Norway, sea-poems, Beckett's Rimbaud

My recent trip to Bergen, Norway happened to coincide with the sunniest two days that the city will likely experience all year. The purpose of my visit was to speak about Lucretius at a Bergensian arts institute called Litteraturhuset. Thanks to the charm of the city and to my impeccable host and brilliant friend, Eirik, it was a wonderful few days. I scribbled down a summary of my activities on the flight back:

Lucretius talk was fun. Then pizza bar with some Marxists, we disagree on Hegel (I am not in favour), we talk British and Norwegian drinking habits, onto student bar in the sparkling city centre, it is light at 11PM I keep remarking, we talk Yeats and postliberals, E & I wander back around the city lakes talking Hanseatic League, post-industrial towns in Britain, the perennial light on the horizon even at 1am, how the mountains look Portuguese in the dark with their houses swarming like fireflies on the hillsides, should Eirik convert to Catholicism — I want to say no but feel too guilty, part ways, greeted by wonderful cat on winding hill, grinning in the dark, next morning tram to Edvard Grieg’s old estate, it is called Troldhaugen (Valley of the Trolls), I admit to disliking Wagner, the sun bears down, we’re haloed by the waterside, admire Grieg’s paganlooking gravestone, climb to the nearby stave church, it had been burnt down then restored, we talk of psychedelics and psychiatry, the other pilgrims here are goths, they disavow the Satanist who lit up the most Norse-looking church around, onto galleries, see Munch at his most Nietzschean, Astrup and Dahl their most Romantic, cigarette in the University’s Parisian garden/ Epicurean retreat, buy caviar in a tube, wooden streets wind around the Rosenkrantz tower, tram uphill to Floyen, cold beer and ox tartare, re-litigate Hegelian dispute, talk autism, its relationship to pattern recognition, how marriage needs sanctification to work, or not, don’t assault things with language of transcendence, the here and now is enough, descend by foot, sun is a yolk, it dapples the serene woods, I don’t like David Bentley-Hart by the way, the trees look wiry and quiet like in the Uccello painting, I’ve never seen such sunlight, so red the trees should catch fire — light so northerly, angular, incandescent.

My notes contain nothing about my discussion of Lucretius’ poem De rerum natura, which is available here in podcast form. Eirik and I talk about Epicurean materialism, Lucretius’ polemic against eros, and how we might apply the poem’s arguments to our contemporary debates about superstition, enchantment, political engagement, elite formation, relationships, and so on. Also not mentioned is the theme of civilisation: I am always awed to think about the establishment of maritime trade routes and how great cities were built in difficult climes. I said at one point that the Norwegians are so admirable that I can forgive them the Viking victory at the Battle of Maldon. For coastal civilisations to welcome their own invasions would be an aberration, not a development, of the History in which we're still living.

Bergen is famously watery: located on a fjord, it comprises part of a peninsula, and it usually rains. As I walked around the medieval alleyways, lakesides, and waterfronts I recalled various lines from my favourite sea-poems.¹ Here they are:

From T. S. Eliot, ‘The Dry Salvages’ in Four Quartets:

Lady, whose shrine stands on the promontory,
Pray for all those who are in ships, those
Whose business has to do with fish, and
Those concerned with every lawful traffic
And those who conduct them.

Repeat a prayer also on behalf of
Women who have seen their sons or husbands
Setting forth, and not returning:
Figlia del tuo figlio,
Queen of Heaven.

Also pray for those who were in ships, and
Ended their voyage on the sand, in the sea's lips
Or in the dark throat which will not reject them
Or wherever cannot reach them the sound of the sea bell's
Perpetual angelus.

We both faltered as we tried to quote this section, but remembered the final stanza. On reading Psalm 107 (KJV) aloud in chapel a few years ago, I realised Eliot probably alludes to verse 23: ‘They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters’. Surely he also draws on the BCP’s ‘Prayers to be Used at Sea’.

From Samuel Beckett’s translation of Arthur Rimbaud’s ‘Le Bateau Ivre’:

I saw archipelagoes of stars and islands launched me
Aloft on the deep delirium of their skies:
Are these the fathomless nights of your sleep and exile,
Million of golden birds, oh Vigour to be?

But no more tears. Dawns have broken my heart,
And every moon is torment, every sun bitterness;
I am bloated with the stagnant fumes of acrid loving—
May I split from stern to stern and founder, ah founder!

Another brilliant friend introduced me to this poem shortly before my trip. ‘Million of golden birds’ reminds me of Hopkins; ‘founder, ah founder’ is one of the translation’s more delightful liberties. Beckett’s Rimbaud seems quite unknown; I could find it nowhere online but in a Reddit forum.

From Robert Lowell, ‘The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket’:

Sailors, who pitch this portent at the sea   
Where dreadnaughts shall confess
Its hell-bent deity,
When you are powerless
To sand-bag this Atlantic bulwark, faced
By the earth-shaker, green, unwearied, chaste   
In his steel scales: ask for no Orphean lute
To pluck life back. The guns of the steeled fleet   
Recoil and then repeat
The hoarse salute.

[...]

...Let the sea-gulls wail
For water, for the deep where the high tide   
Mutters to its hurt self, mutters and ebbs.   
Waves wallow in their wash, go out and out,   
Leave only the death-rattle of the crabs,   
The beach increasing, its enormous snout   
Sucking the ocean’s side.
This is the end of running on the waves;
We are poured out like water. Who will dance
The mast-lashed master of Leviathans
Up from this field of Quakers in their unstoned graves?

A vicious poem which didn’t suit the tranquility of those May days in the watery city. Still, I love it: like the Eliot, it alludes to the psalms which concern drowning or the trepidation of seeking dominion over the sea and contains an invocation of Our Lady, albeit one less prayerful than Eliot’s.

I want to keep better notes of my travels and am writing up a piece about my recent visit to New England, where I also thought about Lowell.

1. Over the years I’ve visited quite a few hilly cities, like Porto and Newcastle. I’ve noticed that when I walk alone, my thoughts tend to be more edifying than my speech is when I am accompanied and (therefore tempted to) complain idly about the laboriousness of walking itself; I am not very fit.