down, rather unsurprisingly, as his left arm had been rendered useless at the Battle of Lepanto. He had also spent almost five years as a slave, so could hardly be described as an optimal employee.
He found less exciting employment in Seville as a government agent, collecting produce for the ill-fated Armada. He was equally ill-fated, or maybe worse, in a later job collecting taxes, and spent some time in the prison at Seville. Don Quixote was almost certainly written elsewhere, but Cervantes’ experience of Seville’s seamier side did inspire his ‘Exemplary Novels. Rinconete and Cortadillo tells of Seville’s thieving fraternity, and Dialogue of the Dogs of the city’s slaughterhouses.
We sank a sangria to Spain’s greatest writer, and this captivating and connected city – and watched our bags and wallets, and regaled ourselves on meats, as the clangour of Cathedral bells echoed down the streets.
DEREK TURNER is the editor of The Brazen Head, as well as a novelist (A Modern Journey, Displacement, and Sea Changes) and reviewer. His first non-fiction book, Edge of England: Landfall in Lincolnshire, was published June 2022. Some of his writing may be found at www.derek-turner.com He is also on Twitter – @derekturner1964
A. Z. FOREMAN is a literary translator, poet and language teacher currently working on a doctorate in Near Eastern Languages at the Ohio State University. He received his B.A. in Linguistics from the University of Chicago, and his M.A. in Arabic Language from the University of Maryland. His translations from Arabic, Chinese, OldIrish, Italian, Russian, Old English, Ukrainian, Yiddish and Welsh have appeared in sundry anthologies, journals and a BBC radio broadcast. He divides his time between the bedroom, the bathroom and the kitchen. If you have a dog, he would very much like to pet it.
A. Z. FOREMAN is a literary translator, poet and language teacher currently working on a doctorate in Near Eastern Languages at the Ohio State University. He received his B.A. in Linguistics from the University of Chicago, and his M.A. in Arabic Language from the University of Maryland. His translations from Arabic, Chinese, Old Irish, Italian, Russian, Old English, Ukrainian, Yiddish and Welsh have appeared in sundry anthologies, journals and a BBC radio broadcast. He divides his time between the bedroom, the bathroom and the kitchen. If you have a dog, he would very much like to pet it.
MARK PATTON remembers the day Hirohito came to Massachusetts
It was 1974 and a cloudless bright blue autumn day, and I was out sailing with a friend in her Herreshoff 12 – a beautiful gaff-rigged wooden sailboat designed in 1914 by Nathaniel Greene Herreshoff. Herreshoff designed and built other boats, including five winning America Cup yachts. Of course, the H12 we were sailing in was just 12.5 feet long, compared to the America Cup behemoths, which were ten times its size. However, the scenery surrounding us in the little sloop was just as grand and imposing as anything the Vigilant, Defender, Columbia, Reliant or Resolute encountered during their successful defenses of the trans-Atlantic trophy.
The boat owner’s house sat up on a nearby hill, which overlooked the craft’s mooring in Little Harbor, Woods Hole. It had been used over decades to house family members during the summer scientific season at the Marine Biological Laboratory. We were soon sailing past the buoy tenders of the adjacent United States Coast Guard base into Vineyard Sound, then onto a long reach, placing the Nobska Point Light on our stern and Great Harbor on our bow. To port was Martha’s Vineyard of Teddy Kennedy’s Chappaquiddick fame and Steven Spielberg’s Jaws fame, contrasting with the pristine, and more exclusive, chain of the Elizabeth Islands. West of the Great Harbor ferry line terminal, the peninsula of Woods Hole came into view, which is often called Water Street. Water Street is a half mile long coastal road, bisected in the middle by a drawbridge, which gives pleasure craft access to the sheltered harbor of Eel Pond. On its ocean side, Water Street is lined with fishing vessels and deep-sea research vessels. Apart from a few scattered bars and eateries, science is what this town is about. From the tarmac, Water Street’s seaside view is nearly obscured by the many buildings of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the National Marine Fisheries Service, and the Marine Biological Laboratory.
This small strip of land has big accomplishments to its name – such as the Woods Hole Oceanographic’s deep-sea submersible Alvin, which among other things, in 1966 located a nuclear bomb off the coast of Spain, mislaid by a United States B-52 bomber after a midair collision. It later discovered deep sea hydrothermal vents and the strange chemosynthesis ecosystems that surround them and, in 1985, carried out a systematic exploration of the Titanic. Then there is the National Marine Fisheries Service, enhancing, regulating and inventorying the northeast fisheries stocks since 1871. The Marine Biological Lab is less attention grabbing, and little known to the public, though it boasts no fewer than 60 Nobel Laureates.
Our trip in the Herreshoff came to an end, and soon we were at my friend’s house, for a promised dinner with her family. I cannot tell you anything about what I was served as an entrée, or what most of the conversation was about. However, I can tell you that I learned that the house had been recently passed down by my hostess’s grandfather, who had died the year before. Like so many around here, he had received a Nobel Prize, in his case for the discovery of the antibiotic properties of streptomycin. Nobel Prize aside, among his many other honours was the Star of the Rising Sun, bestowed upon him by Emperor Hirohito of Japan. Hirohito’s son, Crown Prince Akihito had even sat at the table at which I was dining.
Emperor Hirohito was a marine biologist, and had started his pursuit as a young boy. He had his own lab constructed so he could study the subject throughout his life, including the war years. Akihito was no stranger to the subject either. He had officially visited Woods Hole on three separate occasions, starting as far back as 1953 when he was presented with a rare deep-sea fish in a bottle of formaldehyde by the Woods Hole Oceanographic. I was flabbergasted. I think few Americans had any idea that Japan’s imperial family had any interest in marine biology and had such prolonged contact with this distant promontory on Cape Cod.
I had to ask my hosts what this prince was like. “A nice fellow”, they said. “Naturally, there was a language barrier but he seemed to be a happy sort.” “How did he look?” I asked. “Slender, like you, and wore a blue jean jacket just like you’re wearing now.”
How could this be? I had seen many productions of the Mikado and knew that when the son of the Emperor of Japan traveled in disguise it was as a second trombone, not dressed like me – a former helmsman of the research vessel Chain, who was now working as a part-time police officer while attending Northeastern University in Boston.
***
It was October 4th, 1975, and another cloudless bright blue autumn day. I was walking up Harbor Hill, the upper section of Water Street, Woods Hole. Next to me was the Falmouth Police Department’s junior sergeant, who normally commanded the community’s midnight shift. We were heading to Woods Hole’s only coffee shop.
Most of the preliminary preparation had been done. All the cars that had been parked on either Water Street or MBL Street had been towed. Sawhorses had been erected to prohibit traffic entry, and part-time police officers ensured no one went beyond them. Rope lines had been placed at strategic spots where the motorcade would be accessible to view to authorized viewers.
A month prior, I had been called by the Falmouth Police Department’s captain of operations. He needed manpower. He was mobilizing every man he could get from his regular officers, provisional officers and auxiliary police officers for the 124th heir to the Chrysanthemum Throne, the longest reigning monarch of Japan. Michinomiya Hirohito was coming to town, with his wife, the Empress Nagako.
The plan was that the Emperor’s motorcade would drive down Water Street, stop at the Wood Hole Oceanographic’s Redfield Laboratory. There, he would exit his limousine, go in and discuss marine biology with some leading scientists in his field. The Oceanographic had a lab all set up for him, including a bathroom specially designed for this very occasion, nicknamed The Royal Flush. Once the science had been taken care of, the Emperor would be back in his limousine headed further down Water Street to the Marine Biological Laboratory’s (MBL) library in the Lillie Building. He would enter the library and be given a precious pickled tunicate (sea squirt) from the top brass of both research institutions. Concomitantly, the Empress would be up in Falmouth proper, at the historic home of Katherine Lee Bates, composer of ‘America the Beautiful,’ to be presented with some silver candle sticks carved with the MBL logo. The silversmiths were a local couple, the Panis’s, who lived on several acres of wooded and elaborately gardened land next to the town’s colonial cemetery. On occasion, I had helped Mrs. Panis with her weeding – a very short, round, and elderly woman. The couple lived in a small white house not much bigger than a doll’s, where they kept their jewelry patterns for rings and brooches in an old tobacco tin. If the empress was to receive a gift from anyone in town, I couldn’t imagine anyone more delightful to bestow it.
Regrettably, the sergeant and I never made it to the coffee shop. As we were about to open the door, six Massachusetts State Police cruisers were let through the upper Water Street barricade. They came with their blue strobe lights flashing. This struck us as showboating, due to it being early morning and the street had been cleared of people. There was no one about to be impressed by the display but other cops. These units then parked at an oblique angle, totally ignoring the painted parking lines, in front of a local tourist bar, The Captain Kidd. In unison, the troopers exited their cruisers, formed up into two columns and began to march. When they were finished with their parade, most of them went up to their positions on various rooftops with sniper rifles.
At this point, their ranking officer noticed the sergeant and me, still by the coffee shop. He hailed us, and then came over and discussed the upcoming event. As he put it, “I don’t like guarding this son of a bitch, but my job requires that I do so. If someone offs the emperor I’m not going to lose any sleep over it.” He then mentioned that three former Canadian prisoners of war, who had been held at a Japanese internment camp during World War II, had been stopped at the US border. Their plan was to be at this event and do something the trooper wasn’t going to lose any sleep over. However, he then quickly added that the men he had selected for the rooftop assignments had no fathers who fought in the Pacific theatre during World War II. I thought, “That was a bit harsh,” as the head trooper departed to attend to his other duties.
At that time, most of Woods Hole, and the rest of the nation, were still buying the official line of the Supreme Allied Commander in Japan, General Douglas MacArthur. His spin was that the emperors were always just puppets under the thumb of strong military generals. So, Hirohito didn’t cause the war or actively participate in any major decision making. He was just required to rubber-stamp things. MacArthur even went to the length of persuading Hirohito not to acknowledge his responsibility for the war. Having the Emperor of Japan brought before The Tokyo War Crimes Trials would have caused considerable heartburn for the American occupation forces in Japan.
Not long after the trooper’s departure, the sawhorses on the upper barricade were pulled open again. Now it was time for the school buses. A long line of yellow buses was admitted onto Water Street. The first was filled with reporters, their cameras sticking out the various windows and clicking away. The next series of buses contained ‘Save the Whale’ people. That year, Greenpeace had started its campaign to end whale hunting, but like Norway and the Soviet Union, Japan wanted nothing to do with it.
These Save the Whale folks were to be my particular problem. They had been granted space within a roped barricade in an area off Water Street that became known as Peace Park. It was one of the few strips of land on Water Street with a clear view of the ocean and the outlying Elizabeth Islands. As the sergeant and I headed down the sidewalk to our assigned positions we passed the Woods Hole Pharmacy. There, a strange looking young man opened the door to the drug store and entered. His chin had a couple days growth, he wore a black motorcycle jacket, and most curiously, he wore a pink knitted cap replete with brim and a pompom on top. When he entered the store, I could partially see into one of his coat pockets. It was a fleeting glance, and I wasn’t really sure of what I had seen. Was it a gun? Or was that just the sheen from a package of cigarettes? I resolved to keep an eye out for him.
At this point, the sergeant went off to his station, the Redfield Building, where the emperor would first arrive, as I headed down to Peace Park. Once there, a couple of provisional officers and myself began the process of herding cats – the cats being the protestors. They really wanted to be on the street. One of them kept engaging me in a conversation about Japan’s whale killing. I kept telling him that there was nothing I could do about Japan’s maritime policies. He then began sticking his foot beyond the rope line.
“What would you do if I go out into the street?” he asked. “Would you arrest me?”
“I would arrest you,” I answered. My assigned position was very close to the steps of the Lillie Building, where Hirohito would make his public appearance. Closer to those steps was the roped-off press area. Two fulltime officers were stationed there.
They turned to me, and admonished, “Remember, never take your eye off the crowd. When the emperor comes out refrain from looking at him. Keep your eye on the crowd.” As I resolved to heed the experienced advice of these veteran cops, the Japanese security team made its presence known – a well-tailored group of men in dark suits, led by one man in a light-coloured suit.
The people who had been allowed to assemble up the road at the Redfield Building began clapping and cheering as the black limousines pulled in front of the building.
Down on my end, the one protestor was still pestering me with his version of the Hokey Pokey — put your right foot in, take your right foot out. Put your left foot in and shake it all about. The Save the Whale crowd was getting agitated, but it was too early for them to raise their signs and begin chanting. I then felt the presence of someone directly behind me. As I turned, I discovered that it was the man in the light-colored suit, and he was some angry. He gestured wildly. I couldn’t make out much of what he was saying. Somehow, we had a serious problem. There were so many people he could have vented to, like those two veteran officers near me, or perhaps my sergeant, or that top ranking trooper, but he for some reason latched onto me, the person with the least authority in the entire bunch.
Following his lead, I left my post and hurried with him to the backend of MBL Street. There was a sawhorse there with some sort of Falmouth Police officer stationed next to it. I’d never seen this guy before. He was far too old to still be in uniform, and his uniform looked even older. I asked him who he was, and he told me that he was the father of one of the regular officers. Not sure how he got the barricade job – perhaps sworn in just for the occasion? You only needed a week’s training and passing a state exam to be a provisional. Even the town hall janitor had once flashed a badge at me. So, I guessed it was all legit. I dare say that the chief of Japan’s security had better qualifications, and his beef was that this fellow was allowing anyone who wanted to see the emperor to go beyond the official police sawhorse. They were lining up near the steps of the Lillie Building – the best seats in the house if you wanted to see the emperor. I told the well-meaning officer to knock it off, then went back to sort out the unwanted gawkers. When I made it back to my post, I saw him…the man in the black leather coat with the pink pompom knit hat. He was right amongst my Save the Whale people. I asked two other provisionals who were working with me to follow me into the crowd. As I sidled behind the fellow with the outlandish pink hat, I got a good look into that suspicious pocket of his. There was a gun. Immediately I commanded him to put his hands into the air as I lifted my revolver from its holster. “I’m a trooper!” he said in sort of a loud, but hushed style voice, as though no one would notice he was now surrounded by cops. “Oh, yeah? Well if you are a trooper why wasn’t I told you were in my crowd?” “It was to be kept a secret.”
I sent one of the other provisionals to go get the head trooper while the rest of us kept this guy’s hands up.
Yep. He was a trooper. His boss came down, nodded his head, and then walked back up Water Street.
“Why are you dressed in such an outlandish getup?” I asked him in amazement.
“I was told that Woods Hole is filled with Hippies. I thought I’d blend in with the Save the Whale people.”
His cover blown, I left him as an oddity amongst the Save the Whale people, and returned to my spot in front of the protestors.
Shortly after came the roar of more cheering up the street. I glanced towards the Redfield building and saw that the scientific discussion had apparently ended. The limousines were coming down to the Lillie Building. Everything was now happening behind me. I could hear car doors opening and closing. People were applauding and some were booing. The planned speech under the portico of the Lillie Building was now taking place.
There I was, my back turned to one of the most significant people in the history of the 20th century, and I wasn’t allowed to look at him. I was just to keep my eyes on the protestors and the fake hippie trooper. Even after the conclusion of World War II many Japanese still considered Hirohito to be of divine origin. For much of his life his subjects averted their eyes in his presence. Here I was probably the only person left on the planet still doing so. I had to take a glance. Just for a second. Capture the moment. You know, “Yes, I saw the emperor of Japan.” As I turned my head to see what was happening behind me, I saw that the two veteran officers, who warned me about doing what I was doing now, had left their posts in front of the news media people, and had sauntered up to the foot of the stairs leading up to the portico. They were totally engrossed with the ceremony, arms folded over their chests, listening to every word being spoken.
Well, the emperor was handed the precious pickled tunicate. The show was over. In a few weeks Hirohito would be down in Orlando, Florida being escorted through Disney World by Mickey Mouse. The emperor would live on for fourteen more years. In 1989, Akihito would ascend to the Chrysanthemum Throne.
As is tradition with Japanese emperors, Michinomiya Hirohito was given a posthumous name after his death. It would be Showa. His reign would be titled the Showa Era, which translates into “Bright Peace” – which is a bit odd if you consider that the wars Hirohito engaged in cost an estimated loss of life somewhere between three million and ten million people.
Irony seems to be the nature of human history. In 1964, the Japanese government awarded the Grand Cordon of the Order of the Rising Sun to Air Force General “Bombs Away Le May” Curtis Lemay. They did so even though he was responsible for the strategic bombing of Japan, specifically the firebombing of the paper houses in Tokyo. An estimated 80,000 to 100,000 people died there, with another estimate of half a million deaths for the entire bombing operation.
Then there is also the case of General Minoru Genda, who was the military architect for the attack on Pearl Harbor. Twenty years after the attack, he was awarded the Legion of Merit by the United States Air Force. By the way, the Legion of Merit is one step above the Distinguished Flying Cross, and is meant to be awarded for exceptional meritorious conduct. So, all in all, I think things worked out. I mean, Hirohito’s actions had the highest body count, so he only got a sea squirt pickled in a jar of formaldehyde.
At nineteen, MARK PATTON was a helmsman for the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. By his mid-twenties he was flying out of Otis Air Force Base for the National Marine Fisheries Service. After graduating from Northeastern University, he became a roughneck for Delta Drilling. He left Texas to become a police officer and later a head of Natural Resources on Cape Cod. Retired, he is now pursuing his longtime passion for writing. His latest novel is Pishtaco: Lord of the Lost Inca Gold, available here
Adam ran his hand over his balding scalp. The dunes shimmered all around – expectant, empty of any movement except his, although he knew rare beetles trundled through rough grass, and he could hear toads, chirring contentedly somewhere amongst orchids and buckthorn. He couldn’t see the sea from here, but it would be far out at this time, perhaps exposing the ribs of the Sprite, which had foundered here fatally in 1888.
A track wended up a slope surmounted by wind-tortured hawthorns and a World War Two pillbox – an outsized armoured helm in lichened concrete. This had always been a watchful coast, wary of invaders or worried by water, fearing one day it might break through to complete the drowning of Doggerland. There were times – more and more often – when Adam remembered the world’s hugeness, and hardness. Its terrible hardness…
He sighed, and sweated up the slope. Bone-weary though he was, his eyes were darting everywhere. He had tofind it. Had to. It would be his first. It would be his last. It would crown the day, this year – in fact, his nature-watching life. And it would be the perfect sign-off for this place, which he’d soon be leaving for good.
Angela had loved it here. So many days here with her, sharing the exultance of seeing some creature that according to the textbooks shouldn’t be there at all, some visitant magically manifesting thousands of miles outside its accustomed range. Once, when lying beside her under bushes, watching a vagrant warbler almost never recorded outside Central America, she had breathed just audibly, “It’s like a miracle!”
So it was – although there was also sadness surrounding such wanderers, so far from home, never to return, fated to end among unfamiliar dangers, trembling in unaccustomed cold, calling out plaintively into unanswering air for flock or mate.
Birds had been Angela’s passion – house-sparrows as much as any exotic warblers. She had never taken any species for granted since reading as a girl about the passenger pigeon. They had even given their daughter the name of Martha, in honour of the elderly endling which had fallen to the floor in Cincinnati Zoo in 1914, the last representative of flocks which had once broken branches by sheer weight of superabundance. On that proud day at the font in sunlit St Michael’s, with smiling family all round, they had never considered their choice might be so portentous…
Adam was more interested in insects. They had fascinated him since he was four, after a hoverfly had alighted on his outstretched hand like a benediction, a gold-and-black bejewelled being gracing his hand in a God-ray of sunshine slanting through trees.
He had lived insects and arachnids since, keeping ants and stick-insects, rearing moths, watching Attenborough, reading books like The Life of the Spider and The Soul of the White Ant, habitually turning over stones and rotten logs – in incessant search of insect lives, their meanings, their secrets, their symbolism.
Medieval illuminators had made minibeasts into miniature marginalia, and philosophers had seen them as metaphors of society and statecraft. The bee-kings that became queens as science advanced – the toiling workers so infinitesimal in themselves, but whose united efforts brought strength and sweetness to the world. Adam owned a small 1660s still-life, an anniversary present from Angela – a Delft bowl of apples, grapes, pears, and pomegranates, festooned with delicate butterflies – a Golden Age representation of Earth’s bountiful interconnectedness. Insects intersected with everyone everywhere always; their fall would also be ours.
He had become an academic, a writer of papers and addresser of conferences, a campaigner and charity trustee – so often dull and dry work, filled with frustrations, but energised always by that childhood encounter, and then the prospect of the whole planet losing its pollinators – losing its life. Losing its soul.
Whenever things got bad, there was balm in the multi-legged multiverse that began outside his back door. He would switch off machines and go into the garden – there to lose himself in the polished elegance of earwigs, watch whirligigs writing in an unknown language across the pond, or look into the compound eyes of bee-flies and wish he could see the world their way. Invertebrates had more sense than some vertebrates. Their unflagging energy was humbling as well as inspiring, an example of courage to him and to everyone – how they would resurge after every reverse, like bees building each spring, or Robert the Bruce’s spider in the cave. Insects had seen dinosaurs pass; woodlice would probably see us out.
He interested himself intimately in insects’ activities, intervening like a god when provoked by some miniscule plight. Even today, with his mind filled with his quest, he stooped to move a burnet moth caterpillar from a bare sandy tract that from its perspective must have seemed miles wide, and placed it on the sappy stem of a ragwort. Caterpillars found out in the open were often dying, he knew, driven insane by parasites eating them inside. But maybe this one might just make it. And anyway, it was indecent to leave a helpless creature – just as sick people deserved treatment, at whatever cost, and however distant the chances of success. However futile, even – however blackly written in the book of mitochondrial heredity.
An emperor dragonfly angled electrically into view, and he watched it zigzag away like an escaped ampere – a spectacular insect, whose even larger ancestors once darted over drowned Doggerland. Land and sea so often seemed interchangeable along this littoral, confusing even the animals. He sometimes found insect-falls along the advancing edge of the sea – ants, devil’s coach-horses, ladybirds – tiny fragments of feeling kicking their legs helplessly or crawling desperately away from the water at the salt end of all things, pitifully paralleling the great human-falls of history. He always lofted as many as he could away to safety, although aware he was making little difference, and that all safety was at best a postponement. Under every summer beachscape lay freezing physical forces, under sun-warmed wavetops a constant churning of cold deeps, and under the fine sand sliding earth plates, all part of the constant longshore drift of life into detritus.
As Adam aged and ailed, some of his students joked that he looked like a late-summer lepidopteran. Mr Mothman, they called him – an upright and ugly imago. His skin grew dry, thin and chitinous, and his bones increasingly prominent, as if he was turning inside out, developing an exoskeleton. But why shouldn’t his softness hide inside? Life had so often shown him need of a carapace.
How he wished Angela could have been here today, of all days.
Late yesterday evening, when Adam had been reading a local nature blog, he briefly stopped breathing. Just a few casual words, written by a local nature-guide, mentioning that a Camberwell Beauty had been seen the previous day. It was the most wonderful of shocks. A Camberwell Beauty!
For much of his life, Nymphalis antiopa had been flitting through Adam’s imagination – an apparition flapping always in front, just out of reach. He couldn’t remember a time when he hadn’t known of the butterfly’s existence. But then his first home had been on Coldharbour Lane, where the butterfly was first recorded in 1748, by a man named Moses Harris, who called it ‘Grand Surprise’ to register his astonishment at its size and striking appearance – richly maroon wings, with blue dots and creamy yellow fringe, and powerful un-butterflyish flight.
It had stuck out even in Moses Harris’s still semi-rural, semi-magical London, with Camberwell still famous for fruit growing, and Peckham Rye nearby, where Blake would soon see angels in the elms. Science itself was still in a state of wide-eyed and wondering innocence, where each day brought discoveries which could still be attributed to God’s benevolent grace, and clustering new species were named after characters from Greek myth. There had been many Antiopes in Attica, but Adam was sure the Beauty must have been named after the daughter of Aeolus, or the consort of Helios, or maybe in honour of both, seeing that the creature was the most perfect union of air and light.
The boldness of the Beauty had clearly compelled Harris, who as well as being an entomologist, had also been an engraver and theorist of colour. Adam had sensed the other man’s aesthetic and aurelian excitement across the gulf of years – although for Adam excitement had always been mixed with melancholy, because the Beauty hadn’t been seen in Camberwell since the early twentieth century.
Others people had noticed, and mourned the butterfly’s absence. It had been referenced in literature and music, and there was a huge mosaic of one on a building in Burgess Park, moved there in 1982 from a demolished 1920s printworks, which had used the already rare butterfly as emblematic of their expertise. Adam remembered the mosaic in its prominent original location, and being told that the Luftwaffe had ironically used it as a navigation aid for raids.
But Adam felt the insect’s absence almost physically – felt it like a folk-memory of destroyed wildness, felt it like the pains amputees imagine in absent limbs. He almost envied the long-dead who had glimpsed the Beauty in habitats like those he had known – battening in Brixton back-gardens or fluttering up Forest Hill, or beating between the Hammer Horror monuments of Nunhead Cemetery, a Gothic shade among the white angels and the ivied urns – the Germans’ name Trauermantel (‘mourning cloak’) so suitable in that context, so redolent of the insect’s elusiveness, and adjacency to extinction.
Nymphalis was quite common elsewhere; Adam had even seen a subspecies in Sweden. But it was surrounded with special significance for him and all English lepidopterists, including the Edwardians who were the last to see it in London. Those Edwardians, with which Camberwell always seemed synonymous – those bicycle-clipped, moustached City clerks, with their copies of Illustrated London News, and Elgar on wax cylinders – so often seemed frozen in photos, fixed in period the way old collections of coleoptera were pinned to museum boards. But they had been wonderfully alive in at least one respect – to have had even an outside chance of seeing Beauties in their rose-gardens, flying in from some other realm to enrich their Arts and Crafts universe.
The Camberwell Adam had known as a child, then heard about as an adult – an anthill without purpose, a place of bad air, cars, crime, and riots – had seemed daily less likely to throw up Beauties. So now, one had kindly come to him, was waiting for him, possibly just over this hill – his personal ‘Grand Surprise’ sipping the sap of a willow, or winging royally across rabbit-nibbled clearings, the ultimate prize for hours of exertion on the hottest day of the year, the culmination of a life’s longing. This was circularity. It felt a little like – destiny.
How could it have come? Some came over the sea in some years, but very few, and never this far north. There were theories about pupae carried in cargoes of Scandinavian timber. There were also rare private rewilders, eccentrics or idealists who raised and released animals they felt ‘belonged’, animals which had a moral right to be in particular places. Aged eight, Adam had met one, the famous Leonard Newman, who had signed Adam’s copy of Complete British Butterflies in Colour – a book outdated even then, but still on Adam’s shelves. Newman had reared thousands of Beauties and let them fly in Kent one hopeful spring, then waited…and waited…and given up.
Adam knew why Newman had done this; skies that had known the Beauty must one day know it again. But he wanted to think this specimen had somehow made its own way here, acting on some unknown impulse, linking his early life with his late – bringing old London to modern Lincolnshire. It would be kismet – completion – closure.
He had sometimes worried that if he ever caught up with the Beauty it might feel like an anti-climax. Species ticked off lists were like sports trophies – wholly inadequate, tinny mementos of a very different day, a different outlook, whole other worlds of happiness and health. And this just wasn’t any species. The Beauty dwelled by itself. It had flown in front of him for so long that finding one might feel more like losing something. But if this was a risk, it was one he had to take. What else would he do? What else could he do? It was his nature. Angela would have understood – and Martha.
He fantasised hotly, the sun boiling the reddened skin of his scalp. There might be more than one. A venturesome individual might be the vanguard of a viable colony. Could this bold outrider be a scout – the crest of a climate-adapting wave, coping with change by expanding range? He knew, in truth, this was a fancy too far; the Beauty liked cooler climates. But somehow, somewhere among all this global destruction and private desolation, some species must find a way forward, lead a rebirth and recolouring of the cosmos. How wonderful it would be if at least a few beautiful things could defy the world’s contagion…Was that too much to ask? There was so much loss, so much waste and death…
He stopped to get breath, and looked up, to see the sun well on its way to the west. There weren’t many hours left. There were never enough. There was never enough time for anything. Angela and Jane were also now flying in front… He pushed on through trees and across a wide wasteland, while a large butterfly on the highest branch imperiously flared indigo wings, and indifferently watched him pass.
DEREK TURNER is the editor of The Brazen Head, as well as a novelist (A Modern Journey, Displacement, and Sea Changes) and reviewer. His first non-fiction book, Edge of England: Landfall in Lincolnshire, was published June 2022. Some of his writing may be found at www.derek-turner.com He is also on Twitter – @derekturner1964
BEN MORGAN is a writer based in London. His pamphlet Medea in Corinth: Poems, Prayers, Letters and a Curse is published by Poetry Salzburg and he has also published in Stand, Oxford Poetry, AlchemySpoon, One Hand Clapping and elsewhere.
“Where did we go wrong, do you think? Probably with the discovery of agriculture” Hari Kunzru, Interview Magazine, March 2020
We needn’t only leave things as they are. The great roof of leaves and monkeys is a beauty, and sometimes, yes, it triumphs over rain –
though the storm will always beat it – but it grows as you or I grow, as we feed it. Nor can it outrun us like the deer.
See, here, where the sharp berry answers your touch with a bite. She never rears her head as high
as the star-hungry forest, but she bleeds sweetness in winter; and the limbs of the bodiless spider are rivers in air,
sailable by foot. The purple hearts, bruised lips of the goddess, which purse and beat around our feet
die into life’s blood – food, livid wetness. All purposeful things are shaped for hands like yours and mine. Time itself
will fall from us. No more days like slow-blooming beads of water, waiting for the crash of an animal,
but a series of small and greater dances, each nestled in the circle of the larger, like you, and me, and the children.
We needn’t only leave things as they are. I learned this last night inside a dream, then woke in a sweat, thinking he was here,
the one who told me – boarlike in his fatness, yet his children, who carried his great bier, thin and trembling as arrows in the wind.
BEN MORGAN is a writer based in London. His pamphlet Medea in Corinth: Poems, Prayers, Letters and a Curse is published by Poetry Salzburg and he has also published in Stand, Oxford Poetry, AlchemySpoon, One Hand Clapping and elsewhere.
STUART MILLSON finds folklore and old industry in west Wales
Beyond the high watershed to the north of Carmarthenshire, which separates the Rivers Gwili and Teifi, lies the countryside where the three counties of west Wales converge: Carmarthenshire, with Carmarthen town, steeped in legends of Merlin the wizard and Dylan the poet – Pembrokeshire, once called ‘Little England Beyond Wales’ – and Cardiganshire, its wilder, ragged character, wind-bent coastal trees and moor-like appearance, so well captured by the illustrators of the old Shell Guides.
The counties’ confluence is more or less pinpointed at Cenarth Falls, a rocky, densely-wooded gorge hewn out of the land by the Teifi. Known for its former culture of coracles and fishermen’s tall-tales, the Teifi is one of the country’s great salmon and sea-trout (sewin, in Welsh) water-courses, although ironically in our age of supposed greater environmental awareness, the river has never suffered from so much pollution.
Nearby, the smaller River Cych flows through woodland straight from the pages of the Mabinogion, or Gerald of Wales’s ecclesiastical tour of Cambria. After heavy rainfall, dozens of tiny streams and springs bubble from the hilly embankment by the lane that winds through the valley; rooks and the occasional red kite seem to brush the tree-tops. Gerald, or Giraldus he styled himself, knew this district – crossing the Teifi with Baldwin, Archbishop of Canterbury, in their quest to rally men to the Cross and to the Crusades.
In their travels, the churchmen unearthed many oddities of folklore, not least the tale of a young man who discovered the entrance to a fairy world, but who enraged its inhabitants by stealing treasure from their subterranean kingdom. In fury, the fairies pursued him, retrieving what was theirs, but when he tried to return to the crevice in the earth – the gateway to the hidden realm – all traces of it had disappeared. But, after all these centuries, does another entrance exist? Close to the Teifi, a curious pool may offer an answer…
Said to be fathomless, the pool (on private land) looks to be the result of floodwater that has spilled over into a small dip of the land by the riverbank. For folklorists, it is a place inhabited by the Cambrian fairy-race, the Tylwyth Teg – the beautiful ones. To this day, some fishermen doff their caps in the direction of the pool, or even offer a libation to the invisible inhabitants. Even unbelievers have spoken of experiencing a peculiar sensation here, of being watched, of someone lurking at the very extremes of their peripheral vision. A few fruit trees stand nearby – the land’s previous owner trimming their branches on a sunny afternoon, remarking how he felt his every move being studied, but not another human soul in sight.
A much more tangible lost world exists on the northerly bank of the river. Like an industrial leyline, threading through woods and knotted thickets long since rewilded by the hand of Nature, runs the trackbed of the old Great Western Railway. Occasionally, from the road (perhaps only a temporary victor over the railway?) the once-neat embankment comes into view, on which the freight of milk churns, coal, and the county solicitor on his rounds, would all trundle by. And if you look carefully into woodland, the bridges which upheld the single track over difficult dips in the terrain are still visible. Weeds and vegetation drip from the stonework – forlorn remnants of steam and country branchlines, ‘henges’ of the railway age, dotted through Cambria.
The district was also known for its many waterside mills, now as silent as the Cornish coastal tin mines, or the colliery wheels of south Wales. One village, Drefach Felindre, was even likened to Huddersfield, so impressive was its industry and wool-making. Some 12 miles away, Cardigan’s quayside, once banked up by trading vessels, still retains some sense of old importance as the Teifi estuary’s commercial port.
Here in Wales, unlike in south-east England, structures of old industry still stand, symbols of an age long gone, but not beyond recall – an age you somehow feel could be reclaimed. So enduring are the foundations of everything, in this land of long memories.
LIAM GUILAR is beguiled by a dream of tangled trees
The Wildwood holds the remnants of the past, / Strange ceremonies that the fays still love / To watch – the rituals of demon tribes / Who once played havoc with the universe, / And everything that says the world is not / Exactly what it seems is hidden here, / But also there are paths to blessedness.
So begins Seren of the Wildwood, Marly Youmans’ narrative poem that drifts the reader through a tale that seems both familiar and strange.
Traditional fairy and folk tales have been a resource for many modern writers and film makers. The old story is usually rewritten to correct a perceived ideological bias, or to rationalise the magic, or to make it acceptable to modern audiences, whose ideas of story have been shrunk by mass market films. With notable exceptions, rewriting fails to produce anything that comes close to the originals in their ability to unsettle and entertain. Writers can study archetypes, read the psychoanalytical literature, immerse themselves in Joseph Campbell et al, naturalise Propp’s Morphology, and still produce a story that fails to hold an audience.[i]
The stories Walt Disneyfied are closer to inappropriate dreams that don’t care about your daylight ideology, or your preferred version of the world. They exist in the liminal space between waking and sleeping, recalling a time when the wolves were real and the forest was a dangerous place. Marly Youmans’ story moves bodily into that space, where nothing is quite what it seems, and never quite what it should be, where hope and disappointment are as commonplace as leaves and what we might label cruelty is just the way the world is.
Her poem is not a retelling of a previous story – but is rather a new story, inhabiting old spaces to make them new again. Seren grows up on the edges of the Wildwood, her childhood overshadowed by the death of her brothers, which the story ascribes to her father’s ill-chosen words. Constrained at home by her mother’s care, she is lured into the trees by the promise of friendship and adventure. She meets characters who harm and help her, moving through a dream-like landscape, made real by Youmans’ descriptions, until she finds her way home.
The poem is written in sixty-two stanzas, each consisting of twenty-one lines of unrhymed iambic pentameter ending with a ‘Bob and Wheel’. The Bob is an abrupt two syllable line, the Wheel four short lines rhyming internally. They break the visual and aural monotony even the best blank verse can produce over a long narrative; they can summarise the stanza, comment on it, or provide an opportunity for epigrammatic statement:
[…]Next, a King
Not young but middle-aged his curling beard
Gone steel,
His mind turned lunatic,
His body no ideal
Of grace and charm to prick
Desire: man as ordeal.
The Bob and Wheel, famously used in Gawain and the Green Knight, inevitably evoke medieval precedent, as does the walled garden Seren finds but can’t enter. Although the Wildwood is not the harsh landscape Gawain rides into before returning home, the Knight of Romance rode into the forest to seek adventures because the forest was the place where the normal social rules and expectations did not apply. There is often a didactic element to such stories, but fortunately Youmans avoids the temptation to turn hers into a sermon.
Her poem is full of good lines:
Like some grandfather’s pocket watch wound tight
But then forgotten, Seren moved slower
And slower.
The descriptions of the landscape anchor the fantastic story. In the following quotation Seren is heading towards a river she must cross and discovers a waterfall:
And so she travelled toward the roar of rain
With thunder, apprehensive as she neared
The lip where torrents catapulted free
From stone and merged into a muscular
And sovereign streaming force – the energy
That shocks the trembling pebbles into flight
And grinds the massive boulders into bowls.
Occasionally it is not easy to decide if a line is padded or what might be padding is deliberate stye: ‘It seemed satanic, manic, half insane’, but this is so rare that the fact it’s noticeable is a tribute to all the other lines where it isn’t.
The poem is rich in images and incidents and packed with a diverse cast of characters, but what does it mean? This is the wrong question. In school we are taught ‘how to read a poem’. For ‘read’, understand ‘analyse’ and the purpose of the analysis is to explain ‘what the poem means’ or, in its most depressing formulation ‘what was the poet was trying to say’. These questions and the approaches they require have little to do with the experience of reading poetry outside the academy.
Stories, poems, and narrative poems especially, can be a way of thinking in and through language, in a non-linear, perhaps non-rational, associative way. The story works for the reader when it activates memory, prior reading, knowledge and experience. The question therefore should be, what does the story do for you while you’re reading it, and afterwards, when a phrase, an incident, or an image remains in your memory.[ii]
Youmans’ poem encourages such a line of thinking; there are numerous allusions to other stories, tying Seren into a network of intertextuality, (at one point she is helped in the story by remembering the stories she has been told), there are images, which evoke a host of medieval precedents, but Youmans avoids the simplification of neat equivalence or the temptation of a tidy conclusion.
In terms of traditional narrative arcs, if you believe in the importance of such things, the story ends abruptly and very little is explained. There are questions left unanswered and threads that were run out but not neatly tied together at the end. The reader is being treated with respect and left alone with the story. It is a book that invites and rewards multiple rereading.
Reading is made easier because the book itself is a beautiful object. Wiseblood books are to be commended on producing such a fine hardback at such a low price. Printed on good quality paper, one stanza to a page, Seren of the Wildwood is illustrated by Clive Hicks-Jenkins. His black and white images complement the tone and mood of the story.
[i] There are obvious exceptions to this generalisation and to be precise everyone who has told these stories has altered them; the Grimms were notorious revisers.
[ii] The undeniable consequence of this line of thinking is that the book that haunts one reader is the same book another reader can’t be bothered to finish, regardless of the reviewer’s praise or condemnation. This seems especially true of narrative poetry.
DEREK TURNER is editor of The Brazen Head, and a novelist and reviewer, who writes for journals including Country Life and the Irish Times. His first non-fiction book, Edge of England: Landfall in Lincolnshire, was published in 2022 (Hurst)
Fathers of Botany – Fossil Trees of Greece
“We were searching to rediscover the first seed
So the ancient drama could begin again.” (George Seferis)
Tree from Titanic time, chlorophyll from Chronos –
A plant to make the Iliad feel young;
Older than Achaea, bough from Europe’s birth,
Corinthian column from anonymous earth.
Cell-structure chthonic, bark architectonic,
First saplings convert light for all lungs;
Dawns before dinosaurs, green deaths in deep glades
That shivered before any islands were made.
Steles sway in dead winds, mark skies meteoric –
Ossified weathers striated in stumps –
Hold in their heartwood earth’s earliest mysteries,
The comets and climates that changed before histories.
Rock sounds of ages and petrified tracks –
Trees shooting endless in verdant triumphs,
Creatures of ancient wing, instinct with sap and spring,
Once stood on these redwoods’ spread rooftops to sing.
Sang songs of the spheres, remote, melancholic,
Strange songs for lost woods in an alien tongue –
Harmoniously unify heavens and world
As seeds from stone cones let Creation unfurl.
Then day cataclysmic: deep doom from first physics:
Drums beating, bass booms as world structure unslung,
Ashfalls before Hades, heats pre-Hephaestus,
Flames black out the birds, stones alter the atlas.
II
Metamorphosis – an ageless land’s axis,
New architect orders for the new world just sprung –
Stump of the sacred grove, and pillar of Zeus –
Shoots for the Stagirite, seeds Theophrastus.
Human analogies bud bright philosophic:
Trees rise, carry crowns, then return to the dung.
Though statues, they sow evergreenness from roots;
Even now that they’re dead, we climb them for truths.
DEREK TURNER is the editor of The Brazen Head, as well as a novelist (A Modern Journey, Displacement, and Sea Changes) and reviewer. His first non-fiction book, Edge of England: Landfall in Lincolnshire, was published June 2022. Some of his writing may be found at www.derek-turner.com He is also on Twitter – @derekturner1964