Emerald Cove

The recent disclosure of vast amounts of (25,000 or so) barrels of leaking DDT filled barrels in the deep waters off the southern California coast, was, well, disturbing to say the least. During my childhood my family often spent summer weekends at Santa Catalina island with its seemingly pristine reefs and kelp forests. The toxic barrels were secretively dumped in those far off years and recently discovered.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/apr/27/up-to-25000-barrels-found-at-suspected-ddt-dump-off-california-say-scientists

This poem is a response.

Emerald Cove

We swam, diving in lucid waters

among the kelp forest on the reef

stared at by red saddled sheephead *

fish who munched on sea urchins and

lit by the golden globes of garibaldi**.

Innocence unaware that

eight miles offshore of the island

barrels of DDT sludge were being

dumped in the thousands upon thousands

on the  continental shelf

in the murk, the barrels slowly

leached all these years dichlorodi-

phenyltrichloroethane.

We knew the pelicans with their

great beaks and fishing prowess

had disappeared unable to hatch

their eggs without breaking them,

and the eagles were long gone.

That we knew but not the sinister

presence in 3000 feet of water,

lurking to this day now revealed

in the deep, half a century

after the chemical’s banning

in the US though its maker

Montrose continued for years

exporting to other lands.

The ocean was infinite in those

mid-century years: dump anything into it

and forever gone except

in the monster movies where

the deep would erupt but that

was mostly left to Japan.

Sinister the tens of thousands of barrels

waiting all these years, waiting, waiting

leaking and corroding in the pressures

of the deep ocean, waiting, your truths

now revealed to the cameras.

emerald cove your water so clear

the abalone and the lobsters

on the rocks the sculpin and bass

swimming among the fronds—

experience held in memory,

caught in the traps of loss.

• The California sheephead, Semicossyphus pulcher is a species of wrasse. They have the interesting habit of being able to change sexes but start out as females. Good to eat too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_sheephead

Wikipedia

**A species of orange damselfish, Hipsypops rubicundus, sometimes called California goldfish.

The Strange Beauty of the Archipelago: A Review

Strange Beauty: Ecocritical Approaches to Early Medieval Landscape by Alfred K. Siewers

There are several intriguing arguments made in this book that made it a worthwhile read, though I am not a Celtic Christian. It is a very dense read, though, and at times a bit of a slog through untrimmed thickets of academic jargon. Strange Beauty is part of a series called The New Middle Ages from Palgrave MacMillan*.

I found Siewers’ geographic and cultural focus on an Irish Sea region interesting, the including of Ireland and western Britain together, and his gathering Irish and Welsh literature through this lens insightful. He uses the term Irish Sea region for Ireland and Wales as a key geographical and cultural zone and also centers ‘archipelagic’ as a key concept. In his view archipelago and otherworld reflect each other in a rich and ever productive way. Siewer’s understanding of the otherworld is as something continuous, multi-form and expressing deeper or normally hidden levels of our daily realities.  This would be in contrast to views like that of Patrick Sims Williams who argues for the multiple nature of plural Otherworlds in “Some Celtic Otherworld Terms”.

Siewers is a Christian and he reads the stories he analyzes as always having strong Christian components (anti-nativist, at times annoyingly so to this reader). What I found fascinating with his portrayals of currents of Christianity that would eventually lose out in the later middle ages but that were positive toward this-world as Creation. Perhaps the most interesting chapter was the one on Eriugena, titled “Paradise in the Sea: An Early Geography of Desire” with an extensive analysis of the Periphyseon (De Diusione Naturae) of the 9^th century Hiberno-Latin philosopher and theologian. He sees John Scotus Eriugena as celebrating a cosmic participation  and of nature being permeated with theophanies of the Creator. Eriugena comes across as a fascinating thinker and theologian of a constrained time and of great interest to pantheists and Christians of a ‘creation spirituality’ emphasis, I would think (but also for this pagan reader). He asserts, somewhat disingenuously I  think, that Eriugena was not a Neoplatonist, he sure sounds like this was a major influence on him via the early Christian Neoplatonists and it’s stated his being influenced Pseudo-Dionysius (a 5^th/6^th century Neoplatonist).

There is an interesting chapter on the colors of the winds where the creates an interesting color wheel with some insightful thoughts on glas (blue-green-gray). He compares its usage to the color of gold used in byzantine icons in which the viewer loses a sense of where background ends and figure begins. Siewers writes that in Dionysian/Eriugenean theology imagined divine energies “in nature as a relational experience entwined language and color”.  Glas as color melds sea and sky.

A chapter called the “Cosmic Imaginarium” has some interesting perspectives on topography and both textual and visual style found in early Irish contexts which he calls ‘inverse perspective’, analyzing the Tain. Truth is searched for via multiple perspectives, and multiplex images are exteriorized between the art and the reader (he calls this exteriorized dialogic and notes its use in Byzantine icons). The narrative style through using variations deflects interiorization of the reader into the image, as does the content of the stylized dual nature of the landscape—otherworldly and thisworldly, implicitly Christian and explicitly pagan—“all related to actual topography. Theories of perception expressed in such effects were taken seriously as life practices in that era.” These become mysteries not be ‘penetrated’ as in modern landscape but to be engaged with. Even Cuchullain’s warp spasms are interpreted in this multi-perspectival way, a fluidity of body, which he also sees in the figures in the Book of Kells. Compared to the Coptic and Byzantine works of the time the Irish has the archipelagic emphasis on landscape and engagement with nature, the immersiveness of sea and sky.

The last chapter “Archipelago and Empire” contains insightful material on the different takes between the Celtic archipelagic landscape orientation and the Anglo-Saxon and Frankish one which took on the dominant role in western Christianity. The  ‘Archipelagic’ form was one of multiple temporalities intersecting, of the divine penetrating nature and in the fluidity of the Otherworld whereas in the imperial, ecclesiastical one the Other anchored a firmly delineated individual (male) upon a landscape. He gives Beowulf as an example in his dive into the swamp where he slays Grendel’s Mother; Siewers sees this in terms of the psychological theory of Julia Kristeva, where in the dominant western paradigm identity is formed by opposition to the Other (my thoughts were a very significant change had occurred from the era when the numen of the mere would have received gifts or sacrifice instead of being visualized as slaughtered). “Bede’s temporality would come to be figured dominant. But the landscape of the Mabinogi, and those of the early Irish Sea zone generally, remain obscured yet still activated tropes of iconographic resistance to the Western tendency to reform nature into interiorized virtual reality.” This triumphal attitude he then relates to colonialism and empire. Siewers finds the tradition of participatory relationship and interpenetration with the other to be a rich resource for ecological relations now. There is so much more in this packed book from which I learned a lot, including about earth-friendly currents of early Christianity that were historically overwhelmed. A worthwhile read for those who want to know more about the early Christian era of Ireland and western Britain, the era when the literature was shaped.

*These are very over-priced books but can be purchased once a year in the huge Palgrave sale (or obtained via InterLibraryLoan).