Charles P. R. Tisdale

POETRY’S NOISOME PESTILENCE

It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for a moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has passed!

Walter Pater on Leanordo’s “La Gioconda” in The Renaissance

The small seacoast town of Whitby guarantees deception. At least from the land side. The North York Moors dominate all roads from south to north, an uninhabited expanse of hills and vales covered in heather, outcroppings of rocks, and bracken. When the horizon finally opens eastward, the ocean is not at first visible. Rather large grain fields skirted by clumps of trees. Soon, however, the honey-colored stone arches of the ruins of the ancient abbey centers the landscape. The tourist can choose to park near the abbey grounds or take a circumventive route to the nearby town. For the abbey rests on a headland cliff about three hundred feet above the sea. The contrast between the quiet, green lawn and the blue ocean is stark, a difference as distinctive as the religious contemplation the abbey once housed and the hustle and bustle of commercial life nestled around the rivermouth below.

A variety of motives may bring the occasional visitor to Whitby. The environs preserve the quaint charm of a once thriving whaling industry and anyone interested in sea exploration is sure to be inspired by walking the streets of Captain Cook’s native seaport. Of course, the abbey shrine offers sustenance to religious devotion and palpable clarity to the dusty obfuscation of historical study. Moreover, the region has been a prime vacation spots for Britishers. Just a few miles south Robin Hood’s Bay offers an ideal curving strand for the human heliotrope. But whatever the reason, the limited habitable land between the foot of the cliff and the edge of the shore forces preservation rather than expansion, a contraction of one’s curiosity to a poignant apprehension.

I wanted to explore Whitby’s many literary associations in my visit there in the summer of 1990. Not only was the abbey above the town the chosen location of the Synod of Whitby, held in 664, a signal event in the history of the Christian Church in the British Isles, but also the first English poet that we know by name, Cædmon, worked as a cowherd in its precincts. His metrical translation of Genesis from Latin into Old English represents today the oldest extant manuscript of that language in verse. I also knew that Cedd, an otherwise not very famous Anglo-Saxon monk and bishop, served as the translator at the Synod of Whitby. Could there be, I wondered, some connection between these two men who undoubtedly knew each other? Put another way, can there be some mental activity in the creative process associated with verse making that embodies an essentially interpretive role? Might not the poet, any poet, be seen more as a translator rather than an originator?

Those who claim that the poetic voice is divine strikes the non-humanist literalist as absurd. Many literary critics offer a compromise, such as inspired or co-creative. For surely only god can create ex nihilo, something from nothing. That is why Arthur Koestler, in his fascinating study of the nature of the creative activity, rather argues all original thought is a metaphoric process, protean rather than seminal. No human discoverer starts from scratch, rather puts two unfamiliar eggs in one new basket. To pare his idea down to poetry, to Cædmon, and all who have come after in the English tongue, the poet sees an association not recognized before. The poem is the verbal display of working a conflict out on the hinge of a very narrow connection. A clever example is Donne’s ever-shifting comparison of human love making to the bite of a flea.

Elizabeth Gaskell visited Whitby in 1859 and chose the town as the setting for her late novel, Sylvia’s Lovers (1863). She adopted the pseudonym Monkshaven, an ironic allusion, one speculates, to underscore the failure of religious and social institutions to prevent the fall of her heroine. Mrs. Gaskell, in her creative process, maintains a delicate balance between her Christian impulses and the social conditions of mid-Victorian period, especially the lack of the will to communicate between the classes. In addition to this first modern literary inspiration native to Whitby, consider the unlikely fact that Bram Stoker states unequivocally that he received the entire idea for Dracula (1897) from witnessing the sinking of the Dimitri, a Russian schooner just outside the harbor. He used many of the characters and the public excitement on that fateful day to create his novel of sexual repression and the shocking metaphor of sucking blood from one’s prey. The illness is compulsive, associated to some degree with the real human disease of rabies or hydropsia, perhaps a morbid version of Donne’s playful flea. Moreover, added to Cædmon, Gaskell, and Stoker, a significant portion of A. S. Byatt’s Possession (1990) occurs in Whitby. I have often visited the sites where great creative imaginations also stayed and have invariably been baffled by my inability to get infected with the microbe of their luminous achievements. Roland and Maud capture this sense of probing failure, although more successfully that I ever have. They are looking for some clue to a previously incarnated soul, of course, who perhaps is repeating her life in themselves. The prospects are absolutely mesmerizing, at least captivating enough to win the Booker Prize. A. S. Byatt has that rare gift of making the paranormal possible.

But, as I have just said, in my brief meandering around the city, I could not get in touch with any of these preexisting souls, whether literary or real. Cædmon learned all at once the intricacies of Old English prosody from an angel who encountered him alone in a cattle shed. He had fled from the feast after not being able to sing when the harp had reached him in the circle. But on my visit to Whitby the genius of that proto-poet had dissipated among the silent gothic and Romanesque arches of the ruined abbey. Nor could I sense A. S. Byatt’s aura who had no doubt hired a room in a B & B to get a feel for Whitby. I could not see a face like Sylvia’s nor one of her descendants as I descended the three hundred feet of steps from the abbey to the town below. I certainly didn’t feel like sticking my fangs in any one and drawing blood.

I did run across a stamp store and bought some first day covers. A weakness of aspiring writers is that in the absence of notoriety they fall to collecting. In addition to coins and stones, I have slipped behind the antiseptic sheets of photograph albums a quite beautiful display of stamps with their cachets, specializing not only in poets, novelists, and playwrights, but also painters and composers. Absent fame, my subconscious is saying, then at least assemble a personal mausoleum of those who have won the bay and laurel.

At the stamp store I found several I didn’t have. The one I remember most was dated 9 July 1980 and issued at Heytesbury, Warminster, Wiltshire. The cachet is not elaborate as cachets go. We simply see the signatures of Mrs. Gaskell, Emily Bronte, George Eliot, and Charlotte Bronte in a beautiful golden cursive script but with no pictorial adornment as is normally the case. The stamps themselves, however, are quite lovely, all in a row the foregrounded portraits of the four, while in the backgrounds full-bodied representations of principal characters and lovers gambol and endear themselves such as Catherine and Heathcliff, Jane and Rochester, Tom and Maggie, but sadly Sylvia alone.

While I was paying up, the clerk pointed out to me a fact I had not known. The minuscule gilded bust of Queen Elizabeth in the upper right hand corner was in profile with her head turned to stage right. He said that with each change in the monarch the direction of the profile is reversed. I thought it an odd convention, but at least as interesting as any of the epic ones Homer and the writers of Genesis (including Milton) employed. I am thinking of the meal or dream, but also visitations from angels, perhaps a muse, at least an Olympian god. I am also remembering that after his invocation of the muse, Homer begins The Iliad with an epic sickness. Allan C. Christensen in his study of Nineteenth-Century Narratives of Contagion, has this to say about one of our poetic Ur-histories:

Angry because of an affront to one of his priests, Apollo shoots contaminated arrows for nine days into the encampment of the Achaians, and the pestilence rages from tent to tent. The god, as in many stories of pestilence, must be placated, but the placating sacrifice arouses further anger and desire for retaliation on behalf of the sacrificial victim. An unstoppable chain reaction of resentment spreads as a metaphorical continuation of the initial pestilence. And that chain reaction continues, we might say, not only into the devastating events of the Trojan War but, through its aftermath, into the rest of history.

The biblical narrative is no different in the way it begins. Through Adam and Eve’s eating of an apple both death and suffering enter the world. Only it didn’t take Satan nine days.

As I left the store I noticed what I can only call an ominous announcement framed in one of the glass cases. The message warned to beware of the gluten in the glue on the back of the stamps. I didn’t know how to interpret the caveat, conjuring up visions of letters being carriers of diseases anywhere from Hong Kong flu to the bubonic plague. Diseases slip in under our noses in the fleas infesting bundles of textiles, the blood sucked by mosquitoes, or the feathers of birds. I asked the clerk what the announcement meant and he laughed. “Oh, no, not to worry,” he replied. “Some lady thought her children had an allergic reaction to the glue in stamps and started one of those crazy anti-everything campaigns.” I laughed, too, but today we board our flights with our cosmetics bundled in clear plastic bags.

I spent only one day in Whitby. I’m not sure why. Perhaps the hidden wish no longer to prolong the absence of a surefire connection to fame, or grab for it in no more vaulted a place than a ruined abbey and a postage stamp. But I did have a plan––to follow a hunch I had about Cedd. At that time I knew next to nothing about the monk bishop except the most striking attribute of his life, that he knew enough Latin, Gælic, Old French, and Old English to be an interpreter at one of the two most significant synods in Anglo-Saxon history––Whitby and Hertford. Moreover, almost like an epic convention, Bede says that after the synod had adjourned he left immediately for Lastingham, some eighteen miles south and west of Whitby, contracted the plague, and died.

For a long time I have thought of translators as cheaters. That is, if you can’t read the text in the original, then lower yourself to ride to the gods on the back of a slave. All you have to do is accept that these words stand for those and mean more or less the same thing. I am not so sure, however, of this prejudice any more. Could a genuine similarity exist between the original poet and the translator? The role that Cedd played as interpreter at Whitby might not have been much different from Cædmon’s as the first English poet whom we know by name. Cædmon was turning Latin into Old English and the demands must have taxed his creative imagination as well as his verbal acumen. Both men were not adding to the created world in terms of new matter, rather embellishing its store by exploring what was already there.

Contrary to what I had previously thought about poetry, then, my assumptions were being challenged by these two men who worked in close proximity to one another over a millennium and a half ago. One was a cattle herder and the other a monk. One lived near to the world the god of Genesis created in six days; the other near to god. They both tinkered with words and how verbal meaning might be conveyed. Thirdly, a price had to be paid. No one knows how Cædmon died. But, like Coleridge’s ancient mariner, I believe once he got the knack that he developed a near pathological addiction to his gift. After all he did translate practically all of the Pentateuch, a huge shift from cows to cæsural pauses. And I am sure, contrary to some colloquial modern translations of the Bible, Cædmon’s rendering constitutes an astounding facility with intricate poetic rules.

As for Cedd, there is no transcript of the Synod of Whitby, although Bede gives a faithful summary, sixty-six years later in 731. Maybe the proceedings were prosaic, as they no doubt had to be. But not clinical, for Bede’s account of the debate indicates the Roman side was snobbish and that Wilfrid’s condescending tone generated a heated reaction in his adversary Colman, the devout Bishop of Lindisfarne. Cedd, having to restate not only the words but also the moods of both parties, must have felt conflicted, given that his leanings were decidedly Celtic. Surely such a situation would have both provoked and suppressed huge disparities within his sensibility, one of the grounds for genuinely great poetry. It is my contention that a balancing act of immunity and assault can only be conceived of as a kind of disease. One of the reasons Homer, a Greek, is so great is that he can present both sides. But to survive blind neutrality in the face of contagious conflict a poet has to keep very good care of himself.

And this is how I think why. Metaphorically speaking, modern epidemiology defines disease as the struggle between one’s immune system and insurgent foreign microbes. Indeed, microbes already exist in the human body, either rendered passive by antibodies, or latently waiting. When an opportunistic pathogen breaks out, however, a life and death battle can ensue. The redefinition of health, then, in the modern world, means that this state of affairs is normal to life and not an aberration. A living organism must necessarily be in constant warfare with competing parasites, parasites that sometimes symbiotically live off one another, and at other times overrun and kill the host. Indeed, the theory setting plague historian William McNeill redefines human beings not as stewards of god’s bounty, somehow above and beyond the contest, but parasites no different from any other parasite. Given the looming prospect of global warming, we may soon find this definition to be all too uncomfortably––some say catastrophically––true.

McNeill’s disease paradigm of human existence is the same one that Christensen argues replaces the ideology of a causal divinity in the nineteenth century. Humans are not to be ever thought of as healthy if health is conceived of as an eventually divine conquest over all conflict. Very much rather, health is the maneuvering of the body and the mind in a Darwinian struggle within the human frame to survive. There is no teleology, only a process. Christensen points out that the modern zeitgeist operates according to an unknown cause. In the absence of an assignable reason why, then according to nothing, there is only the process of contagious parasites fighting contagion. My argument in this essay is that this organic paradigm has far-reaching associations with the poetic process. The only difference is that poets introduce an aesthetic protocol as an existentially chosen descriptor to guide the process. A happy process characterizes comedy; a sad one tragedy. Protocol comes from Greek meaning a gluing procedure, affixing a draft of an agreement as to how to resolve a disagreement.

In this context, Cedd’s retreat to Lastingham, the abbey he had founded six years earlier, gains both cogency and poignancy. After maintaining a balance in a political medium contrary to his personal beliefs, after dealing with verbal conflict intensely at two levels, he sought solitude, as many poets and translators customarily do. Perhaps if he had taken quill and parchment in hand at Lastingham and written an epic poem about what really happened at Whitby, he would have survived. For all we know, he did. But as it was, he succumbed very shortly to the plague. That means he could have very well become a carrier, just as the fleas that rode among his clothing upon his back. Many died of the plague in successive waves before and after 664. The heavens were disturbed as well, the planet in ill health, as a presage of human affliction. Bede records that a solar eclipse occurred in the spring of 664: “In the same year of our Lord 664 an eclipse of the sun occurred about ten o’clock in the morning on the third of May, and a sudden plague which first decimated the southern part of Britain, and later spread to Northumbria, brought widespread death to its people.” As Christensen might say, these “devastating events” continued into “the rest of history.”

The hunch I had about Cedd would take me eventually to Lastingham, but not without a circuitous route in getting there. Travel in non-native territory should be undertaken with no great hurry in reaching the preconceived destination. My overall plan was to tour Yorkshire, the ancient lands north of the Humber River but south of the Firth of Forth. In fresh countryside something to be noticed pops up after every curve or over every hill. In the same sense, writers will often say that an overly preconceived idea will destroy the magic. Creative thinkers, translators and interpreters, consequently, must have the courage to open up and make themselves vulnerable to not only its curative of organization but also the contagion of intuition.

A context, however, cannot altogether be jettisoned. An established beginning and a presumed end provides the assurance of common ground, that we do speak in tongues others can be warmed and moved by. Perhaps the odd mixture of the Christian and pagan elements so often noted in Beowulf, if judged an infection that does not achieve its aesthetic, at least should be forgiven for the way their conflicting presence reveals the disease of Old Testament heroism being assaulted by New Testament mercy. And if nothing else, those few who make the effort to learn Old English can anoint themselves with the palliative of the sheer beauty of its rhythms and sounds. Poetic hitchhiking, as a rule of thumb, can offer sonorous opportunities for achieving what Susan Sontag calls the “individualizing power of disease.” Harmony must result, of course, but at the elemental level a struggle between stressed and unstressed syllables must adhere, between long ones and short ones, between rising pitch and falling pitch, an iamb here and a trochee there, above all utterance and silence. This ground floor of prosody matters, because without it all one hears is a noisome pestilence.

But, like the Beowulf poet, I digress. Getting back to Cedd, one thing I knew, if I was to follow him to Lastingham, I surely should not rush things. Better to wind my way like an episodic poem, through the exquisite Yorkshire countryside and see what might happen, once in a while if I was lucky catching a shaft of light as I soared over the swan’s road. That’s a kenning. My path would neither be a swan nor an ocean road, and yet the two together form a verbal metaphor that riddles what it is. The path of the poet is not a beeline to his or her end, but a kind of diseased quest between fate and chance. The danger is to get sick, as a disproportional number of writers have. One antidote is to let go and laugh. And so, another kenning in Old English for the poet is hleahtorsmithum or laughter-smith. A poet is neither laughter nor a smith, but he or she can bring delight.

To my way of thinking, the two kennings noted above illustrate the point that Millman Parry discovered so brilliantly about Homer many decades ago, that the nature of oral verse is its sonic element and therefore formulaic. As far as kennings go, they are not only verbal metaphors, but they also meet a certain metric requirement of the particular rendition at the time, and also as an aid to memory. While the modern poet writes with pen in hand or fingers on the keys of a word processor, as I am doing now, I suspect nevertheless that words single themselves out in the old way, rising from the “word hoard,” not just because the metaphor means right, but it also sounds right. If any one today is lucky enough to have an “ear” anywhere remotely akin to that of William Butler Yeats, then the rhythmic properties of the words will necessarily if in part have a value independent of their meanings. The process of poetic composition, as in jazz music, does not just follow a meaning or a theme, but advances subconsciously through Calliope’s mansion of pure sound. Poets tinker with words, to be sure, after they already stand at attention. But the calling forth is a kind of incantatory voodoo. Shakespeare could see it both ways. Hippolyta’s “airy nothing” acquires “a local habitation and a name.” Prospero’s “cloud-capped towers” vanish into “thin air.”

I set my compass southwest toward Bronte country. The three novelist sisters, all succumbing to tuberculosis and dying tragically very young, grew up in the parsonage in Harworth, a small village northwest of Manchester. The name Manchester brings up the spectre of the Industrial Revolution and seems to disqualify any association with Yorkshire. But, in fact, Harworth is considered a Yorkshire town and its environs remote and off the beaten track.

I initially headed toward Thirsk, a market town at the foot of the great Yorkshire dales spreading northwestward up the rivers that eons ago grooved the vales: Wensley, Swale, Tees, Deep, Arkengarth, and so on. To crosscut these glacial inscriptions the traveler must climb the fellside from one valley, more likely on a single lane-winding road through clumps of sheep, and then descend into the next. In this way I entered Swaledale. Here, happily, I ran across the perfect swimming “hole,” to use a southern American colloquialism. In fact, I was later to see this virtually unknown hideaway featured on one of the pages of a picture calendar advertised as twelve of the most scenic views in England.

The “hole” was at the foot of a ten-foot high rocky ledge, a shelf that had sheared off long ago in some prehistoric geological time. I could sit in various niches on the ledge, leaning back far enough so that the waterfall poured over me like a voluptuous shower. Moreover, diving was possible, for the rocky riverbed had crammed together about fifty feet downstream and thus backed up the current to form a natural chest-high pool. I swam in my underwear, for I was the only one present, a solitary and almost naked bard, though experience had taught me that in rural England it is acceptable to dip in the nude as long as one uses the proper discretion. That mid-afternoon swim was one of those peaceful times when I have felt my life was accomplished even though in the fret and fever I am as insatiably unfulfilled as Goethe’s Faust. In such rare moments a poet can be released from the ancient mariner’s curse. He enters a middle space of soundless oblivion where his words are excused from Aristotle’s narrative burden of finding a beginning or an end.

After I had been swimming for about an hour I heard a distant murmuring that soon became an unmistakable bleating. Shortly thereafter in the one lane road beside which I had precariously parked my rental car a large herd of sheep came into view at the downhill end and was clambering its way up. The jammed throughway had provoked quite a commotion and I soon saw why. Two Border Collies were yapping at their heels and leisurely walking behind them a somewhat elderly shepherd. He looked decidedly unbucolic, not a specimen that Wordsworth could have rendered into verse. Instead of the classic type, my shepherd was dressed in a dirty and rumpled plaid shirt and greasy khaki pants. The bottom two buttons’ worth exposed a rotund belly. His pants cuffs were pulled up above his boots, which were untied and open at the top. The man looked like he had not shaved in a week.

Nevertheless, I hurriedly vacated the swimming “hole,” ran to the car, dressed myself as quickly as I could, and set my course. In about a mile I caught up with the entourage, at the top of the hill. The sheep had already been herded into the pasture, and there was an unlikely wire fence, most of the fences on the fellsides being usually stone gathered for centuries from the fields. The two Collies were leisurely relaxing around their master’s feet.

As I approached the farmer he muttered something I could not make out, but I nodded yes, as it seemed to be a question. He raised his left hand, more his two fingers, and both dogs immediately jumped the low wire fence virtually from a standing position. They rushed toward the sheep, surprised because they thought their fears were over, and began to herd them in various directions according to the farmer’s barely audible commands. I could not tell if the dogs were following the sounds or the slight motions of his hands. The show was quite amazing to my untutored eyes, for although I had seen sheep dogs once or twice go through the trials at country fairs, I had never seen them operate under actual working conditions. After about five minutes the farmer said something––I don’t know what––and at once both dogs stopped what they were doing, came straight to the fence, jumped it again without hesitation, and then sat on their haunches in the heeling position, one on each side of the farmer. I must say I was quite impressed, as if I had somehow been watching an ovine poem being written.

I think the farmer asked me had I seen enough, but I found it hard to understand his accent. This was the first time I had encountered someone in the British Isles whose spoken language was on the verge of being uninterpretable. I nonetheless persevered, for indeed I felt beholden to the man. I introduced myself as Mr. Tisdale, but he did not make the association I desired with Teesdale. He said he was “Alderson” and we shook hands. I was struck by that name for I recalled that Alderson was the maiden name of the wife of James Heriot who had written the tales of his experiences as a Yorkshire veterinarian. I wondered if he might be related to the actual woman in the books. I knew the books well, not because of any literary interest in them of my own, for I considered Heriot a “popular” writer, but I had read at least three of them to my two daughters when they were at an impressionable age. I do not mean to disparage Heriot’s achievement for I enjoyed the stories very much and they were ideal for family reading. And I must say the man excelled in his description of landscape, local color, and like Andy Griffith’s Mayberry of my own North Carolina, the odd characters one encounters in such homely settings.

I mentioned to Mr. Alderson this fact and asked if he knew Mrs. Heriot née Alderson. His response surprised me, for he let out one of the most perturbed grins I have ever seen. “Oh, you mean that veterinarian?” I replied yes, that I had read all the books and apprised him of my detailed knowledge, almost equaling that of an Old English hleahtorsmithum, but he at once put me in my place. “Oh,” he shot back, “you must mean that one. In Thirsk. His real name is White and he don’t come from around Yorkshire. He’s a Scot. And you know what?” he inquired. I said no I didn’t know what. “Well, he ain’t a good veterinarian either.”

I left Mr. Alderson flummoxed by a number of things, all of which conspired to obliterate the peace I had basked in under the tannin-stained waterfall and my invigorating swim in a stream so sanitized by the warm sun. My complete harmony with the landscape had been defeated by my inability to understand Mr. Alderman’s accent, his unkempt dress, the cacophonous and onomatopoeic bleating of the sheep, and, not least of all, my embarrassment in wrongfully assuming I had identified some living literary allusion. I decided I should at once head south for Harworth and the Bronte country, a landscape I felt sure would restore my comfort zone. Most professors seek refuge in the past, canonical literature, and narratives that do not have to be challenged by ordinary experience.

But I never got there. I had found in a rack of tourist brochures in Richmond a leaflet for a forthcoming museum about the plague in Eyam, twenty-five miles from Harworth and on the opposite side of Sheffield. The museum promoted itself as being “The Moving Saga of Life in a ‘Plague Village.’” Not counting on finding the facility ready for business, I did entertain the hope some partial exhibits might be up since the official opening was set for the coming spring. I was disappointed in this expectation. In Eyam, however, being a smallish town, I was lucky to cross paths with one of the members of the local planning committee in the main pub where I stopped for lunch. My discussion with Mr. Daniel was instructive not only because he was a key figure in the project, but he also descended from one of the seventy-six families that had inhabited Eyam at the time of the plague. I also discovered that the particular onslaught of the plague to be highlighted was the seventeenth century incursion. Although this cycle of the bubonic plague was not the one that had done Cedd in, I had read Daniel Defoe’s chronicle of it in A Journal of the Plague Year. Moreover, talking with Mr. Daniel did further my curiosity about the disease metaphor I was pursuing, its epidemiology and its course.

The plague at Eyam came in the form of a box of cloth from London sent to the village tailor. Only the box was infested with fleas, fleas that had fed off rats that had died from the plague infection. Fleas feed off the rats ravenously because a complex series of bacterial strains from the plague bacillus Yersinia pestis impacts their stomachs and causes a complete blockage. The fleas do not actually prefer human hosts, but if they have not eaten for some time, in fact cannot, they are starving, and a near at hand tailor is instantly irresistible. For the three outbreaks of the plague––the Justinian in Cedd’s time, the Black Death in Chaucer’s, and the Great Plague in Defoe’s––careful research estimates an average of a third of the population died over the half century more or less of the peak of greatest virulence. Plague comes in waves because survivors either have or gain immunity and a lapse of ten or fifteen years is needed for a younger generation to appear on the scene with no antibodies to fight the disease. Towns like Eyam did survive, obviously, but the loss of so many victims who played even ordinary roles in the service of civilized life created social havoc. The modern health care system contemplates similar statistics for AIDS and more recently the Bird Flu Virus, if the disease mutates in a form opportunistically transferable to humans. Health professionals preparing for the front line defense describe what would happen, in spite of all their frenetic preparation, as “catastrophic,” the most common adjective used to measure the effect of the bubonic plague in history. Yersinia pestis exists today in rodent populations, such as in California, but modern public health practices and penicillin have rendered it harmless as a human threat.

I enjoyed the pub lunch I had with Mr. Daniel––the ox tail soup, the roast pheasant, and the two drafts of Theakstone ale––as picaresque as my appearance in Eyam was. He seemed encouraged to be talking with an American, perhaps contemplating the possibilities of bolstering the local economy, although he kept peppering his speech with laudable expostulations such as how wonderful it was that the “human spirit” was capable of overcoming such “dreadful of natural catastrophes.” I tried to share with him some of my views about how disease might be a condition to be lived with rather than overcome, but he did not warm to my pessimistic outlook, seeing as they were not amenable to poster commentary. William McNeill’s thesis that humans are not biblical stewards of nature, or even the nexus utriusque mundi of the Great Chain of Being, is difficult for those who naturally assume the ascendancy of Homo sapiens.

McNeill points out that ecologically speaking humans are only one of the many millions of organisms. As such we fit into the dynamic of organized life no differently than any other living creature. Being so, disease is an unavoidable dimension in the interrelations of creatures. McNeill calls the resulting paradigm parasitic, that organisms live for and off of one another. At the cellular and species level, what McNeill terms the micro-parasitic, organisms are in an unabated Darwinian struggle for survival. Health, therefore, in the sense of having conquered all of one’s predator parasites, is an illusion. Rather the successful negotiation and struggle with one’s parasites is a more correct definition. Conflict is the status quo. As a corollary, parasites do not usually completely kill off their hosts since that would mean the end of their livelihood, too. Ecological balance is a hypothetical state, then, where parasites coexist in non-static harmony, not individuals of any species, but organic life as a whole over time.

If creative artists are thus the ones among us who are most suited for sustaining consciousness of antithetical forces and elements within us, the deadly microbes and the life giving killer cells of the alerted aesthetic immune system, then they can serve somewhat like medical doctors by helping to alleviate the prosaic rather than inaugurate, whether physical or mental, a hope in an illusory paradise on earth. At the same time, again like health professionals, they take the greatest risks, and are therefore subject to the greatest chances for failure, irremediable illness, and death. I like the word blockage that the descriptions of the plague utilize. Just as the flea’s gullet or the human’s lymph nodes are blocked by parasitical invasions, so a writer who can’t get started is said to suffer writer’s block. Here is a happy example of a metamorphic connection in precise verbal consonance, capturing the relation of disease to a writer who is unable to discern an aesthetic path in the resolution of his internally conflicted perceptions. To this end McNeill makes the point over and over again, that the same systemic conflict at the physiological level is fundamentally no different than the one in the macro-parasitic domain, that is, not just by metaphor alone, but the model as a kind of ideological truism of social and political life itself. Not only are nation states, cultures, and civilizations parasitic on one another as an endemic modus operandi, but also religious ideologies such as Protestantism and Catholicism within Christianity, Sunni and Shi’a within Islam, and Christianity and Islam as a whole from the Crusades to the early twenty-first century. Must one be reminded as well that capitalism as the prevailing economic system is based on competition, on guaranteed losers and winners? If ideological warfare occurs just as biological parasitism, then, as McNeill insists, I see no reason why the aesthetic struggle between the beautiful and the ugly cannot operate according to the same set of processes. Surely parasitic conflict applies to the various translations that occur in an honest poem.

Mr. Daniel was a smart man and I think he tried to understand my point, but, as I indicated above, he grew impatient at the lengthy discourse because he saw no way that the committee for the plague museum––no doubt a healthy intervention for a marginal local economy––could sell it. Museum goers would not want some academic discussion of how everybody is sick, rather the noble “overcoming of the most dreadful of human catastrophes.” I assured him that I had no argument, for just like Dr. Johnson’s rebuttal of Pope’s metaphysical optimism in An Essay On Man when he kicked the rock in his path and exclaimed, “Ouch, that hurts!” any justification of the pervasiveness of disease as central to organic life pales before the reality of human suffering. I shook Mr. Daniel’s hand amiably as I got up to leave for Lastingham and Cedd. I was impatient, too. I was still wondering if Cedd could have understood in however a rudimentary sense that the poetic process within the disease paradigm seeks to translate the poet and his readers to some kind of aesthetic consolation. And also did he despair at being forced to speak out of both sides of his mouth because he never could find les mot justes to forgive himself and thereby repair the injury.

I do not have the liberty nor you the patience to immortalize all of the places I visited as I made my way from Cedd’s Whitby to his Lastingham, as if I were Homer cataloging all the Archive ships. Perhaps that was the fatal problem, though, that Cedd’s sojourn went straight whereas mine roundabout, like Auden’s parabolic orbit, speaking in riddles and never stating the meaning, or T. S. Eliot’s circling forever the ineffable still point of the turning world. The body is an unknown territory, especially the disease, the bacterial microbes, the defenses of the immune system and its killer T-cells, not to mention the onslaught of infection or inspiration, the crisis, the dead-end blockage, or the magical recovery. Unfamiliarity breeds metaphors such as the outer reaches of space of astrophysicists, the red shifts, the death stars, the galactic milk and primal soup, as well as the interior reaches of particle physics, string theory, force fields, critical mass, splitting the atom. Likewise, no one can chart at a sub-atomic level the magnetic resonance image of what goes on in a poet’s sensibilities when he is writing a poem, the breaks away, the associated meanings, the rhythms, trajectories, inner chemistry, the heart’s cadence, and all the rest. What if Cedd grew despondent beyond words because he sensed any “honor” he might have saved from the synod was no more than just Falstaff’s “air?”

So I will not tell you everywhere I passed through during those five days, but I have given you the terminal poles of the Swale of health and the Eyam of disease. I have staked these two poles because that is my intention, an existential choice to present a metaphoric construct desiring meaning. Suffice it to say, having edited out the dead ends and digressions, I went on to Lastingham, always aware of my ultimate objective, that there was some secret lurking there, or at least some way to end my quandary. If no logical statement can be made in a poem as to how to escape the self-replicating cancer of its own metaphor, as Foucault would define life itself, then at least I wanted to draw my pilgrimage to an indulgent conclusion.

I must inject at this point, however––it seems a timely one––that I have notes to fill a volume about the history of the plague in the British Isles. But not being a physician who fears enormous liability suits, I will not attempt to cover all my bases. In sum, medical historians are in agreement that Justinian’s Plague afflicted Europe from 541-750 AD, but considerable difference of opinion rages as to whether this bubonic epidemic spread as far as England and Ireland. Other diseases in earlier times, due to the lack of immunity, could reach devastating proportions, just as AIDS or the Bird Flu can and might today. Some scholars argue that Cedd died of smallpox. I will leave the question open, because for the purposes of my inquiry here, the specific diagnosis of the pathogen is irrelevant. As I drove toward Lastingham all I cared about was why a man who knew languages and loved words, as I did, would die of any plague. I sensed in the aftermath of his using language he would have considered injurious to his deeply rooted beliefs he failed to find any way to enfold that language in a finished product that both gave the words their due yet subsumed them.

As a corollary to Cedd’s dilemma, some persons believe that all disease is psychosomatic. I am ambivalent. On the one hand, how can I hold another responsible for contracting pancreatic cancer, any more than Dr. Johnson could justify the Lisbon earthquake? On the other, I do concur, if one brings the immune system into play. Research establishes that the common cold and other forms of organic infection can be caused by a dysfunctional immune system weakened by emotionally induced stress. And surely a “healthy” immune system can give a sufferer a better chance at defeating the illness, or more aptly, putting it into remission. I do not claim to know anything about the state of Cedd’s general health after Whitby. He may have simply given up. Or conversely, he may have made some attempt to neutralize the injury accorded him by an authority that prescribed when he might legitimately celebrate his belief in human transcendence over ugliness and death and when he might not.

Indeed, as I have tried to show, psychosomatosis may be essential to the productive health of the creative sensibility. Thomas Mann’s essay on the sick artist describes how the moments preceding Dostoyevsky’s grand mal epileptic seizures also were the carriers of his most intensely imaginative insights. It is interesting that Dostoyevsky afflicts his villain, the bastard brother Smerdyakov in the Brothers Karamasov, with the same illness. Mann might just as well have declared that all creative persons are diseased, both the criminals and the heroes, as Zola well knew in his Rougon-Macquart family, and it is up to each artistically gifted individual either like Ariel to use the microbe to affirm life or like Caliban to deny. The choice seems more existential today, rather than theological. For the artist, the terms rest more in the realm of the aesthetic, how, for instance, the conflict of the metaphors and rhythms create something worth saying and keeping from nothing. In the beginning was silence, really, and that’s all there is. Unless one chooses words. All the other parasites exist, too, but the sole distinction is that only humans can speak.

I entered Lastingham on a foggy late afternoon after a steady, intermittent drizzle. The town holds no other feature of historical or religious interest, and so I went straightaway to St. Mary’s and the crypt where I knew Cedd had once been buried. Except for the altar, no Anglo-Saxon architectural elements remain of Cedd’s time. What the visitor encounters, as he carefully descends the narrow stone outdoor steps, is the Norman eleventh century structure, built by Abbot Stephen. As most crypts, even in large churches, the ceiling is narrow, the stone damp and chalky rather than sleek and polished, and the lighting is dim if at all. I do not mean to slight the small, quaint village here. Set in a cove at the bottom of the North York Moors and very much off the beaten track, the environs are quite lovely and undisturbed by the fever of modern life. Cedd’s Well can be found at the center of the village spanning a small beck, but the waters promise no special healing properties.

As I made my descent I cut on my torch, which in American English means flashlight. A stack of brochures about the crypt and Cedd sat on a nearby table and I took one. The facts are few. The original entrance was on the north side, though access is from the west now. The ceiling consists of nine vaulted compartments supported by short robust columns. Indeed, the ceiling is confining, as in most crypts, and one gets the sense of definitely being in a mausoleum. The capitals are the unadorned cushion form or carved with simple volutes with intersecting arches and primitive leaves. The plain altar slab looks as if it could genuinely be the original Anglo-Saxon one and thus beneath it the site of Cedd’s second burial after he was moved from outside into the now non-existent chapel. I was sorry Cedd was no longer in residence. At some point his bones were moved a third time to join his brother Chad at Lichfield Cathedral. I sensed that this might be a great loss to Lastingham, much like the citizens of Florence feel today, that Dante lies in Ravenna.

I stood alone with only a single beam of light whose source I held in my hand. I could not help but wonder what Cedd felt after Whitby, especially very near where he sensed the first symptoms of the terrible illness than ended his life. If I might be so bold as to speak for him, I believe he must have been severely despondent over what had become of the faith he had been drawn to as a benighted young pagan. Celtic art and spirituality held such a richness compared to the unbending Romanist doctrine and practice. Wilfrid had sought to control and thereby squelch every bit of the mystery and mysticism out of the bardic vinescrolls of his religious experience, all the maternal and nourishing circles and curves, the feminine metonymy of their iconic trajectories, the sense of all creation, including the angels as well as the zoomorphic characters, centered around the cross. Cedd could have very well seen the Lindisfarne Gospels in progress, if not the Book of Kells, the Book of Durrow, or the Durham Gospels. He could not have seen the Codex Amiatinus since it was produced at Jarrow a good fifty years after he died, but he would have found nothing foreign in this great biblical pandect of all that he had loved.

Cedd’s being a translator with such a rich appreciation for artistic representation of spiritual values leads me to think that if he was not a poet then he must have had a poetic sensibility. His ear would have reveled in the Old English verse that he heard from Cædmon on his off hours, in the epic and lyrical charm of scriptural language read to him at meals in the refectory, and in the beauty of liturgy attended at canonical hours all through the day. If I am right, he would also have had to have been diseased. I have never met a poet who was not. The deadly microbes are there, capable of integration if successful, of dissolution if not. And in the long term, I have never known a poet who was truly satisfied he had succeeded in all his attempts, and who believed he had written out all that was in him to write. The life of a poet is an addiction to words and at some point the circus animals depart, or he fears they will, and when they do a poem must be written about them, and another poem about the feeling about the feeling they have gone. A poet is restless because the addiction will not let him go. A poet, a translator, is sick, as well, because he has to learn to speak the language and ideology of his opponent, absorb it as a willing sacrifice, in order to fight and refashion it. People forget that Christ, one of the world’s greatest poetic sensibilities, in the Blakeian sense anyway, was crucified suffering the sins of the whole world. Christ did not so much defeat or withstand the sins of the whole world, rather he became the sins of the whole world. Cedd did die of the plague shortly after his willing sacrifice at Whitby. All poets do.

The brochure did not tell me anything that I did not know about Cedd, for history has preserved little beyond what Bede records. The telling facts are that Cedd was born circa 620 AD in Northumbria, that he had three brothers, the “alliterative brothers” we might style them, Cedd, Chad, Cælin and Cynebil. They were schooled at Lindisfarne by Aidan, the bishop from Iona brought by Oswald to found that famous monastery. Aidan sent all four brothers to Ireland to further their education, thus Cedd was steeped in the bacillus of Celticism. He evangelized Mercia and was a key player in the conversion of Peada, the son of the pagan scourge Penda, who had agreed to convert to Christianity if allowed to marry Oswy’s daughter Alchflæd. Cedd was therefore no doubt present at the marriage and enjoyed the celebratory “laughter-smithings” at the mead hall feast. It is well to remember that a priest never marries two persons, rather he blesses the marriage, an epithalamial bardic function, of increased significance since the blessing involved the bedding down. The creator god does pretty much the same thing in the creation myth when he pronounces “it was good” at the end of each day.

The poet in his co-creative capacity can thus be said to bless with words but also to make with words. Coleridge’s pleasure dome features a scop who “on manna dew hath fed, and drunk the milk of paradise.” Tennyson’s Lady Muse looks at life through the mirror and the mirror must inevitability break into life. Isaiah, in arguably our most poetic of prophetic books, has his inspired vision loosed with a hot coal on his tongue. I have already mentioned King David whose autobiographical psalms embody the struggle of creation itself. William Blake believed that humans were indeed fallen gods, and that poets were the ones who incorporated all the dichotomies, polarities, and antipathies whereby they could forge with corrosive acid and hot fire the marriage of the suspended oppositions that would return the god to the paradise he originally fell from. Joyce’s Stephen discovers that his calling as an artist is to “forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.” What could that conscience be but the entire creation? If we take Ireland as a synecdoche. Like god, ultimately, nothing can be left out.

Another key fact in Cedd’s life was that he was asked by King Æthelweald of Deira, son of the sainted King Oswald, and nephew of Oswy, to found a monastery that would also serve as his mausoleum. Cedd did so, choosing as a site Lastingham (Old English Lastinghamæu, conjecturally meaning “river track”). Bede says that the site was “among some high and remote hills, which seemed more suitable for the dens of robbers and haunts of wild beasts than for human habitation. This was to fulfill the prophecy in Isaiah that ‘the haunts where dragons once dwelt shall be pasture, with reeds and rushes.’” This description is a hagiographic convention where the lives of saints are compared to Christ, in this case Cedd’s going into the wilderness and fasting for forty days to purge the environs, some scholars think originally a pagan holy place, in order as did Jesus in the desert, to prepare “a highway for our god.” I do not think Cedd had much fear of the pagan world, seeing a man no less than Gregory the Great, also known as “The Plague Pope,” didn’t. In Gregory’s letter to Archbishop Mellitus of Canterbury he instructed that pagan temples must not be destroyed. He rather believed that a symbiosis, perhaps a parasitical one, should exist between paganism and Christianity, at least at first, in the effort to convert and not to frighten.

Most readers of this section of Bede ascribe to Gregory a calculating political savvy, but I think otherwise. I suspect Gregory knew that the religious life was a process in a deepening inward vision rather than a narrowing one, juggling many and conflicting human instincts and insights. His brand of faith was the creation of a living devotion rather than signing the dotted line on a fait accompli formulated by others. If Gregory the Great had been in charge at Whitby, possessing the various microbes in his ideological sensibility that he did, I believe he would have wondered what this problem about Easter was? Sure, King Oswy a Celtic practitioner, and Queen Eanflæd a Roman one, were having some domestic difficulty because they were celebrating Easter sometimes on Sundays three weeks apart, but what’s the big deal? Such a calendrial disparity stimulates healthy conflict. For instance, if King Oswy has to abstain an additional three weeks for Eanflæd before he can enjoy the debt of her body then so much more his pleasure for waiting.

Such was the largeness of Gregory’s soul and the “wideness of his mercy.” Gregory also said once that if a man is dying of starvation and passes by a grain field, he is not breaking the spirit of the commandment against stealing if he harvests an armload of sheaves to bake himself a loaf of bread. This seems to me a peculiarly Blakeian point of view, who claimed the Satanic Christ transgressed all the Ten Commandments at one time or another. Needless to say, I believe Cedd had all of this largeness of soul as well, for that is what translators learn, know, and do. Like a poet open to new experiences, Cedd fled when King Sigeberht of the East Angles was murdered by his pagan brother Swithelm and sought refuge in Rendleshem, Suffolk, not far from the great pagan royal burial site Sutton Hoo. Rendleshem was the court of King Rædweald who only some twenty-five years before had kept both the Christian Cross in his “fan” as well as a conglomeration of pagan idols. Gregory, I believe, would have opted to work with the possibility rather than foreclose on the blasphemy. Admittedly, much conflict bristles here, what McNeill would call parasitic disease, both at the personal level and at the macro-parasitic ideological level, but that’s the point. Cedd, like Gregory, would have picked up on some of the creative dissonance, some of the thinking out of the box, some of the disparate ideas poets and carriers, translators and interpreters, by nature entertain.

Another telling trait of Cedd, when he was purging the site of Lastingham, was that he committed himself to the kind of introverted discipline poets adopt if they are going to be productive. He fasted for forty days, eating, we are told, only a morsel of bread a day, an egg, and a little watered milk. He also flew in the face of authority. After thirty days were up King Æthelweald called him back to York on an unspecified emergency mission. But Cedd would not break his vigil, even at the behest of secular authority, and sent his brother Cælin in his stead. As a translator with a Gregorian largeness of soul, then, I believe Cedd could set personal priorities that overruled political and secular ones. He could tell the king no. This trait achieves monumental dimensions when translated to his role at the Synod of Whitby. There, in contrast, he conceded to the delegated charge of serving as interpreter, of being forced to say the words that put his feet in two conflicting camps with his tongue divided straight down the middle. But he stood his ground and acted as faithfully as he could.

This must have been profoundly difficult for him, knowing that half the time he was speaking the words of others that were inimical to him. The only way he could have done it I figure is that he had the poetic wisdom to know that this, too, shall pass. McNeill has pointed out on the religious and ideological levels that even though Roman Catholic orthodoxy has sought to maintain its ever-so-tight parasitical grip throughout the centuries (he does not mention Whitby but he could and should have) nevertheless one wave after another has crashed upon its dogmatic stubbornness––Lollardry, the Protestant Reformation, the mystic strain in Christianity, and the growth in individualism that he ascribes in part to the plague. Faith, Cedd might have understood even as he spoke, is a matter of heterodoxy, of countless ways of attempting to formulate, transcribe, and interpret a truth out of the conflicting struggles of human division, and in the inevitable organic failure to completely accomplish that mission once and for all, at least to try to give the end of the effort an aesthetic twist. Every poet, as every true worshipper, begins by engaging himself in an act of faith. Faith is not repeating what is already there. Rather faith is forging a new path in the dark, or at least through a glass darkly, uncertain of what it might or can mean. His probing light does not come from a star, rather a slender, handheld torch.

Indeed, using a flashlight is like writing a poem. A poet has some vague idea of where he has come, and usually it is very much like a crypt, as I was in in Lastingham. Crypt comes from Greek, meaning a hidden place. I learned in graduate school that the medieval definition of enigma is a nonsensical, cryptic allegory. When we begin to write a poem we have little idea what words will come, the majority of them. If we are reading a poem, we are even less certain. Translation is usually thought of as the conveying of meaning from one language to another. But translation also has to occur within the same language. The poet must constantly translate his poetic subject in words for which he hopes his reader will find clues in his own somewhat different connative vocabulary to unlock the poem.

For instance, I have admired Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” since I was in high school, the romantic sentiment of finding recourse in romantic love in the face of the receding of the Sea of Faith and Greek learning. Arnold asserts this as the only hope in late nineteenth century England and any schoolboy who is beginning to question his faith might readily agree, at least the schoolboys in my generation at mid-twentieth century. Be that as it may, what makes no successful translation is when Arnold uses two particular words to describe the beach from which the waters are receding, “pebbles” and “shingles.” No southern American child can make anything of it no matter how patiently his high school teacher explains that all the poet means is that the strand was strewn with shells. Nearly fifty years later I still wince. Their presence, in fact, mars my aesthetic experience of an otherwise magnificent poem.

So, I am sitting in this crypt shining my “torch” around on isolated objects, all quite intriguing, all singled out for my progression through the setting of the place or the poem, and all of a sudden my shaft of light settles on a stack of brochures. This might seem entirely sensible, but if I were to include “torch” in a poem about Cedd’s bones having rested here, my beloved college English teacher would immediately write in the margin “faulty diction.” The difference between British and American English is slight, but problems in translation emerge when one confronts dissimilar meanings in a poem that is supposed to make seamless sense, a torch here, or a bonnet there under which is the motor of an automobile, that uses petrol rather than gasoline. Words such as Arnold’s “shingles,” thus, disturb the aesthetic trajectory of a poem, as if I stumbled in the crypt at Lastingham, or stubbed my toe.

What other symptoms can I cite to convince my reader of the disease we sometimes call poetry? The torch I held in my hand swooped and bounced around the walls and ceiling and floor, trying to establish the contours of my visual poem, aware that here over fourteen hundred years ago lay the plague-festering body of a translator, perhaps a fellow poet. His remains had been tucked away beneath an altar, a holy place acknowledging that every poem, every human life, is only a series of stabs in the dark, of resurrections and hopes, of failures and deaths, of disease and illness, a cacophony and harmony inextricably bound in what T. S. Eliot says of persons in Little Gidding: “united in the strife which divides them.” After reading a good poem, or good novel, I have always had the immense desire to somehow collect all of the points at which the torch of my eyes had stopped on, to contain the poem, the novel, the life, in some kind of absolute unitary apprehension. But the effort is fruitless. The circle of light can only isolate one word, one spot, one meaning at a time. And the author couldn’t do it either, select out and add up, getting all together, nothing left out. A poet never loses sight, as neither did Gregory nor Cedd, of the flashlight’s ideal and failure, making some visible artifact out of invisible ineluctability.

Let me admit that I understand that this essay is a “stretch.” By “stretch” I mean I know of no objective evidence whatsoever that Cedd was a poet in the terms in which that definition is usually construed. I also know it cannot be proved that poets are physiologically more susceptible to illness than any other demographic subset, though one might come closer at the macro-parasitic level. For if historians such as McNeill are redefining the ecological role of humans and there is some validity to psychosomatosis, then the proposition that imaginative persons embody and suffer from conflict in multiple dynamic and interconnected ways is plausible. Granted the proposition, there has to be some symbiosis between verbal sensitivity and certain forms of disease, the fallout from an inability to achieve a complete correspondence between words and a flawless aesthetic ideal. Poets shine their flashlights in the dark and the dark does not always comprehend it––a pun as well as a paradox––and the result is not to flip a switch and a thousand floodlights beam on full of grace and truth. Rather more a partial connection of spotlighted impressions that are lucky enough if they “ring true,” for at least the time of the writing and later the reading. So with Cedd, let me restate, I do believe he had the sensibility to be a poet. Maybe he did not sing his own version of Beowulf, or The Wanderer, or play with enigmas in the vein of the Old English Riddles in the Exeter Book, but given his profile from the few facts that we know about him, he could have. He had the courage to allow his immune system to lie vulnerable to an inimical religious orthodoxy and not whimper as his flashlight scanned on the wall the certain signs of his contagion.

I wonder why a Gregorian reader should hold it against me anyway, that I have taken the risk to write in a way suggestive of hypothetical possibilities rather than proven facts. Isn’t that what a true essay should do anyway? Should it not both propose and suppose? Does not every poet take a chance when he makes a stab at that first word? The word does not make his flashlight any brighter nor the objects upon which it fixes any more coherent or proven. Given the infinity of the crypt of outer space, are we not lucky if we identify a few galaxies? Or make up some preposterous story about constellated connections? Constellations are visual icons of some of our oldest mythic stories, but they have absolutely no configured meaning if someday our spaceships can go far enough to rearrange them.

Translation in the narrow sense means verbal substitution. Movement among meanings may be more comprehensive, involving not just words but space and time. I have already mentioned A. S. Byatt and her use of Whitby in Possession. I doubt that Ms. Byatt has had any personal experience of the repetition of life episodes over generations and eras, nor have I, but we have both wondered about the possibility, we have both shone our torches in the darkness to scan for psychic hieroglyphs. We are not alone in this hypothesis, this willing suspension of disbelief that is a little more than simply curiosity. C. R. Jung proposes that not only can cultures have collective unconsciousnesses, but also individual families can possess endemic psychological plots that are repeated down through the generations as if it were a genetic component to one’s basic drives. John Fowles does a magnificent job of probing similar ideas in The French Lieutenant’s Woman. In its extreme form, thinkers like Nietzsche and Spengler stated that the entire universe repeats itself over vast eons of time, infinitely revisiting itself. This theory is consistent with one proposition of modern astrophysics, that if there is enough centripetal force, enough mass in the universe, then the results of the big bang will be an eventual recollapsing upon itself in an exact and never ending identical repetition. Moreover, the “Celtic seam” is a central aspect of the mythological metaphysics of coexisting but different realities. The sidhe can pass through an invisible shield and end up in another world, a world that in space is going on at the same location as the one just left. My contention is that such experiences impinge upon the process of writing poetry and reading it. Poets enter into a “zone,” or a “trance,” as it is sometimes called. The role of the poet, then, is not so much to create the other world, but to literally translate him or herself, and later his readers, from one spatial and/or temporal zone to the other. C. S. Lewis’ curious children slip through a wardrobe into an entirely different reality. The hypnotic eye in fully engaging the ancient mariner’s story, or Coleridge’s, is no different.

One may find it intriguing, as I did, to discover that Lastingham is a key site for ley lines. For anyone not in the know, here is the Penguin Encyclopedia definition of such a phenomenon: “Visible lines that connect ancient sites and features (e.g. Burial mounds, standing stones) across the countryside. They have been interpreted as ancient trading tracks, as ‘energy lines’ which can be detected and mapped by dowsing, and as ‘spirit lines’ or ghost paths which begin and end in cemeteries.” Such lines were first proposed by Alfred Watkins on 30 June 1921, an amateur archaeologist, who must have had somewhat of a savant’s eye for seeing dots in the landscape and the lines that connected them. He wrote several books on the subject the first of which is entitled The Old Straight Track. Suffice it to say that while Watkins worked within the bounds of the normal, more recently new-age cults have furthered his hypothesis into the paranormal realm.

The word “ley” derives from Old English, akin to lea, meaning a glade, a track of open ground, a clear meadow. I have run across such spaces that immediately announce themselves as possessing a directional power, that is, sites that move one along a visual dynamic. Such seems to me to be a poem and producing one sights a path through liminal territory, as well as the honest reading of one. For instance, take birth as a metaphor for completing a poem. At what precise point does one consider a child to be unborn and then born? Or to use one definition of limnos, meaning threshold, at what point when one enters a room is he or she out of the room, and then in the room? If one keeps dividing by half, the destination is never reached, and thus one encounters an infinity, which is interesting, because contrary to infinite space, in this case one is using numbers that can be counted. I like this idea, too, or analogy, because a poem is such. One can “murder to dissect” a thousand times with one’s eyes but it never seems enough. Like love, or god, no one can measure what it finally or completely is. Again, using our torch metaphor, or flashlight, moving its beam from one architectonic feature to another in the crypt at Lastingham, lines can be drawn between significant hits, but the geometric pattern that might result, the poem, resides in an ineffable darkness.

If ley lines may be said to resemble the graph of a poem, the directionals are not merely quantitative, rather they seem to come alive. The church at Lastingham, falling along a twelve and a half mile line and joining the abbey with Black Howe Barrow and Dargate Dikes, is a hot spot. For instance, the former editor of the ley-hunter newsletter, Paul Screeton, reports that “if you want to get a feeling of what ley power is like, go into the crypt at Lastingham church . . . you get that buzzing feeling.” Another former editor, Philip Helselton, relates that a friend of his “who spent some time down there felt unable to speak afterwards.” Andy Roberts, normally skeptical of ley lines, confesses he had to leave because of some “supernatural pressure in the air.” The blind canon Gordon Thompson told Guy Phillips that he often experienced a “disincarnate spirit” in the church, usually near the door linking the vestry and sanctuary. Paul Devereux and Ian Thompson took a compass below and noted that in the crypt the needle kept moving with a “rhythmic jiggling.” Which is as much as to say that most persons would judge the above observations simply wacky. I would, too, only that I have felt pretty much the same after reading passages from Shakespeare or Yeats, or that last paragraph of incomparable prose in Joyce’s The Dead. Perhaps the poet contrives a series of linear associations that triggers in the reader, or in the poet searching for them, a genuine although to some degree fragmentary encounter.

I guess, however, there are different qualities and degrees of what one defines as healthy ley lines, just as there are good and bad poems. The Seattle Arts Commission allocated $5,000 to a group of New Age Dowsers, the Geo Group, to map the Seattle area and display its findings on posters spread throughout the city. They proudly proclaimed that their work “made Seattle the first city on Earth to balance and tune its ley-line system.” They further said that “we believe the result will be a decrease in disease and anxiety, an increased sense of wholeness and well-being and the achievement of Seattle’s potential as a center of power for good on Spaceship Earth.”

I am not so sure. Auden noted in his Yeats elegy that “poetry makes nothing happen: it survives/in the valley of its saying . . . “ My prejudice is, though, that poetry, unlike dowsing for lei lines, is an honorable attempt “where executives/Would never want to tamper.” In college I became addicted to poetry. I implored my teacher to give me the hardest one he could to make some sense out of. Of course, Lewis Carroll is known for his nonsense poetry but only because the exception so magically proves the rule. That revered English teacher once took an entire fifty-minute class to recite “Jabberwoky” and he delineated the entire poem from memory without missing a line. The poem is an exception and it is not. One could say that the mind that produced such nonsense is disordered, diseased, afflicted. On the other hand, I could shine my flashlight for as long as the batteries held out in the crypt at Lastingham and not make any sense out of it and yet be moved. In nonsense verse one is delighted, not by being transported to any meaning, but translated by the sheer beauty of the sounds of words and the rhythms that join them.

Like the Ancient Mariner, poets suffer from a verbal contagion, infected and diseased, translating and interpreting. If it were not so why does the list of writers one might conjure on any given night trying to go to sleep counting something better than sheep offer up such a literal sick ward? The Poet’s Corner, as it were, a separate wing of fame’s hospital? To name all would be tedious, but to give a few examples, at least a dozen died of tuberculosis, beginning with Keats and our beloved Brontes. Think of those who were depressed such as Dr. Johnson who had to endure without the pharmacopoeia of modern anti-depressant medications. William Styron describes his depression head-on in Darkness Visible––he did have the advantages of pills and therapy––and yet his forthright and honest tale gives one the shivers. Think of all of the alcoholics such as the notorious Hemingway. Think of the suicides such as Virginia Woolf and that profound portrayal of the disease of a poet and a novelist and a librarian in The Hours. Think of Camus’ The Plague that allegorizes the course of the modern pestilence of National Socialism and the hundreds and thousands of unknown artists that died at Auschwitz. Think of those who would have committed suicide had they not flown over the cuckoo’s nest such as dear Christopher Smart.

And this is what we know. We leave unlisted all the writers who hung on at the margins and danced around the edges, shining their flashlights in the darkness, and hoping the darkness would not engulf the projected beam this time, praying they might make some kind of connection between the islands of verbal insight they train themselves to look for. I have seen at least three movies that portray life in an insane asylum: the enthralling anti-war movie King of Hearts with Alan Bates, the fantastic Australian film Così Fan Tutte where the inmates are allowed to put on the most incredible production of Mozart one could ever imagine, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest that represents the American prototype of the genre. In all three a given is that the poet inmates are more sane, the sick persons healthier, than the Nurse Ratchets and the institutions that plague them.

As I was about to leave the crypt at Lastingham I recalled that Cedd had been buried under the right side of the altar. That meant the Epistle side rather than the Gospel side. When I was a child I was an acolyte and under the old liturgical practice, when the priest faced the altar celebrating the Eucharist, one of my jobs was to move the missal on its polished brass stand after the Epistle was read from the right side, Cedd’s side, to the left. At that time, I could see why it was a nice touch to “translate” the missal, as it were, but no ever gave me a reason why. The circumstance was rendered even more enigmatic for me because of a domestic episode that occurred when I was about twelve years old. I was blessed to have as one of my godfathers, Albert Stuart, a Navy Chaplain in the South Pacific during World War II, the Rector of St. Michael’s in Charleston, South Carolina, and the eventual Bishop of Georgia. Being around Bishop Stuart was always fun because he was one of those rare spirits who made whoever he happened to be with at the time feel like he was the most special person in the world. I did not see him often, but he and one of his priest relatives, Porter Ball, customarily came to our home about three times a year where they would proceed with my father, also a priest, to get drunk as skunks. Since the rectory was small the added guests made it necessary for my brother and I to sleep on a mattress on the floor on the sleeping porch. Once in the middle of the night Bishop Stuart came into our room, knelt down beside his godson, and whispered in my ear, “Charles, that’s good. Always sleep on the Epistle side.”

I was baffled then and ever since as to what on earth he possibly could have meant. But sitting there where Cedd had been buried under the Epistle side of the altar I think I finally had a good idea. In the Bible, specifically the New Testament, the four Gospels are the autobiographical texts that state the truth with no transparency, or intended as such, while the Epistles are the books in which the poetry comes, where the mystery of the stated truth gets presented in kind of epistolary verse essays. While the Acts of the Apostles is fairly straight up, except for such episodes as Pentecost, St. Paul is a poet, as many of his purple passages attest. And St. John in the prophecy of the end of time, well, he might as well have been William Blake. I thought, then, that Bishop Stuart, my godfather, was trying to mystify me into maintaining my Christian faith, but only if I were to be a Gregory or a Cedd. He wanted me to be involved in translating my religious instincts rather than remaining stuck in someone else’s formulation of it for me. He wanted me to be an interpreter, like Isaiah, one who would feel the hot coal on his tongue.

I ascended through the narrow door up the steps from the crypt. The stars were out. I had to find a Bed and Breakfast, and I might have to drive to Pickering since the hour was so late. I wondered where I might go in the morning. Whitby? No, maybe Scarborough. Anne Bronte had her heroine Agnes Grey go to Scarborough where she might meet her lover who would become her husband. Nothing like that ever happened to Anne, for her standards were high, and she never married. But she did spend considerable time at Scarborough and knew the seacoast town very well. She died in Scarborough and one can find her tombstone in the graveyard there. It is about as peaceful a spot as one could wish for one who like her three sisters lived such brave lives in the face of the consumption that ravaged them.

Seeing Anne’s grave, as I did, the next afternoon, and recalling where Cedd’s bones were laid to rest, I am not sure where is the best place for a writer to be buried. Beneath the ground in a crypt, hidden and obscure? Or above, still under the ground, but the surface windswept? Anne Bronte needed air for sure, and Cedd probably felt like he wanted to get down as deep as he could go given what was taken from him at Whitby. But truly, most writers, most interpreters, like Anne and Cedd, want both, to be evasive enough in one’s writing to gain the reputation of being profound, but also close enough to the surface so as to be famous and loved. A true translator wants to hide his or her meaning if the truth be known, realizing the intractability of language to convey that meaning accurately and precisely. Indeed, when we are speaking our own language there is no possibility that our hearers will interpret exactly just what we touch on, or fully catch the precise beauty of the manner in which we are trying to convey it. Even so, those who open their mouths to speak or their books to write, especially poets, want everyone to get enough to deliver them from the snare of the missed beat and the annoyance of the noisome pestilence.