Gospel & Universe 🧜🏽‍♀️ The Mermaid

Neptune

Stanza 2 & 3 🧜🏽‍♀️ The God of the Sea 🧜🏽‍♀️ Sartre’s Whiter Shade of Pale 🧜🏽‍♀️ Odysseus and Gilgamesh

Stanza 2 & 3

The God of the Sea

Reid skillfully takes us from the whitened face of the woman in the chorus (who we assume is the same woman as in the rest of the song) to her existential statement in the opening lines of the second stanza: “There is no reason / the truth is plain to see.” Her existential point is so succinct that many listeners may run past it, assuming that it must apply to something else. Yet the next line doesn’t have a subject or object to which it applies. The poet may of course take her words to mean that there’s no reason for her to be interested in him, or that there’s no way to explain why she isn’t interested. The lines are skillful in that they can work both ways. Likewise, there are two reasons for why he then tries to take the conversation in another direction. One is that he doesn’t like (or may not believe) in her existential statement. The other is that he doesn’t accept that she isn’t romantically interested. In any case, he tries to distract her from her point by “wandering through [his] playing cards,” which could be the the arguments he’ll make to deflect her existential statement and/or the cards he’ll try to use to seduce her. 

One of the poet’s cards is to treat her like a seductress instead of an epic heroine. Yet she outplays him and brings him back to her serious point. Both stanzas two and three operate on at least two levels. On one level he’s being gently outmanoeuvred in romantic strategy. On the other, he’s being urged to see that her vision contains a philosophical challenge, one that in the final stanza will end with them being obliterated at the bottom of the sea. In the second stanza, the poet uses an elaborate metaphor to keep the woman close: he wants to stop her from joining the vestal virgins (who were captive yet deified in Roman times) “who were leaving for the coast,” presumably in order to find their freedom — not in the plains, wilds, forests, or mounttins, but where the land meets the sea. His attempt to stop her seaward direction may mean that he doesn’t accept her rejection of him, seen here as her desire to leave him for the open sea, that is, for the other fish (or men) in the sea, many of which are probably swimming about the bar as they speak. Yet in retrospect he sees that he didn’t understand what she was about: his eyes “might just as well’ve been closed.”

In the third stanza he tries to get her to look into a mirror and to admit that she’s a sexy sea-nymph who “took Neptune for a ride.” In the most famous of epic journeys, Neptune is the power that derails the plans of Odysseus. Neptune presides over one of the most powerful symbols of natural power in the world: the ocean. It’s therefore not surprising that she turns the poet’s insinuation about her sexual power (taking Neptune for a ride) back onto the poet, who later realizes that he missed her point. His insinuation only makes her look at him with sadness. This sadness can work on two levels: first, she isn’t going to turn into the watery nymph he’s hoping for; second, she knows the god of the ocean and she knows that his rule is absolute. She knows the nature of Nature, and it isn’t to be trifled with, or to be thought of as something that can be overpowered by human will. The poet sees from her smile not only that his seductive scenario isn’t working, but also that his romantic argument has been derailed by some deeper point.

Sartre’s Whiter Shade of Pale

Many of the realizations in the poem echo those found in Sartre — especially the notion that looking squarely at reality is a staggeringly radical act, one that disturbs dearly held notions of essence and connection. It’s like looking at a tree root, as Sartre does in Nausea, and realizing that this life-form, like the natural world of which it’s a part, couldn’t care less about humans. There’s no essence connecting disparate life-forms. The tree doesn’t respond, feel, think, exist in any comforting way humans might prefer to think about it. This alienated perception of the black root of the chestnut tree makes us nauseous, and the more we see the convenient illusions about ourselves that we use to cover up this alienation, the more nauseous we feel.

Looking at nature is also like looking at one’s self in a mirror and questioning notions of essence and fundamental identity. In the lyric, the poet takes the heroine to the looking-glass, yet he makes the mistake of forcing her to agree with him. The very nature of the glass is to show what’s there, not what one wants to see. He wants her to see she’s a sexy nymph, but all she sees in the mirror is the open, unnerving, untameable sea.

In Nausea (1938), Sartre’s protagonist Antoine realizes the Naturalist’s hard and alienating fact that Nature or the world around us is in many ways alien to our cherished ideals. He says,

If one exists, one has to exist all the way, all the way to the mold, to the swelling, to the obscenity. In another world circles and musical airs keep their straight and rigid lines. But existence isn’t a straight line [or, “is a bending”]. / Si l’on existait, il fallait exister jusque là, jusqu’à la moisissure, à la boursouflure, à l’obscénité. Dans un autre monde, les cercles, les airs de musique gardent leurs lignes pures et rigides. Mais l’existence est un fléchissement. (trans. RYC)

Once we question fundamental notions of essence, whether these be in the Bible or the The Bhagavad-Gita, there’s a very slippery and paradoxical slope, leading over hundreds of years, back to Greek and Mesopotamian visions of Chaos. An interchange of couplets across three centuries illustrates this succinctly: in the 18th Century Pope writes optimistically, “Nature and Nature’s Law lay hid in Night. / God said, Let Newton be! and all was Light.” In the 20th century Sir John Squire responds pessimistically, “It did not last; the Devil howling, Ho! / Let Einstein be! restored the status quo.”

Antoine explains the alienating horror of existential realization:

My thought, that’s me: that’s why I can’t stop myself. I exist because I think… and I can’t stop myself from thinking. At this very moment — and this is hideous — if I exist, it’s because I’m horrified to exist. It’s me, it’s me who pulls myself from the nothingness to which I aspire… / Ma pensée, c’est moi : voilà pourquoi je ne peux pas m’arrêter. J’existe par ce que je pense. .. et je ne peux pas m’empêcher de penser. En ce moment même — c’est affreux — si j’existe, c’est parce que j’ai horreur d’exister. C’est moi, c’est moi qui me tire du néant auquel j’aspire…

Antoine’s predicament is echoed in No Exit (1944) when Estelle says,

My reflection in mirrors was tamed. I knew it so well... I’m going to smile: my smile will sink to the bottom of your pupils and God knows what it will become. / Mon image dans les glaces était apprivoisée. Je la connaissais si bien...Je vais sourire: mon sourire ira au fond de vos prunelles et Dieu sait ce qu’il va devenir.

Odysseus and Gilgamesh

The heroine realizes these alienating things before the poet, whose realization seems to come to him much later, when he’s composing his poem. Yet even in the poem’s present, he senses that something about his approach devalues her deeper intentions: she “smiled at [him] so sadly / that his anger straightway died.” One might see the death of his anger simply as his acceptance that she isn’t interested in romance, yet this ignores two things: first, the male tendency to get angry when turned down (in the lyric, the anger is before, not after he’s turned down); second, in the final lines of the poem she joins him in a romantic encounter (so the idea that she turns him down is less convincing). The heroine is less like a reluctant romantic partner than like the adventurer Odysseus when he meets Calypso and Circe: the poet is willing to get involved romantically, yet the heroine is pulled in the direction of a more perilous journey.

Between the stanza where the poet realizes his blindness and the next stanza where he realizes his superficiality, the chorus is the most powerful. It’s here where we can appreciate the full impact of the one thing that deeply disturbs her: the miller’s tale. The text is explicit here: it’s as the miller tells his tale that her face, “at first just ghostly, turned a whiter shade of pale.” As I argued in “The Miller,” Chaucer’s tale is itself quite humorous, yet the prologue and the tale together, from the point of view of intellectual history, tell a different story: one of free enquiry, free expression, and the paradoxical freedom of escaping the great capitalized Meanings, be these of religion or anything else. The poet can try to use vestal virgins or mythic figures to get her to think about romance and sex, but the heroine’s vision isn’t so easily distracted. Her vision is aimed at the sea, like the vestal virgins who leave their hallowed posts for the coast, and like Odysseus who sets sail, never taking the power of Neptune lightly.

While the poet and heroine are both talking about the sea, there’s a clear distinction between them. The chronology is important here, in the sense that it gives the poet two points of view: in the moment at the bar he imagines they’re at sea, floundering in a topsy-turvy world of drink and romance; later, after he’s seen her reaction to the miller’s tale, and after they dive to the ocean floor, he sees that the sea might be something else as well. She on the other hand believes as much from the start, and even more after she hears the miller’s tale: their lives are a sort of shore-leave from the infinity and obliteration of death, often symbolized by the ever-changing power of a river and by the powerful currents and vast depths of the sea.

Her version of death isn’t as much like that of the later Greeks, Hebrews, and Christians (who imagine a journey to the afterlife) as it is like that of the earlier Greeks, Hebrews, and Mesopotamians. The epic of Gilgamesh was written in various versions over the course of the third and second millennium B.C., and it may well be the uber version of both Hebrew and Greek post-mortem water-journeys. We find early in Gilgamesh that the general view of death is seen as taking a boat from the shore to the bottom of the Euphrates. Before his battle with the giant Humbaba, Gilgamesh tells his dear friend Enkidu: “All living creatures born of the flesh shall sit at last in the boat of the West, and when it sinks, when the boat of Magilum sinks, they are gone.” After the death of Enkidu, Gilgamesh goes mad with grief, and can’t reconcile himself to the fact that he’ll never see Enkidu again. For in Gilgamesh’s world, there is no ‘again.’ There is no afterlife — except for Utnapishtim, who builds his ark and escapes the flood, just as Noah does in the later monotheistic version of this story. Yet unlike in the later version, the original Noah doesn’t repopulate the world with children who are given the gift of eternal life.

The world’s first epic contains a sea-journey which has a bitter irony: Gilgamesh travels in Urhsanabi’s ferry to an island where Utnapishtim lives eternally, yet it is here that Gilgamesh learns that no other other humans will journey into the afterlife. This is a confrimation of what Gilgamesh was warned about before: as I noted in “Gilgamesh & the Ale-Wife” (in The Wine-Dark Sea), the ale-wife Siduri tells Gilgamesh: “When the gods created man they allotted to him death, but life they retained in their own keeping.” Utnapishtim confirms this in no uncertain terms: “There’s no permanence. Do we build a house to stand forever? Do we seal a contract to hold for all time? [...] It’s only the nymph of the dragon-fly who sheds her larva and sees the sun in his glory.”

When I say that Reid’s antagonist is an epic heroine, I mean it as much in the ancient Mesopotamian sense as in the Classical Greek or Christian. I don’t mean, however, to imply that Reid was thinking about Utnapishtim or the Mesopotamians when he wrote the lyric. Rather, I mean that the sensibility of dread at the prospect of death resonates more with the earliest Mesopotamian epic than with the later Greek and Italian ones. Yet if one sees the epic as a quest for ultimate meaning — as when Odysseus performs a sacrifice, brings up the souls of Tiresias and others, and learns from Achilles about the dreariness of the afterlife — then the Mesopotamian and Graeco-Italian epics share a great deal despite their differences.

After Gilgamesh accepts that there’s no afterlife (or, if there is one, as in other Mesopotamian versions, it’s the grimmest quasi-existence imaginable), he returns to the great city of Uruk to become a responsible king. This ending is important, since the epic starts with the old men of Uruk complaining about his tyrannical rule (in response to which the gods create Enkidu and set the main story in motion). Gilgamesh’s shift from seeking an afterlife to accepting responsibility in this world is similar to that of Sartre’s existentialist, who finds consolation in creating a meaningful existence. One might note here that Sartre’s vision of meaning may be more political than that of Camus. Yet for both existentialists there’s no victory over death, certainly nothing like the triumphalism of John Donne’s “One short sleep past, we wake eternally / And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.” Instead, there’s only consolation, since the existential vision is based on the acceptance of the devastating changes and inevitable oblivion of death. Sartre’s consolation often lies in political action, while Camus’ lies more in appreciating the moment, in acting, in nature, etc. In both cases, the existentialists engage in the world around them. This same movement from alienation and despair to constructive engagement can also be seen in the legendary king Gilgamesh, who goes from being the outcast grief-striken wanderer in search of the afterlife to the engaged king of the greatest city the world had ever seen.

While the final stanza is highly ambiguous, I’ll argue that it contains a return of sorts to the concerns of the real world: it contains the primal elements of love, food, laughter, and even equality — “And likewise if behind is in front, then dirt in truth is clean” — although these elements are so paradoxical and obscure that it will take me three pages (The Queen of Love, Beyond Alienation, and Myth & Mysticism) to interpret them fully.

It’s also possible that the end of the lyric suggests more than just a consolation. It’s possible that attacking the ocean bed suggests a leap of faith, that is, a leap from this world of alienated illusions into the deep water and essence of God. I’ll discuss this in the final pages, yet to whatever degree this might be possible, we must take into consideration the strong existential elements in the poem. We also need to consider the logical problem in any type of theological existentialism (such as Christian existentialism): once we’ve made a leap from existence to essence, we’re no longer in the realm of existentialism, but rather in the realm of essentialism, or in a sort of existentialist-cum-Christianity. It might be easier to argue that the woman is an agnostic, diving to the bottom of the sea with only the hope of some meaning to follow. In this sense they dive together down to the “the ocean-floor” yet circle back up to the skies, suggested by the ceiling which ‘flies away’ in the first stanza. Yet this interpretation has to be squared with her expressed notion that “There is no meaning” and with the implication of her face turning “a whiter shade of pale.” In the final three chapters, I’ll suggest that the poet’s ambiguities and paradoxes go some way in reconciling the existential and essential possibilities.

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Sartre says that “Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does. It is up to you to give life meaning.” The sad problem here, of course, is that meaning isn’t an easy thing to give oneself. The heroine of the lyric is perhaps like another of Sartre’s women, of whom he says, “She believed in nothing. Only her scepticism kept her from being an atheist.” If one accepts the complete freedom of existentialism, as well as the meaninglessness and absurdity that comes with this freedom, it doesn’t necessarily follow that one can then create one’s own meaning. The lyric’s heroine seems to understand that with great philosophical freedom comes not just the chance to create your own personal meaning, but also great peril, two linked metaphors for which are the open sea and the ocean bed.

Much of the lyric’s power lies in its unflinching realism. There may be no Zeus or Hades, no God or Devil. There may be no personal or political meaning that can substitute for the loss of the traditional cosmic Meaning, binding the universe with its meaningful Love. But there’s still Neptune, who represents the powerful forces of nature and circumstance. Where or when he will capsize the boat of our lives is an open question, mysterious as Fate. In this sense, stoicism may be as germane as existentialism and essentialism.

Neptune might be seen as the god of the late-19the century Naturalists, yet we are all under Nature’s power. The realization of this may be disturbing, yet it might also be seen as the first step of humility. As the stoic Marcus Aurelius says in Book 10 of his Meditations:

Nature gives all and takes back all. To her the man educated into himility says: ‘Give what you will; take back what you will.’ And he says this in no spirit of defiance, but simply as her loyal subject. (trans. Marton Hammond)

Everything else is, as the final verse suggests, a series of interlocking metaphors, a conceit that crashes down. The open awareness of this vulnerability, and the ability to grasp the moment of crash-diving, takes us back to the carpe diem of the first stanza. It also takes us back to the wisdom of Siduri the ale-wife, who asks the epic hero, “Gilgamesh, where are you rushing to? You will never find that [after-] life you seek. [Instead,] bathe yourself in water, cherish the little child that holds your hand, and make your wife happy in your embrace, for this too is the lot of man.”

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Next: The Queen of Love

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