The awaited

(A synopsis of a story, perhaps a screenplay)

The setting: Northern Europe; a small island community on the edge of the sea; sometime before 1700.

The two-dozen or so men and older boys of the community have set off in two boats on a fishing or sealing trip expected to last three or four days. They don't return.

Many of the women have never been out of the village; a few are from other islands or the mainland, but have never gone back. There are a few small currachs, but nothing sturdy enough for a sea voyage.

At first the women and young children hope for the return of the men. After a while — later for some than for others — they realize that this will never happen. They do not alter their routines much, but carry on, as they had been accustomed to doing when the men were away, living off stored food and gathered shellfish, plus milk from their livestock. They eat a little less.

After a hard winter that reduces their numbers by two or three the women begin to address the matter of food. They fish a little from the currachs in the surrounding waters, they work in their stony fields as they have always done but a little harder. There is not enough but they survive anyway. Very occasionally, during the good weather, a fishing boat puts into shore for a visit, but the women have little to trade and no one is willing to get on board with the fishermen and leave. Eventually, though, one of the younger wives does go off with a young fisherman. She is never spoken of again.

After a year or two has gone by, and the women have become thin and drawn, one of them refers in passing to a chore she must see to before her husband comes home. There is cold silence. A few weeks later someone else makes a similar remark, and this time heads are nodded. Before long the imminent arrival of the men becomes the sole topic of conversation. Hands are kept busy sweeping out and tidying the dwellings. There are increasing indications of madness.

The story ends with the prow of a boat breaking around the rocks and into view from shore. We don't see who is on board.

Leopardi

There’s a new eatery in town, a kind of delicatessen / restaurant specializing in chicken, and we went in to check it out. While we were eating (I had crab cakes, as I rarely eat poultry), I happened to notice the fabric on the cushions of the bench across from me. Not surprisingly, this was decorated with images of chickens; what was more curious, though, was that there were also several lines of Italian verse, written in an antique hand, repeated through the pattern. The more I looked, the more familiar the words seemed. Now I don’t speak Italian, but I can read it to some extent, and the first line was clear enough:

Dolce e chiara è la notte e senza vento

Something like: mild and clear is the night and without wind. The remaining lines I had more trouble with, in part because of penmanship, but I could make out the words “luna” and “lontan.”

My first guess was that they night be from Dante. I’ve read the Inferno in English in its entirety, and much of it in Italian, and bits and pieces of the other two canticles in translation. The style seemed right, but not the present tense. Still, the first line seemed very familiar.

When I got home I Googled a few words and quickly found out why I recognized them. They weren’t by Dante, but by Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837). I’ve never read him, but I did know this:

"Leopardi"

The night is warm and clear and without wind.
The stone-white moon waits above the rooftops
and above the nearby river. Every street is still
and the corner lights shine down only upon the hunched shapes of cars.
You are asleep. And sleep gathers in your room
and nothing at this moment bothers you. Jules,
an old wound has opened and I feel the pain of it again.
While you sleep I have gone outside to pay my late respects
to the sky that seems so gentle
and to the world that is not and that says to me:
“I do not give you any hope. Not even hope.”’
Down the street there is the voice of a drunk
singing an unrecognizable song and a car a few blocks off.
Things pass and leave no trace,
and tomorrow will come and the day after,
and whatever our ancestors knew time has taken away.
They are gone and their children are gone
and the great nations are gone.
And the armies are gone that sent clouds of dust and smoke
rolling across Europe. The world is still and we do not hear them.
Once when I was a boy, and the birthday I had waited for
was over, I lay on my bed, awake and miserable, and very late
that night the sound of someone’s voice singing down a side street,
dying little by little into the distance,
wounded me, as this does now.

That’s a poem by Mark Strand that I’ve always enjoyed, one line of which (“I do not give you any hope. Not even hope”) had, oddly enough, been in my mind just a day or so before I went into the restaurant. I always assumed the poem was an adaptation, but had never come across the original, which, I now know, runs as follows:

XIII - La sera del dì di fiesta

Dolce e chiara è la notte e senza vento,
E queta sovra i tetti e in mezzo agli orti
Posa la luna, e di lontan rivela
Serena ogni montagna. O donna mia,
Già tace ogni sentiero, e pei balconi
Rara traluce la notturna lampa:
Tu dormi, che t’accolse agevol sonno
Nelle tue chete stanze; e non ti morde
Cura nessuna; e già non sai nè pensi
Quanta piaga m’apristi in mezzo al petto.
Tu dormi: io questo ciel, che sì benigno
Appare in vista, a salutar m’affaccio,
E l’antica natura onnipossente,
Che mi fece all’affanno. A te la speme
Nego, mi disse, anche la speme; e d’altro
Non brillin gli occhi tuoi se non di pianto.
Questo dì fu solenne: or da’ trastulli
Prendi riposo; e forse ti rimembra
In sogno a quanti oggi piacesti, e quanti
Piacquero a te: non io, non già, ch’io speri,
Al pensier ti ricorro. Intanto io chieggo
Quanto a viver mi resti, e qui per terra
Mi getto, e grido, e fremo. Oh giorni orrendi
In così verde etate! Ahi, per la via
Odo non lunge il solitario canto
Dell’artigian, che riede a tarda notte,
Dopo i sollazzi, al suo povero ostello;
E fieramente mi si stringe il core,
A pensar come tutto al mondo passa,
E quasi orma non lascia. Ecco è fuggito
Il dì festivo, ed al festivo il giorno
Volgar succede, e se ne porta il tempo
Ogni umano accidente. Or dov’è il suono
Di que’ popoli antichi? or dov’è il grido
De’ nostri avi famosi, e il grande impero
Di quella Roma, e l’armi, e il fragorio
Che n’andò per la terra e l’oceano?
Tutto è pace e silenzio, e tutto posa
Il mondo, e più di lor non si ragiona.
Nella mia prima età, quando s’aspetta
Bramosamente il dì festivo, or poscia
Ch’egli era spento, io doloroso, in veglia,
Premea le piume; ed alla tarda notte
Un canto che s’udia per li sentieri
Lontanando morire a poco a poco,
Già similmente mi stringeva il core.

I haven't had time to make (or better, find) a full translation, though I've looked it over enough to see both differences and similarities between Strand's version and the original. Strange drift and mingling of circumstance, that reveals the source of a favorite poem through the upholstery of a chicken restaurant.

Postscript: The restaurant mentioned above has since closed. However, it fascinates me to know that someone has translated Strand's version back into Italian: La sera è calma e limpida e senza vento / La luna bianca come pietra aspetta sopra i tetti...

The Bear's Rock

Thanks to a correspondent from Italy who contacted Andy Irvine, I now have the Macedonian lyrics and an English paraphrase for "Mechkin Kamen" ("The Bear's Rock"), which can be found on Andy Irvine & Davy Spillane's CD East Wind (where it is sung by Márta Sébestyen) as well as on Mozaik's Live from the Powerhouse (sung by Andy). Each line is sung twice; for the most part the second part of each line then becomes the first part of the following.

Vo Krushevo ogan gori, vo Krushevo gusta magla
Vo Krushevo, gusta magla, Mechkin Kamen krv se lele
Mechkin Kamen krv se lele, tam se bia tri voivodi
Tam se bia tri voivodi, Turska voiska tri illyardi
Prv voivoda Damé Gruev, vtor voivoda Pitu Guli
Vtor voivode Pitu Guli, a triti ot Ali Bakhov

Andy writes: “I cannot translate it but it means more or less — In Krushevo terrible fires and destruction. At the Bear's Rock there came three chieftains/leaders. Three leaders against 3,000 Turkish soldiers. The first chieftain was Dame Gruev, the second was Pitu Guli, and the third chieftain was Ali Bakhov. That's about it!”

There's a little more background in the liner notes to East Wind: “The Bear's Rock (Mechkin Kamen) is the site outside the town of Krushevo [or Kruševo — CK] where Pitu Guli and his men made one brave last stand against the Turkish forces during the Illinden rising in Macedonia in 1903. The people of Krushevo, who, along with the rest of Macedonia, had laboured under the brutal Ottoman Empire for over 500 years drove out the Turkish garrison at the start of the rising and proclaimed 'The Krushevo Republic.' It lasted for just ten days before the Turks sent in an army of 20,000 to exact retribution and the Krushevo Republic was drowned in blood."

The illustration at top is of the “Ilinden Spomenik,” a memorial to the heroes of the uprising (and to the antifascist partisans of World War II). From the looks of it the image may have been reproduced from a refrigerator magnet.

All hallows eve

Here are some of the names of the ancient megaliths scattered through the countryside of England and Wales: The Pipers; The Hurlers; The Merry Maidens; Long Meg & Her Daughters; Arthur's Spear; The Robber's Stone; Harold's Stones; The Devil's Arrows; The Devil's Den; The Twelve Apostles; The Giant's Grave; The Bull Stone. In centuries past, while the educated “knew” that these were the work of the Druids, the Romans, or the Saxons, for the folk each monument was linked to some supernatural actor or event:

“The Merry Maidens were girls who instead of going to church on the Lord's Day, went for a walk in the fields. Demons disguised as musicians appeared and began to play dance music, whereupon the maidens recklessly began to dance and enjoy themselves. As their dancing became more and more wanton, a bolt of lightning struck them and the girls and the fiends were turned into stone.“

“The Devil's Den is reputed to be haunted by a gigantic white dog, with glowing red eyes like burning coals. It is apparenty kenneled beneath the tomb. The nearby West Kennet long barrow is also haunted by a huge white dog with red ears. At sunrise every midsummer's day it follows a ghostly priest into the barrow.”

(Quotations from Megaliths by David Corio and Lai Ngan Corio)

I grew up in a part of the northeastern US which, though solidly suburban (it is even more so now) still displayed to the careful observer a discernible imprint of a rural past: abandoned orchards and half-buried foundations among the second-growth woods, stone walls that no longer held anything in or out. I spent a fair amount of time wandering among such traces, navigating not by road signs and property lines but by visible landmarks (“the main hill,” “the brown dock,” “the cow pasture”) — which may in part explain why to this day I am slow to learn street names and often give poor directions. They formed a kind of transitional zone, both in time and in space, between the landscape of human occupation and what we imagined as wilderness (childhood itself, is of course, another kind of transitional zone), and I think it is such zones, rather than say, the deep old-growth forests, that are most conducive to enchantment.

The neighborhood had its local lore, some of it possibly handed down from an earlier time, some of it spontaneously generated from the imagination of childhood. The older kids would relay such things — and much worse, no doubt — to tease and horrify the younger, the more gruesome the tale the better. Most of this is now irretrievable to me, and even what little remains is broken into fragments, embellished by my attempts to shape them into coherence — but then, doesn't the survival of folklore owe as much to the tangled process of forgetting, improvising, and mangling as it does to faithful handing down from one generation to another?

There was one story — attached to an old barn that was still standing but had lost its agricultural purpose — about which I only remember that it had to do with some terrible wasting affliction of horses. (Was it a natural or supernatural affliction? It made no difference: in the mind of children the two are as yet undivided.) Another, which I remember a bit better, was connected to a small water tower at the top of a hill, in which a creature was said to silently lurk, emerging only in certain times of drought, when it quenched its thirst by draining the bodies of whatever animal it encountered (a squirrel, a dog … a child?) There must have been many others; some sort of legends or inventions must have surrounded the house-sized boulder, universally referred to as Transylvania, that was tucked into the woods by the end of the lake. But if so they have descended into the substratum of memory.

There was also, a few miles away, the Leatherman's Cave; but in this case the name derived from a historical figure, a late 19th-century vagabond who wore a hand-tailored leather coat. I've seen a photograph, and his wanderings are amply documented; still, without written records how easily it would have been for his actual story to become obscured, leaving only vague rumors attached to his former digs.

Urban and suburban areas have their own folklore, as Jan Brunvand and others have documented, but it rarely seems rooted in particular places. Modern urban spaces are too transparent, their occupation too transitory, to hold onto a mystery for long. But I suspect that, even for children “out in the country,” the landscape is now largely disenchanted, done in by television and the more efficient horrors of movies and video games. It's a great loss.

Woodland (II)

Yesterday I revisited William Cronon's ecological history of New England, Changes in the Land, and — borrowing some additional ideas from the mammalogist Tim Flannery — examined Cronon's argument that the state of the “primeval” forest encountered by the first European settlers in the Northeast was in fact the end-result of a long process of co-evolution in which plants, animals, and Native American hunters and agriculturalists were all actors. Before the peopling of the continent some 12,000 years ago or so, the North American landscape had been shaped by an assemblage of large grazers and browsers, mostly now extinct, including giant sloths, mammoths and mastodons, and a larger version of the bison. The large herbivores kept the growth of vegetation in check, promoting relatively open woodlands and the proliferation of “edge” environments, and their extirpation, possibly by hunting, would have prompted an increase in forest density as well as a loss of habitat diversity. When the Europeans arrived, however, they commented on the open, “parklike” appearance of the southern New England forests, for by then the Native Americans, in order to encourage the population of species useful for hunting and foraging, had learned to reshape the woodland to their own purposes through the widespread setting of fires. The deep aboriginal Northeastern woodlands, seem, at least in southern New England, to be a myth.

Some parallel ideas emerge in a New York Review of Books article (as it happens, written by the same Tim Flannery) that includes a review of a new book by Franciscus Wilhelmus Maria Vera with the title of Grazing Ecology and Forest History. In Flannery's summary:

In our childhood, we all heard fairy tales about the European wild wood, which is portrayed as a gloomy wilderness where column-like trunks soar above the dank, entangled forest floor. But Vera argues that, except on some mountains, such forests never existed in Europe. Instead they are the invention of the foresters and ecologists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, who both created the first such forests by excluding grazing animals from forestry reserves, and spread the myth that the forests were somehow natural. […]

In Roman times, Vera points out, northern Europe abounded with great mammals such as aurochs, bison, tarpan, and elk, whose grazing prevented the forest from becoming dense and continuous. Many plants in the underbrush had evolved spines and thorns to protect themselves from the browsers and grazers, and it was these thorny plants that acted as protective nurseries for trees such as oaks. Outside their defensive palisades the forest was reduced to meadow, and so a woodland mosaic resulted. It was, Vera argues, a vegetation pattern that survived well into medieval times, for domesticated cattle, horses, and wild pigs continued to act as their wild ancestors did, both in creating meadows and in perpetuating the oak woodlands.

It has long been argued that Europe's greatest biodiversity is found not in its forests but in environments modified by human beings. Richest of all is the oak forest, a woodland environment that has long been thought of as resulting from the introduction of grazing herds into the primeval forests in medieval times. Vera argues instead that the oak forest is a relic of a pre-agricultural Europe, and thus it is the true primeval European environment. The only change, he contends, was that the herds of grazing animals that maintained it became domesticated, a development which did not substantially affect its structure.

Vera thinks that belief in the existence of the illusory primeval European forest is leading to environmental catastrophe. The last remnants of oak forests are being choked to death by trees because, in an effort to return them to what the environmentalists see as “nature,” grazing by domestic stock has recently been prohibited in them.

The idea of the “primeval” European forest is a powerful presence in our folklore and literature. (Also, more disturbingly, in our national mythology: see Simon Schama's Landscape and Memory for some interesting material on the role of the myth of the forest in virulent forms of German nationalism.) One biography of the Brothers Grimm is entitled, fittingly, Paths Through the Forest. But were the looming woods of folklore ever a reality? No doubt there will be disagreement with Vera's thesis, but if he is right the history of the European forest may need to be rewritten, in order to reflect more fully the series of interactions — between wild animals, livestock, and human beings — that have shaped it. The dark woods of our collective memory may reveal more about our own interior landscapes that about the way things really were.

Woodland (I)

Looking out of my window, and over the rusty or — now — snow-covered roofs of the warehouses that are the closest buildings to our office, there is a fine view of wooded hills in the distance; on some winter afternoons the sunsets over the ridge can be spectacular. The rural aspect of the view is, actually, a bit misleading, for hidden beneath and behind those trees are subdivisions, railway tracks, and a busy parkway. It's true, though, that we're fortunate to overlook a landscape that is “still” forested, and has not yet been divvied up for McMansions and shopping centers.

I say “still” in quotation marks because much of the woodland here is, in fact, second growth; photographs from a century ago often show large open fields where today there are dense expanses of trees. This was once dairy country, and until a few generations ago much of the area — all but the swampiest bogs or the steepest rocky hillsides — was parcelled out into farms that supplied milk for the growing population of New York City. At some point the economics shifted; land close to the city became more valuable for housing, and at the same time better transportation made it possible to ship agricultural products from counties farther north or west where land was cheaper. When the local farms shut down some of the farmland was developed, other tracts were preserved as parkland or watershed, and some fields just went fallow waiting for the right buyer and the right use. Walking through the woods, even in the extensive forested acres of the Ward Pound Ridge Reservation to our north, you can still see the farmers' old stone walls, silent evidence, like the ancient Indian mounds of Ohio and the South, of a culture that no longer exists. The reforestation of the area — along with leash laws — has brought corresponding changes in wildlife populations. Deer, once glimpsed only rarely, are now seen as a plague, the wild turkey has returned, and coyotes — not originally native to the region at all — are increasingly common.

The immigrant agriculturalists from Europe who colonized New York and New England in the 17th and 18th centuries were not, of course, the region's first settlers; neither were they the first people to transform the Eastern woodlands. Two decades ago, in a stimulating, brief book entitled Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England, William Cronon surveyed the prospect initially encountered by European settlers:

One must not visualize the New England forest at the time of settlement as a dense tangle of huge trees and nearly impenetrable underbrush covering the entire landscape. Along the southern coast, from the Saco River in Maine all the way to the Hudson, the woods were remarkably open, almost parklike at times. When Verrazano visited Narragansett Bay in 1524, he found extensive open areas and forests that could be traversed easily “even by a large army.”

The relatively open condition of the southern New England woodlands was due to the deliberate use of fire by Native Americans. Not the passive Arcadians Europeans often imagined them to be, the Indians in fact were active agents in shaping — one could easily say cultivating — the forest for their own purposes:

The effect of southern New England Indian villages on their environment was not limited to clearing fields or stripping forests for firewood. What most impressed English visitors was the Indians' burning of extensive sections of the surrounding forest once or twice a year. “The Salvages,” wrote Thomas Morton, “are accustomed to set fire of the Country in all places where they come, and to burne it twize a yeare, viz: at the Spring, and the fall of the leafe.” Here was the reason that the southern forests were so open and parklike; not because the trees naturally grew thus, but because the Indians preferred them so. As William Wood observed, the fire “consumes all the Underwood and rubbish which otherwise would overgrow the country, making it unpassable, and spoil their much affected hunting.” The result was a forest of large, widely spaced trees, few shrubs, and much grass and herbage. […]

In particular, regular fires promoted what ecologists call the “edge effect.” By encouraging the growth of extensive regions which resembled the boundary areas between forests and grasslands, Indians created ideal habitats for a host of wildlife species. […] Indian burning promoted the increase of exactly those species whose abundance so impressed English colonists: elk, deer, beaver, hare, porcupine, turkey, quail, ruffed grouse, and so on. When these populations increased, so did the carnivorous eagles, hawks, lynxes, foxes, and wolves. In short, Indians who hunted game animals were not just taking the “unplanted bounties of nature”; in an important sense, they were harvesting a foodstuff which they had consciously been instrumental in creating.

But if the “parklike” woodlands were not aboriginal, neither were the denser forests they replaced. In The Eternal Frontier: An Ecological History of North America and Its Peoples, Tim Flannery describes how, before the arrival of humans, a now-vanished assemblage of “megafauna,” including giant sloths, mammoths and mastodons, and a larger version of the bison, once dominated the continent. Like the elephants, rhinos, and the like of the Old World, these massive grazers and browsers would have imposed strict limits on the growth of vegetation. Furthermore, by creating disturbed “edge” environments by means of their wallows, trails, fallen trees, etc. they created conditions favorable to a host of smaller animals and herbacious plants. The relatively rapid extinction of the large herbivores some 12,000 years ago — possibly (it is still debated) at the hand of human hunters — prompted an increase in forestation and a corresponding decline in ecological diversity, and led, Flannery thinks, to the widespread shifts in the distribution of smaller mammals that have been documented in the following millennia. The burning witnessed, much later, by early European visitors, was therefore a kind of partial compensation for the lost effect of the large grazers.

The present condition of the woodlands of the Northeast U.S., then, can't be explained in terms of a simple opposition between “wild” and “developed” land, but must be understood as the outcome of a specific series of historical changes, in which herbivores, Native Americans, colonists, and suburbanites have all been actors. None of this is to suggest that, since there is no “natural” state to preserve, we should have no reservation about strip-mining (or strip-malling) what open space remains. It does, though, argue for a more complex model of the human-natural interactions that have shaped the landscape. Tomorrow I examine a somewhat parallel argument, this time relating to the deep forests of the European past.

Urn burial

What song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, though puzzling questions, are not beyond all conjecture. What time the persons of these ossuaries entered the famous nations of the dead, and slept with princes and counsellors, might admit a wide solution. But who were the proprietaries of these bones, or what bodies these ashes made up, were a question above antiquarism; not to be resolved by man, nor easily perhaps by spirits, except we consult the provincial guardians, or tutelary observators. Had they made as good provision for their names, as they have done for their relicks, they had not so grossly erred in the art of perpetuation. But to subsist in bones, and be but pyramidally extant, is a fallacy in duration. Vain ashes which in the oblivion of names, persons, times, and sexes, have found unto themselves a fruitless continuation, and only arise unto late posterity, as emblems of mortal vanities, antidotes against pride, vain-glory, and madding vices.

So Thomas Browne, in Hydriotaphia, or Urn Burial, regarding the unearthing in a Norfolk field of several dozen urns containing ancient Roman burial remains. Browne's point, as I read him, was that the careful interment of the Romans' ashes had come to nought: their names had failed to survive them, and so their lives, their deeds, their kin, were lost to human knowledge for eternity, and no historian could ever restore their identities. The ashes in the urns were now mere stuff, matter without a trace of the spirit it once contained.

It has always struck me as a little surprising that Browne thought, on the other hand, that “what song the Syrens sang” was not similarly “beyond all conjecture.” The enigma was an old one: according to Suetonius, the emperor Tiberius was fond of stumping the grammarians of his time by posing the same, unanswerable, riddle — the one about Achilles, as well. If Browne had a possible solution in mind, though, he apparently kept it to himself. (And thus left it to our own time to resolve: according to the Coen brothers, the sirens sang “Didn't Leave Nobody but the Baby.”)

Stonehenge is the most famous ancient site in Britain, but as far as I know historians cannot retrieve even a single name of one of its builders. We can't even guess at what language they may have spoken or who their leaders or heroes may have been; all we have are sarsens and bones and beads and a few vagaries about “Beaker folk” and “the Meldon Bridge period.” This from peoples who inhabited Britain for millennia and constructed monuments that required the cooperation — voluntary or not — of countless laborers.

In a way, our ignorance of those very things that must have seemed most important to the ancients — their speech, their affiliations, their memories and desires — smooths out the terrain of the past and enables us to interpret its contours more clearly. We see the long, slow processes at work: the gradual supplanting of one people by another, the advent of technology, the decline or increase in the productivity of the land, and we can deliberate the reasons for the changes we observe. From this vantage point, whether a certain chieftain died in battle or survived, whether a famine or epidemic compelled a family to abandon its home, has no visible effect.

Today, in an age when seemingly everything is documented, we scrutinize every twist and turn in our own procession; we speak of the “hinge” of history, of “decisive battles.” But do we really know? The Battle of Antietam may have been decided by the finding of a package of cigars, and Five Forks by Gen. George Pickett's fondness for shad, but would the North have eventually won the war in any case? If the North had lost, would the difference it would have made as the future unfolded still be discernible after a thousand years, or five thousand, or would it survive, at best, only in the fine print of a rarely perused chronicle of “ancient” events?

Sometimes history reclaims a parcel from the vast terrains of the unknown past. Browne could not have known that the decipherment of hieroglyphics would restore to us names that were “but pyramidally extant” in his own day. Letters of Roman soldiers stationed in Britain have been found; we can trace a little, from reading them, of ordinary lives that would otherwise have been long ago subsumed by time and decay. But the general trend towards oblivion remains; whatever our efforts to record and ponder our affairs, to “make provision” for our names and deeds, the long view will eventually lose sight of us.