A Tattletale Sound
Shipwreck songs move us, move us uniquely, because we all die. The ship
is the ship of state of course. It is also, in some contexts, the church. I
think it is often the body. A ship is sailed by fools, blind to their folly.
Captains go down with ships, bravely and sometimes mere lads do as well (at
least in Victorian verse). Whichever way, ships do only one thing poetically
speaking. They sink. If they sink memorably, they are immortalized in song.
Songs about shipwrecks speak, proleptically, of the ultimate shipwreck of our
bodies, fortunes and even of our own souls. Further, all shipwreck songs are
one song. A poet, if they are a real poet, may attempt to write new one, to
introduce novelty, but, as sure as the tides, the archetypes will master them.
The shipwreck tale will impose its nature willy-nilly on any poet tuned in,
beyond ratiocination or discursive chatter, to the primordial shape of life.
The shipwreck tale will tell us who is a poet and who is a poser by how deeply
and fully he or she is mastered by the paradigmatic shape of the story. The
shipwreck tale is a tale of death, of tragedy, of human loss but it is also a
tale of hubris and the pride that goes before a fall. Interestingly, the
greatest of all shipwreck tales, the sinking of the Titanic, actually happened. Here a pure myth took actual flesh some
years before it was made into poetry (first, I think, by Hardy). Sometimes this
happens, I suppose, as C.S. Lewis said concerning Christ and Adonis (the first
gave the second actual flesh!). I am told, though, that some years before the Titanic set sail a novel was written
concerning a doomed liner named the Titan. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised by this,
though, I have yet to see the novel in question to judge of the matter. Art
imitates life which imitates art which imitates life. There is no before or
after of art to life or life to art but a constant mirroring of one by the
other.
At the beginning of May Gordon Lightfoot passed away at 84. As a true
poet he gave us unforgettable shipwreck songs that hit exactly the right, the
true, poetic note. Such notes as the anonymous composers of ballads could hit
with unerring sense. I will discuss a
couple of these but first I must discuss another, somewhat earlier poet. The
African American blues singer Blind Willie Johnson gave us the story of the Titanic in its moral and spiritual form
in a song called “God Moves on the Water”. God, of course, in his spirit, moves
over the water in the story of creation. Yet God, as a dark paraclete, also
moves over the water in the destruction of a mighty ship. God is creation and
destruction, or, to put it another way, creativity manifests as construction
and as destruction. Here we might appeal to the Kabbalists and their German
disciples Boehme and Schelling. In God there is light and dark. The primordial
darkness in God, the dark aleph of the Kabbalists, is a negative polarity, a
dark, restless urge to pure individuation. A turbid, ever unsatisfied desire for disruption and differentiation. Yet, even in this dark primordial form it is love
and an urge to balance and light. The dark aleph pushes ever forward for the
light rather as a plant seeks the sun from the darkness of the soil. In God
this polarity achieves a marvelous balance as dissonance sets up a concord in
music. Yet, released into the finite, the polarity manifests as the evil and
darkness of the world. It manifests as the storm and the wind, the destructive
wrath of nature whether in the open form of the hurricane or the subtle,
insidious form of the lurking iceberg. God moves on the water as creative love
and as consuming wrath. According to an African proverb, when elephants fight
the grass gets trampled. When the play of light and dark emerges in creation as
love and wrath, Blake’s tiger and lamb, humans should get out of the way except,
of course, they can’t. They are part of the drama of creation and the urge to
pure individuation, to pride is in them too, as is the longing for harmony and
light. The drama of God is their human drama too. Theology is anthropology and
vice versa. In another great shipwreck song, “The Flowers of Bermuda” by Stan
Rogers, the doomed sailors catch the scent of Eden as they drown; the eponymous
‘flowers’ of the magic isle. Here though, the poor souls aboard the Titanic are
“liable to be crushed” and liable, with its legal and ethical connotations, is
the exact word a poet a would reach for.
Now to Lightfoot. Gordon Lightfoot was a Scotsman and a protestant one to
boot. I do not know if he had a Calvinist sense of sin, but his shipwreck songs
do, though that may have to do more
with shipwreck songs themselves than with any religious attitude (or lack
thereof) on Lightfoot’s part. His most famous shipwreck song, ‘The Wreck of the
Edmund Fitzgerald’, has the telling line which forms the title of this piece.
“The wind in the wires made a tattletale sound” he tells us as the north wind
rose and waves crashed over the railings. On one level this is merely physical
description. The wind whistles like chattering, mocking voices. Yet a
tattletale tattles on a fault or sin. What sin? The beginning of the song tells
us “The ship was the pride of the American side”. The wind is the divine wind
of judgment on folly and pride. Where, the song asks, does the “Love of God go/
When the waves turn the minutes to hours?”. The love of God here has taken on
its alter ego, its double, the destructive yet sublime fury of the gale. The
theological framing persists throughout the song. A cathedral bell tolls 29
times for each sailor which is perhaps a sign of grace as the drowned souls are
gathered to eternity. As there is judgment there is, just maybe, mercy for the
God who shows the dark face must also show the light. The story is one of
passage through the storm and stress of the world (the ‘great lake’) into
eternal life. It is the human pilgrimage through death and darkness to rebirth
in light. Human pride is brought low, the passionate assertion of separateness
in the dark ground is negated. Yet, in defiance of this, the human is
commemorated and in commemoration, in communal, sacred memory, upheld (unless
one reads this commemoration as humanistic defiance?). It is the oldest,
deepest story there is deployed in the most elemental images and that is why,
in defiance of all commercial logic, it became a number one hit. Lightfoot, no
doubt, had not a bit of this in mind. HE toiled to get the physical detail
right, the tonnage of the ship, the disrupted routine of breakfast, the caved
hatchway, the steel company contracts. THIS is what the poet considers
discursively. The story, though, brings forth the rest whatever the poet may
will or however he goes about the remainder of his day after finishing the
song.
Fine as this is, Lightfoot has given us something even greater in “The
Ballad of Yarmouth Castle”. It is a ballad in the true
sense, and it reads as well as it sings. This evokes another doomed ship though
this one perishes by fire not water. Indeed, the Yarmouth Castle is thing of paint and patchwork with a ‘rusted
spine’ and worn out machinery. It is the aged, decaying body I suppose though
the persistent mentions of paint make us think of ‘painting’ in the
Shakespearean sense with its suggestion of duplicity and sexual rot. It is the
paint, moreover, the veil of pretense and superficiality, that provides the
actual fuel. Lightfoot makes a point of telling us how nicely it burns: “And
the paint she wore to keep her young/Oh Lord, how well it burns!”. The fires burn
away all appearance and externality to the underlying core of naked, bitter truth
in a sort of Blakean apocalypse. At any rate our hapless liner, whited
sepulcher that she is, is in archetypal terms, the ship of fools. The guests
can barely be pulled from their card games to note the ship is on fire: “Then a
voice says "Shut up and deal, I'm losin'". The blaring music covers
over the groaning of the twisted metal which becomes the desperate plea of the
ship herself. Brilliantly, Lightfoot describes the progress of the fire from a
bare spark to a twisting, blazing inferno. The ship is dying from the start
“but doesn’t know it”. A tiny spark glows as her “sands run out” which I
suppose evokes the hourglass. An hourglass has so many grains. Of course, the sands
are here in the ship’s heart. A heart has so many beats. A ship has only so
many voyages and its boilers will only light so many times.[1]
While some party others sleep after “the busy day” with all its many trials and
rituals of departure. I said fire reigns in this song and indeed the “ragged”
hoses, empty of pressure, bring no water to these “burning hearts in hell” as
another singer song-writer put it (one might even think here of another dry,
waterless hellscape here- the one in Eliot’s Waste Land-to say nothing of Dives in hell!).
This ship is God abandoned too, though in rather a different sense than
the Edmund Fitzgerald. She is abandoned by the captain, the human authority who
images the divine, the ‘ship’s husband’ to use a fine Newfoundland phrase. At
any rate we have in this one instance a deus
ex machina. Another liner appears to affect a rescue. Some are saved though
others dammed. The sleepers die in their beds or, roused too late, are forced
back into hell by the engulfing flames. These die in the ‘molten sides’ of the
ship. Again, a poet doesn’t will these stories. A poet only toils to get the
details down. A poet thinks of fire and metal and paint and the groans of a
dying ship which come from who knows where. He connects a ship’s machinery and its
life span with the sands of time and the remorseless drip of the hourglass. He
makes sure that things rhyme and that the verse sticks closely to ballad meter
and lightly evokes the ballad tradition’s archaic language (as in phrases like “For the
ragged hoses in the racks no pressure do they hold”). He also makes sure to
evoke common meter when a hymn-like resonance is required: “"God help the
ones who sleep below/and cannot find the way/Thank God for those we've rescued/Upon
this awful day." A poet does these things while the story rises from
whatever depth, whatever primordial shape of things, a true story rises from.
Like any great storyteller, Lightfoot, has given us stories riveting because
true, true in the empirical sense that they come from the daily paper, but also
true in the sense in which great stories are truer than true though they never
really happened.
[1] As much as possible a poet should make sure any symbolic object like sand should have some material presence as well. The poetic word rests on the flesh of physical objects. However, it is a gift of the muses whether we can pull this off in every instance in which it is desirable. I have searched and searched and the only references for ‘the use of sand on steamships’ are tangential. The sands here, I can only conclude, are solely symbolic ones. One more point: one thing that will impose itself willy- nilly on an English speaking poet is the King James Bible. "Superior" it is said "never gives up her dead" in direct allusion to Revelation 20:13. Will the dead sleep in her waters past judgment day? Will she both pre and post date the Christian narrative? Lightfoot gives us her name in Ojibway "Gichi-Gami" and perhaps that is telling though I leave this mystery to the poets.
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