Pilgrims\u27 Progress

The Catch, 2014

The essay offers an analysis of Gary Snyder's poem "Wave". Close reading reveals the connections between metaphorical, structural, and performative levels of meaning in the poem. This text was written for the course "Another Universe: Wilderness Thought in Ancient Chinese and Modern American Poetry", taught by David Hinton at the Free University of Berlin in the winter semester 2013/2014.

Resilience, 2020

The Coevolution of Language, Teaching, and Civil Discourse Among Humans, 2020

Come stand with me some breezy summer day, on a certain rock formation I know on the coast of Maine, about an hour up from Portland. We'll be looking out over Goose Rock Passage, where tidal currents rush by with such swirling force they sometimes wrestle that big red navigational buoy before us completely under water. Rachel Carson's summer cottage, where she wrote portions of The Silent Spring, is just a few miles to the southeast, on Southport Island, across Sheepscot Bay. Across the narrow channel just in front of us, a group of Arctic terns divebomb the water for minnows. Look there, to your right: here come two commuting cormorants, short black wings beating tirelessly, long black necks stretched forward, tracing a perfectly efficient course just a foot or two over the surface, side by side, destination unknown. A whiskered, dog-faced harbor seal surfaces, drifts lazily with the tide a few hundred yards, then disappears with a flourish. Farther out, just north of McMahan Island, a couple of lobsterman are pulling a trap, attended by an unruly swarm of gulls eager for discarded baitfish. Near the water's edge down to our left, a solitary gull picks her dainty way along the rocks, a small crab dangling by a leg from her beak. If we're lucky, high in a treetop on the point of land across the little cove to the west, we'll see

This article considers what is probably the most influential of all transformations to the medieval mind: the arduous heaven-bound journey of all Christians that played out in numerous forms in medieval thought and practice – as pilgrimage, as life-long psychological preparation, as spiritual ascension on death, as psychosomatic experience at Judgement. The Seafarer, one of numerous overtly and didactically religious poems in the ten-century Exeter manuscript, engages this popular theme through a narrative that is at once metaphorical and literal; it involves an ascetic peregrination of the yearning spirit, but also the tactile and physical endurance of a solitary, desolate voice navigating the atol yþa gewealc ‘terrible tossing of waves’ (6a). Into this maritime portrayal of pious transcendence comes an equally abiding image – that of the soaring bird. The key envy of birds which makes them dynamic movers between elements and between spheres enables these creatures to occupy an in-betweenness that has, of course, made them commonplace figures of the fleeing or liberated human soul across cultures and centuries, including Anglo-Saxon England. Whilst the six named species in lines 19b-25a of the poem, and the anfloga ‘lone-flier’ flight imagery at lines 58-64a have by no means lacked critical attention separately, I attempt a reading that brings these two passages together: vividly real, wandering, noisy seabirds and a pelagic bird-soul image. Far from appearing as mere background incidentals, the poet’s treatment of the seabirds we first encounter resonates with contemporary ornithological knowledge, and suggests that they feature specifically as species that best convey the trials and endeavours of a sea-going speaker who observes, listens to, and names seabirds. Speculating and conducting the journey to heaven, that is, involves a human-to-avian transformation, in which the pilgrim must inhabit and traverse the seabirds’ territory. Moreover, the curious essence of seabirds as winged creatures that are always at home on the seas and journeying to a home elsewhere establishes them as what I term ‘native foreigners’, a paradox that highlights the seafarer’s conflicting yearnings and, more widely, reflects the difficult dynamic between the earthly and celestial in the poem’s perceptions of the soul’s journey. As metaphoric relations dissolve into ambiguity even whilst they are established, this very paradox suggests birds as ideal correlatives: birds’ mysteries are aligned with uncertain adventures towards God beyond far horizons, towards a destination which is never reached in the poem.

2014

1986

TEXT, 2018

On the next instance of the New South Whales making an appearance in the assignment, she hesitated, then typed out a pithy question. Because a third mention surely deserved sarcasm. She tapped it out two-fingered on her laptop. 'Are these related to the Southern Right Whale?' Was she undermining the student's self-esteem by pointing out he didn't know how to smell the name of his home state? More to the point, had she been teaching too long? It was supposed to be a heart and soul job, a vacation like being a nun. She wanted to do the right thing but increasingly felt she was losing the plot and not just of the students' convoluted assignments. It was like an illness, this feeling stalking her. The bus lurched to a stop and she was jostled by the outflow of passengers spelling of body odour and expensive perfumes and daily grind. She stared blankly at the swelling cityscape beyond the window. Sighed. Not her stop. Dropped her eyes back to the coldface. The hall was deserted. She sometimes doubted students existed in threedimensional space. The laminated A4 on the Professor's door announced Consolation times, handily colour coded on a timetable. No one had introduced him to the vagaries of autocorrect, nor his students to the futility of expecting anything soothing when they came to consult behind that particular door. She arrived just in time, a skerrick before the nick, in a case of hurrying up to get somewhere to sit still. The school meeting dragged, its soul-purpose, it seemed, to prepare them for hell. The diminutive sessional tutor alone did not partake of the neatly triangular sandwiches and cut fruit provided as incentive to get them there. This woman had long subsided on next-to-nothing at all. As the clock on the far wall itched its way closer to the advertised conclusion, she found herself drowning. She woke as her chin hit her chest. 'I meant drowsing,' she apologised. The Head droned on, having made a slightly more complex spelling mistake: perusing agenda items took so much longer than pursuing them. The list of mistakes in the afternoon marking grew. The baddie had another think coming. A ballerina was frilled when she won the Eisteddfod. Some boys went surging. The versus of a song were eluded to.