Collected Works ✏️ Vancouver

1825

10:33 AM

I’ve given up on trying to get Old Rex to think about Sumer and Akkad. Anything outside of Europe and British India seems to be a strain. But perhaps I can get him to see Odysseus in terms of Beowulf, the first English classic, and from there I might work outward to Celtic myth, King Arthur, Sir Francis Drake, Lord Tennyson, Winston Churchill, Richard Nixon, and George Bush the Second. Sooner or later, the marauding bands of Angles and Saxons and Jutes will be the terrors of the Earth. But along the way they will write some good stories.

I imagine Old Rex wandering into his study in the evening. He sees in passing his image in the looking-glass, the one he bought thirty years ago on his honeymoon in Wales. The one with the ornate frame, with carved waves and sea creatures like the ones Bethan told him that she could see frolicking in the waves and on the beaches of Anglesey.

Looking deeply into the mirror, Old Rex looks past sea nymphs and March Hares and teacups, past his own rich necktie and thinning hair, and sees islands floating in the open sea. Then he glides across the room, with its bookcases full of love and adventure, and sits in his favourite chair, deep in its soft leather. From the side table he lifts the large Times Atlas onto his lap. He turns the pages, and imagines that he’s Odysseus, the nimble-witted wanderer flying across the pages of the rolling Mediterranean.

Old Rex sits there for hours, slowly sipping the one small glass of cognac Bethan allows him each night, dreaming of escape. Occasionally she comes into the study to settle a pillow by his head, and says soothingly, “There, there, the ocean is wide, and the oarsmen are strong. The arcs of their shoulders, as they heave back and forth, glisten in the moonlight. The strong muscles of their shoulders tighten their rounded biceps and give power to their forearms. They grip hard the wooden handle of the oars as they stroke. Wrapping him about with a shawl, she repeats, “Stroke, stroke, stroke …”

How to get to Old Rex before all of that happens? How to stay his progress toward the chair of poetical fantasy, and get him to look again in the mirror — which I have tilted, just enough for him to see a group of figures, their dusty armour glinting dully in the dim light of the room.

In the far corner of his study Old Rex sees Priam, tired and defeated, next to Hrothgar. Next to them stand Achilles and Beowulf. The king of the Scyldings is telling the old Trojan how he broke no oaths, dealt out rings, and built the great mead-hall. Beside them Beowulf is telling Achilles how he raised the spirits of Hrothgar once Grendel’s mother burned down the mead-hall. Beowulf told him, “Better to avenge friends than mourn too much."

In the long window behind the four figures Old Rex sees the raging sea. Islands and shorelines are etched by the sharpness of lightning bolts. Towering above the sea, seemingly safe from the raging swells, lie the cloud-capped towers of Illium, apparently immune to strife and war. Further below, along the shoreline, sits the quiet abbey of Lindisfarne.

The monks are flying through the pages of their illuminated Bibles, from the peaks of Sinai to the dragons of Revelation. Some of them imagine that the tales are pure fantasy: the white rider of the Antichrist, the red rider of War, the black rider of Famine, and the pale rider of Death. Across the water battering-ram prows rise from the sea, rugged soldiers cry out for glory, and on the white banners, torn by the wind and falling axes, flutter the slogans of love and brotherhood, shredded in the maelstrom and drifting upward to Valhalla.

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Starting from Old Zealand

The path of the Vikings stretches from the North Sea to the Strait of Messina, where it meets the Greek fleets coming from Troy. The Viking ships descend the Volga and the Dnieper to arrive at the Black Sea, where they meet Jason and his quest for the golden fleece. This may suggest a poetic European circle, but if the epic teaches one thing it’s that there are circles beyond circles. The defeat of the Trojans was a victory for the Greeks but a defeat for the Eastern Trojan civilization. Dante reaches into the heaven of divine circles, yet he realizes that all he can see is a metaphor for a greater meaning he’ll never understand.

The oars of the Vikings and Greeks dip into the same sea. Whether one calls it the Baltic or the Aegean, this sea stretches from one end of the earth to the other, and around again, and again, as often as days spin through the night of outer space. Or, if not into outer space — from Voltaire’s Sirius to Ovid’s Andromeda — then at least from the Øresund Strait that divides Zealand from Gothland, around the northern tip of Denmark, down the North Sea to the Thames. From there the ships set sail to the straits of Gibralter and Malacca, and from there to the very ends of the Earth, the antipode of New Zealand. 

No writer has written with more majesty and subtle irony about this mastery of the globe than Conrad. Heart of Darkness is a Modern epic of trade and folly, adventure and mischance, ideals and realities. In the opening pages, he celebrates the Thames River, from where the boats set sail to the far-flung corners of the British Empire, an Empire on which the sun was about to set:

The old river in its broad reach rested unruffled at the decline of day, after ages of good service done to the race that peopled its banks, spread out in the tranquil dignity of a waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth. […] It had borne all the ships whose names are like jewels flashing in the night of time, from the Golden Hind returning with her rotund flanks full of treasure, to be visited by the Queen’s Highness and thus pass out of the gigantic tale, to the Erebus and Terror, bound on other conquests — and that never returned. It had known the ships and the men. They had sailed from Deptford, from Greenwich, from Erith — the adventurers and the settlers; kings’ ships and the ships of men on ‘Change [the Royal Exchange in London]; captains, admirals, the dark “interlopers” of the Eastern trade, and the commissioned “generals” of East India fleets. Hunters for gold or pursuers of fame, they all had gone out on that stream, bearing the sword, and often the torch, messengers of the might within the land, bearers of a spark from the sacred fire. What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an unknown earth! . . . The dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empires.

The sun set; the dusk fell on the stream, and lights began to appear along the shore.

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The boats of the English set sail from the Thames Estuary to every corner of the earth. When Tennyson writes of a horizon that continues to move as we advance toward it, he’s writing about England in the 19th Century, and how the English are beginning to see that their desire for knowledge has no end. The first train may have left the station in 1825, yet the train will lay its tracks all over the earth, from the TGV to the Shinkansen.

I’m pretty sure Old Rex will look more favourably on my argument if I include lots about Lord Byron, Lord Tennyson, and all the other lordly glories of Victorian England. Old Rex is crazy about the Victorians. Perhaps I should mention how David Hume blew everybody’s socks off and how John Stuart Mill put them back on. Or how the geologists of the 18th century unsettled the ground beneath us, and Darwin taught us to stand up straight and weather the shakes. If I can work in Old Rex’s favourite metaphor, the Victorian train, he may even get on board. 

1825

The journey of Odysseus doesn’t just lead us to great exploits and beautiful ladies — to Virgil’s Dido, Dante’s Francesca, and Milton’s Eve. It also leads us to a train, called Locomotion No.1, waiting next to the Mason's Arms public house, in Shildon, County Durham, England, in the year 1825.

1825 is the first year that humans moved across land at astonishing speeds, with the ability to carry tons of cargo. It signalled the maturity of the Industrial Revolution, and allowed the navy Empire to stretch from port to port, across vast stretches of land. It allowed the British to bring the riches of the world into what Conrad called “the greatest town on earth.” It also allowed the British to export their notions of law, property, business, religion, and politics. It did to land what the ship had done to sea: it allowed English power to reach not only Cape Town and Bombay, but also Pretoria and Hyderabad.

Behind the Victorians lies the British Empire, and behind that Empire lies Sir Francis Drake, Columbus, Snorri, Leif Erikson, and the epic Roman hero Aeneas. And behind Aeneas lies the Greek colonies and the archetypal explorer, the clever epic hero Odysseus, designer of Trojan Horses, destroyer of cities.

Yet here's the tricky part, at least in writing to a fan of the Greeks: 

And behind Odysseus lies the great adventurer Gilgamesh, the first epic hero ever to live in a world of numbers and writing, of business and religion, of city states and war.

I know Old Rex won’t like this, because he believes everything started with the Greeks. But I can’t help it: I'm on a train platform, and this platform was invented by science, not myth. It was invented by numbers and things. And numbers were invented in Mesopotamia.

It's 1825 and the first train that ever pulled out of a station is pulling out of the station of Darlington. The destination is Stockton-on-Tees. I grab my briefcase tightly in my hand, and jump on the last car.

Whether on a train platform or the prow of a Viking ship, Europeans exercised power through adventure. Viking or British, they’re venture capitalists on the dragon ship of state.

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5:50 AM

I worry: will Old Rex accept my journey backward in time? Will he go, he and I, through the crowded streets of history, while the morning is stretched out like a florescent tube across the ceiling of the Osborne Gymnasium? 

Will he consent to travel with me (and give me a decent grade) if I go backward from the Victorians, the Holy Victorians with their top hats and their pink stretches of Empire, back to the mercantile raids of the English? And if I go back from there to the Norse raids, and to the plunder of the Vandals and the Visigoths? And if I don’t stop there, but connect the Goths and Vikings to the Roman Empire and the Greek city states with their poems and their thin layer of democracy and their colonial satellite cities and their wars against the Trojans and the Carthaginians and the Persians?

Will he shred my paper and toss it in the fire if I then suggest that this Greek slaughter and Greek presents and Greek poetry and Greek talk of you and me voting goes even further back to the Mesopotamians; if I suggest that Charon is just Urshanabi in a foul, desert-dusty tunic, and Noah is just Utnapishtim in a mantle of prophecy?

The train left the station hours ago and I’m in the caboose. As it pulls into the port of Stockton-on-Tees, I take a deep breath, and start scrawling my theory all over my knees, the blue ink flowing into the Matthalaug’s blue depths.

I walk down from the station to the quay to catch a boat to the far-flung corners of the Empire. My knees are trembling at the thought of what he'll do to my grade. They’re also trembling because I see ahead of me the Open Sea — the archetypal, Open Sea of Leif Erikson and Columbus and Odysseus. I see the towers of Illium, burning in the sunset. And I see Urshanabi, with his boat of reeds, about to cross the Sumerian marshes to discover the awful truth.

10:45 AM

The Boat of Magilum

I’m in the boat, we’re all in the boat, that took Gilgamesh across the carpet of reeds to discover that there’s no afterlife, no matter how hard we wish there was. I steer with Gilgamesh back to Uruk, dispirited, having lost the magic plant and having lost all hope of finding his friend Enkidu in the afterlife.

My trembling isn’t just a personal trembling, but a general one. For all of us, whether we’re like Gilgamesh or like Ulysses, bored as a Victorian gentleman with “Life piled on life” and with his “gray spirit yearning in desire / To follow knowledge like a sinking star, / Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.”

Like Byron in 1825, and like Prufrock a hundred years later, I fear that there will be no mermaids to greet us when we meet the end of our days. We’ll all walk that plank, get on that boat, driven by who knows what mythic figure. It may be Urshanabi or Charon, or it may be that other cloaked figure with the hood and glistening scythe.

In the epic of Gilgamesh the boat isn’t a ferry boat. It doesn’t take you from one side to the next. It’s called the boat of Magilum. The dead board it and stand on its deck while it drifts out into the Euphrates and sinks.

Now, the great city of Uruk lies in a dry riverbed where the Euphrates used to be. It was once the greatest city on earth.

'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

6:04 AM

I look at the time on my Mac Air. It’s 6:04 AM. I switch to the playlist Drive Our Ships to New Lands, which ought to give me courage for the road ahead. Above all, I must be careful how I make my points.

10:55 AM

Heart of Darkness: May Day! May Day!

Snorri's stories of the Norse gods might seem like isolated chapters in the history of the epic, yet his Vikings are no exception to the English rule. The story of English conquest is linked to the epic stories of Snorri, Homer, and Gilgamesh. The power of the British and the Americans has just as much in common with the Vandals and Goths as it does with any stories we might want to believe about Arthur’s final barge or the pilgrims on the Mayflower.

The spirit of exploration, of conquering and control, takes us from the dinosaurs and raptors, those scary birds that haunted our earliest days, to the British navy and the Americans with their F-22 Raptors.

And farther west on the upper reaches the place of the monstrous town was still marked ominously on the sky, a brooding gloom in sunshine, a lurid glare under the stars.

‘And this also,’ said Marlow suddenly, ‘has been one of the dark places of the earth.’

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