Is that a riddle in your pocket? Apollonius of Tyre and The Third International Congress of the John Gower Society

We had our own watery voyage.
(A boat ride on the Genesee River.)

This summer has combined conferences both far away and very near. I got to travel to Iceland for the New Chaucer Society Conference (about which I'll blog later), and I got to present at home in Rochester at The Third International Congress of the John Gower Society: "John Gower: Language, Cognition, and Performance." Traveling to Iceland was magical, but it was also a joy to welcome scholars from around the world to my own institution. The Gower conference was all that I hoped, combining scholarship, camaraderie, and creativity.

I presented a paper entitled "'Bot in writinge it mai be spoke': Intratextual Desire in Gower's Tale of Apollonius of Tyre." The paper was new topic for me. Just as I'm finishing up my dissertation, this paper helps bring a second project into focus (which also connects to work I've been doing on Elaine of Astolat, the Camelot Project page on whom I published recently). As is inevitable at the beginning of a project, I feel like I need to think through it much more fully, but I'm excited about where it will take me. Despite my nerves, the paper went well. The whole panel fit together beautifully, our ideas mingling in surprising and delightful ways, and the discussion afterward continued throughout the conference. As with the best presentation experiences, I feel like the enthusiasm and questions and discussions I encountered will help me continue to develop my ideas.

For those who aren't familiar with the Tale of Apollonius of Tyre, I recommend reading the tale (just scroll down to line 271 of Confessio Amantis book 8). If you've seen/read Shakespeare's Pericles, then you have a basic sense of the plot. The story begins with a king, Antiochus, who has lost his wife and tries to replace her with his daughter. It's a disturbing beginning, and Gower doesn't shy away from the trauma of the princess as her own father violates her. As suitors begin to vie for the princess's hand, Antiochus devises an impossible riddle for them to answer.  Many suitors try, and many suitors fail. Finally, Apollonius arrives to try his hand at the riddle. He correctly guesses that the answer is the

Gower's main hobby is shooting the world.
He's basically the opposite of Atlas.

incest between Antiochus and his daughter, but this correct guess sends him running for his life. After many adventures, he lands on Pentapolis, where he gets a position as tutor to the king's daughter. Many suitors are vying for this princess's hand as well, but this father tries to facilitate his daughter's marriage. He asks the suitors to write bills, which the princess will read and compare. The princess, however, has fallen in love with Apollonius and is ill with lovesickness. The king is worried about his daughter, and she writes him a letter explaining her condition. The king brings the letter first to his wife and then to Apollonius, carefully arranging the marriage his daughter wants. Apollonius and the princess are married and the princess soon becomes pregnant, a sure sign that things are going well. When they hear that Antiochus and his daughter have been destroyed in a storm and it is safe for Apollonius to return home to Tyre, it almost seems like we've reached a happy ending. But there are a lot of lines, and a lot of troubles, left in the tale. While sailing to Tyre, the princess gives birth to a baby girl but dies in childbirth. Apollonius, heartbroken over the loss of his wife, puts her in a coffin with jewels and a letter begging for her proper burial and then sends the coffin to sea. The coffin, miraculously, reaches land, and, even more miraculously, the clerk who reads the letter discovers that the princess is only mostly dead. Reviving her and hearing her story, he sets her up for the chaste life she requests. A lot more happens in the story, and we get wonderful adventures of the daughter as she grows up as well, but this brief summary will get us through the parts of the tale I had time to discuss in my paper.

I began outside the tale (and a few hundred years earlier), with riddle 44 from the Exeter Book: 

Swings by his thigh a thing most magical!
Below the belt, beneath the folds

of his clothes it hangs, a hole in its front end, 
stiff-set & stout, but swivels about.

Levelling the head of this hanging instrument,
its wielder hoists his hem above the knee:
it is his will to fill a well-known hole
that it fits fully when at full length.   

He has often filled it before. Now he fills it again.¹

The answer, of course, is a key. What, were you thinking something else? The moment where the room shares a stifled laugh and represses the obvious dirty answer in favor of thinking through less obvious and more innocuous possibilities is the heart of such riddles. The pleasure lies in the simultaneity of the answer we don’t say and the one that we do.

The riddle at the beginning of Apollonius of Tyre, on the other hand, distorts this tradition by denying the pleasures of the genre. Antiochus gives suitors a riddle in which the sexual answer is correct. Centuries of riddles would suggest that there must be a clever trick here, but there isn’t. And yet speaking the real answer is a dangerous option as well. To declare publically that the king and his daughter share an incestuous relationship seems a good way to separate your head from your shoulders. No wonder so many suitors get it wrong. This twisted form of a twisted genre is well-suited to such a taboo desire as the king’s for his daughter.

The riddle in Apollonius of Tyre is the first of many expressions of as many varieties of desire. Characters in the text articulate their desires by crystallizing them in language. I argue that the genre that each linguistic expression takes directly represents the type of desire being expressed. From the opening incestuous riddle to the body wrapped lovingly in a letter, characters solidify their desires in language that can then be examined and distributed. At each instance of linguistic desire, language takes on a more corporeal quality, until letter and body are interconnected. Throughout the tale, then, language does not merely convey emotion, but embodies it, rendering it both tangible and communicable. Like the key from our opening riddle, language is both the thing to be unlocked and the means to unlock it; it is a passageway between the private and the public, one’s one thoughts and desires and the rest of the world. The fact that the genres of the linguistic expressions I discuss match the desires they communicate gives language an increasing material reality that renders it increasingly productive.

The tale begins with an inappropriate and traumatic desire, that of a father for his own daughter. The private world that Antiochus creates for himself, in which he may do as he pleases, is a world where desires cannot be clearly articulated. As María Bullón-Fernández explains, “incest is equated not just with ignorance but also with secrecy; can keep being performed as long as it is kept private” (49).² Antiochus’s daughter weeps, but doesn’t know how to express herself so that he will hear her. Afterward, “sche lay stille, and of this thing,/ Withinne hirself such sorghe made” (314-15). The daughter’s emotions and desires become trapped in her motionless, soundless body. Not only is she silent, but R.F. Yeager points out “that Antiochus's daughter has no name, in a tale in which even the least servants and functionaries … are made known. … Thus the namelessness of Antiochus's daughter … bears a message we should ponder: that … sexual gluttony has no acceptable side” (228).³ Although the second princess, whom I will discuss later, also has no name, namelessness here seems to deny the princess any possibility of a subject position. She has no language; she cannot articulate her position. 

As offspring becomes consumed by progenitor, desire feeding upon that which it engendered, it’s fitting that the verbal form for these forbidden feelings is a riddle, a tricky trap of language to represent something to taboo to express. If, as Yeager suggests, “sexual gluttony has no acceptable side,” then it makes sense that its linguistic representation is a genre that both reveals and conceals. Antiochus recites, 

'With felonie I am upbore,
I ete and have it noght forbore
Mi modres fleissh, whos housebonde
Mi fader for to seche I fonde,
Which is the sone ek of my wif.
Hierof I am inquisitif;
And who that can mi tale save,
Al quyt he schal my doghter have;
Of his ansuere and if he faile,
He schal be ded withoute faile.' (405-14) 

The riddle puts the desire itself into first person. If the “I” is Antiochus himself, then by sexually consuming his daughter he renders himself his own father-in-law and thus his daughter becomes his mother-in-law. His daughter is his wife is his mother. Family titles multiply to the point of chaos. As Gary Lim explains, "While the riddle evokes familiar subject positions of the family … these terms are thrown into an incomprehensible jumble, except when incest is offered as an interpretive key. Yet if incest indeed governs these relations, it would render the conventionally accepted significance of these subject positions meaningless” (334).⁴ According to Larry Scanlon, the pleasure of riddles “lies in drawing a single, unambiguous solution out of what initially appears to be an irresolvable confusion. Thus, though they are founded on the possibility of instability, they depend just as much on the capacity of language to stabilize meaning as they do on the capacity to destabilize. In this riddle, by contrast, instability is all” (124).⁵

Although the riddle is difficult to parse, as family titles multiply and feed back on themselves, there is something inherently incestuous about it. Unlike riddles like the key from the Exeter book, this one is uncomfortably suggestive precisely so that no one would guess the answer. Even Apollonius never mentions the word incest, only stating that 

‘The question which thou hast spoke,
If thou wolt that it be unloke,
It toucheth al the priveté
Betwen thin oghne child and thee.’ (423-6) 

The answer to the riddle is that the answer is a secret. The riddle represents something that can be unlocked, but that perhaps shouldn’t be, a private space of taboo that can only be put into language when that language resists naming it. Bullón-Fernández points out that “the moment of incest might seem to have assumed a nature/culture opposition, or an opposition between the pre-linguistic and the linguistic, … Such an assumption postulates the existence of an original ‘natural’ state that culture acts upon,” but she argues that  “It is impossible … to go back to that origin, because … the moment we try to conceptualize an original moment, a moment before language, we must use language” and thus Antiochus’s “actions are thus not pre-legal or prelinguistic; rather, they change the existing law and they produce a new type of discourse, the riddle” (59; 60).⁶ This inextricability of language, prohibition, and transgression suits the riddle well, since its very messiness marks it as a link between the desire, the inexpressibility of the desire, and the desire’s expression. If desires are not prediscursive, then it makes sense that linguistic expressions in this tale fundamentally embody the desires of the characters who voice them.

After Apollonius, right about the riddle and yet running for his life, makes his way to Pentapolis, we get is very different scene of wooing. The bills created by suitors for the hand of the princess of Pentapolis are diametrically opposed to the riddle. The king recommends that “ech of hem do make a bille/ He bad, and wryte his oghne wille,/ His name, his fader and his good” (875-877). The bills are formal documents; they are straightforward, listing name, father's name, and possessions. The desire they represent is proper, but more practical than emotional. The twisted form of the riddle mirrored the twisted physical interactions between Antiochus and his daughter, her flesh proceeding from his and then being pulled backward, whereas the lineage related by the bills is appropriately linear, an overly determined teleology. Further, the bills only represent the suitors themselves, no physical or even linguistic interactions having taken place between them and the object of their attentions. The too-private desire of Antiochus is replaced by the too-public desire of these suitors. Rather than meeting her suitors, the princess will compare their petitions. They are interested in making a good match to a princess they neither know nor who knows them. But her love for the mysterious Apollonius, whom she knows in person but about whom she knows nothing, exceeds these other princes, who have given her clear information but with whom she has no personal connection. 

The letter the princess writes in response to these bills is neither direct information, like the bills, nor is it a riddle. Russell Peck explains that “[i]n Gower's source the daughter, when approached by the suitors, replies with a riddle, saying that she will marry the one who was shipwrecked ... The riddle in the source is a felicitous touch in that it makes more emphatic the parallel with Apollonius' first courtship when he encountered Antiochus' riddle. … Gower's reason for the change is probably to set off the motif of movement from will to reason, a motif we have already seen in a negative way with Antiochus, and now put positively in the growth of both Apollonius and his bride-to-be” (170-71).⁷ Not only does this second scene, as Peck suggests, give us a more positive version of the movement from will to reason, but it also gives us a linguistic expression more suited to this positive desire. 

The response the princess gives is romantic desire crystallized into language, a letter voicing her love for Apollonius that convinces her parents and her beloved to forge a marriage according to her wishes. As Peter Nicholson explains, “Apollonius' kin … are more virtuous … not because they don't fall in love but precisely because they do, and it is worth pointing out how fully the effects of romantic love are celebrated this late in the poem” (371-72).⁸ Whereas Antiochus’s desire was destructive and traumatic, the princess’s romantic desire is mutual and fruitful. And unlike the private desire of the riddle or the public desire of the bills, the princess’s letter is a point of access between the private and the public; it renders private emotions publically intelligible. We learn that she loves Apollonius “malgré wher sche wole or noght,” and this lack of control might connect us uncomfortably back to the unwieldy desire that opened the tale (829). Yet even those physical conditions that seem out of her control—being fevered or chilled, for example—proceed from “Riht after the condicion/ Of hire ymaginacion” (849-50). Her imagination, then, becomes physically manifest in her body, and these feelings take shape in the words of her letter. 

A carefully-reared young woman who is unfamiliar with such feelings and who “wolde hire goode name kepe/ For feere of wommanysshe schame,” the letter is a suitable method of articulating her desires in tangible, controllable form (854-5). Her letter opens with reference to maidenly shame as a bar to verbal communication: 

'The schame which is in a maide
With speche dar noght ben unloke,
Bot in writinge it mai be spoke;
So wryte I to you, fader, thus:
Bot if I have Appolinus,
Of al this world, what so betyde,
I wol non other man abide.
And certes if I of him faile,
I wot riht wel withoute faile
Ye schull for me be dowhterles.' (894-903)

Her words are not addressed to the object of her affection, but rather to her father, which fits within her sense of maidenly shame. Shame makes verbal communication impossible, and the rhyme between the words “spoke” and “unlock” indicates that there’s something hidden away that she must reveal through the letter. Apollonius used the same rhyme earlier, but in that case it was his job to unlock the riddle that had been spoken, whereas here the princess will unlock her own desires by writing the letter. The riddle obscured desire, while the letter clarifies it. Bullón-Fernández notes that words like “schame,” “unloke” and “privete” link this courtship scenario to the one in Antioch, but argues that “Unlike Antiochus, even though she falls madly in love, Artestrathes's daughter is aware of the public … the scenes and vocabulary are parallel to the story of Antiochus, but in these instances … privacy and secrecy are ultimately handled wisely and for public purposes” (51-2).⁹ The princess’s act of writing brings about a royal marriage, and the princess is clear about what she wants. Though much of the letter is conditional, using words like “but” and “if,” there is an ultimatum in her final statement. Either she’ll have Apollonius, or her father won’t have a daughter any longer. The role of daughter in her world is clear – it’s the only relationship possible between her father and herself, and it can only be maintained if she has her way. 

By voicing her emotion via letter, the princess is able to choose how and to whom she will grant her body and heart. The letter becomes a tangible, distributable form of her emotion, and it functions to facilitate her marriage in spite of the fact that the suitors have followed the proper procedure. Even as Apollonius was denied his initial suit after he correctly guessed the riddle, the princes here are denied their suit even after they write the bills. In the first case, Antiochus’s desire outweighs the suitor’s wishes, and in this case the princess communicates her desire to outweigh the bills. As Georgiana Donavin points out, “In contrast to Antiochus who controls his daughter’s sexuality, Arestrathes allows his daughter to choose her own mate; indeed, in her letter she demands the right to choose herself” (79).¹⁰ Scanlon agrees that “[a]t Antioch the desires of the daughter were obliterated; at Pentapolis they are determinative” (116).¹¹ I would argue that this shifted emphasis onto the desires of the daughter is directly related to the ability of this daughter to express herself linguistically and the ability of this father to heed her words. Scanlon notes a contradictory element in the second father-daughter relationship:  “Antiochus’s riddle revealed the ‘privete’ he intended to hide. The king of Pentapolis, by contrast, wholeheartedly offers to Apollonius, 'The lettre and al the privete, / The which his dowhter to him sent' (VIII.918-19). What is striking about this gesture is its radically antithetical double meaning. On the one hand, it is an assertion of patriarchal privilege of the most [brutal] and naked sort. He displays his daughter’s ‘privete’ as if she were livestock at auction. One the other hand, this gesture also constitutes a radical abdication. The king reduces his role to that of obedient go-between. He becomes the transparent signifier of his daughter’s desire. Neither of these meanings can be subsumed by the other; they are irreducible components of the same act” (121).¹² Whether the father here is displaying his daughter like livestock via the letter or whether he is “a transparent signifier” of her desire, her letter manages to directly stand in for her body and desires. 

Although this letter allows her to distribute her body as she chooses, the next letter comes when she has no voice left to speak her wishes. Believing her dead while they are at sea, Apollonius wraps her body in a letter and places her in a casket to float to land. The letter pleads for her burial, but leads instead to her resuscitation. 

'I, king of Tyr Appollinus,
Do alle maner men to wite,
That hiere and se this lettre write,
That helpeles withoute red
Hier lith a kinges doghter ded:
And who that happeth hir to finde,
For charité tak in his mynde,
And do so that sche be begrave
With this tresor, which he schal have.' (1110-1130) 

The fact that the subject of the letter is the body that lies “here” renders the message only meaningful if read in conjunction with the body, making text and body mutually constitutive. It’s as if the body is a text in its own right and the letter is a gloss to explain its meaning. 

The coffin also becomes a form of communication, since the men who find it “Which that thei finde faste stoke,/ Bot thei with craft it have unloke” (1175-6). As the princess used her letter to unlock and reveal her desire, the men here unlock the casket to reveal the letter and body. And, luckily for the princess, those who find the casket are able to read both the letter and the body. The letter is visible immediately upon opening the casket, and the letter leads the men to unsew the body from its shroud, another layer of unlocking that reveals crucial information. A learned clerk examines the princess’s seemingly lifeless body, “And with the craftes whiche he couthe/ He soghte and fond a signe of lif.” (1188-9). In order to find this sign of life, the clerk not only needs to be able to read both letter and body, but also must be open to a disjunction between the meaning of the two. Though the letter states that the princess is dead, the physician discovers that he can revive her. Written communication, it seems, can only unlock within the limitations of the writer’s perspective. The princess’s letter stated that she would die without Apollonius, and we believed her because she was describing her own body, but Apollonius’s letter about her can only state what he can see of her. 

Thanks to the physician, the princess regains both consciousness and linguistic expression. And her simultaneous reintroduction into both life and language allows her to situate herself and her needs properly once again. That her husband's written words can give way to her spoken ones extends the possibilities of the letter, even as this final letter is inextricably bound to her body. Her desire to be chaste while she believes her husband dead, like her earlier desire to choose her husband, is granted. Though coming from a place of limited narrative control, because of her death-state, her enclosed position, and her powerlessness to steer on her impromptu ocean voyage, the princess again succeeds in dictating her own terms for her life and body. Her husband's love for her, voiced in the letter he places with her body, allows her to continue her life as she chooses until their surprise reunion. Her facility with language thus creates for her the life of her choosing; it allows her to shape the world according to her desires. 

The tale begins not only with incest, but with rape. Gower presents us with the trauma of the rape victim, the woman who could neither articulate nor enact her own desires but rather had desires enacted upon her. The riddle is her father’s, the “I” of the riddle is him; she is silenced and fated to feel the pain of lightning strike along with her rapist. The rest of the tale, however, shows us how desire can be communicated and love can be expressed. The second princess uses writing to choose her own husband, and her own daughter, of whom I don’t have time to speak, is able to use both tears and words to maintain her chastity even when kidnapped by pirates and brought to a bordello. Language, both as a thing to be interpreted and an interpretive key in its own right, is inextricable from material realities it represents in the tale. The concordance between the language and what it represents allows for efficacious communication and thus greater autonomy and reciprocity for characters who can both speak and listen.

---

1 The Earliest English Poems. Translated and introduced by Michael Alexander. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1991.

2 María Bullón-Fernández. Fathers and Daughters in Gower’s Confessio Amantis: Authority, Family, State, and Writing. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000.

3 R.F. Yeager. John Gower's poetic: The Search for a New Arion. Woodbridge, Suffolk; Rochester, NY, USA: D.S. Brewer, 1990. 

4 Gary Lim. "Constructing the Virtual Family: Socializing Grief in John Gower's 'Tale of Apollonius of Tyre.'" Exemplaria, Vol. 22 No. 4, Winter, 2010, 326–48. 

5  Larry Scanlon. “The Riddle of Incest: John Gower and the Problem of Medieval Sexuality.” Re-Visioning Gower. Ed. R. F. Yeager. Asheville, NC: Pegasus Press, 1998. 93–127. 

6 María Bullón-Fernández. Fathers and Daughters.

7 Russell A. Peck. Kingship & Common Profit in Gower's Confessio Amantis. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978

8 Peter Nicholson. Love & Ethics in Gower's Confessio Amantis. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. 

9 María Bullón-Fernández. Fathers and Daughters.

10 Georgiana Donavin. Incest Narratives and the Structure of Gower’s Confessio Amantis. Victoria, B.C.: English Literary Studies, 1993.

11 Larry Scanlon. “The Riddle of Incest."

12 Ibid.

Of Words and Worlds

And I mean whirlwind literally ...

I am just recovering from the whirlwind that was the 49th International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, Michigan. I am torn between a desire for rest/hibernation and a frantic need to write down as much of my experience as possible. (In reality, neither of these options is possible in the face of gradinggradinggrading.) It was, as always, a rich experience in a variety of ways. I am consistently blown away by the generosity and intelligence and engagement of the scholars in my field, and I am feeling a renewed excitement about my work and my career despite the depressing challenging nature of the academic job market. I can't sum up all of the panels and papers I saw and heard right now, but I will post the roundtable presentation I gave, "England by any Other Name: Nominal Topographies in The Tale of Albin." The roundtable—"What a World!"—was sponsored by the BABEL Working Group on the theme of worldbuilding, and it featured inspired and inspiring papers on topics that seemed wide-ranging but that came together in surprising and delightful ways. I had difficulty crafting my contribution, since I have never participated in a roundtable before, and I am not used to writing such short papers (for those not familiar with such things, a traditional conference presentation is 15-20 minutes, and a roundtable presentation is 5, which allows for more in-depth discussion). Although cutting the paper down to size was physically and emotionally painful, it was also liberating to just present the core of an idea and see how it functioned in terms of a larger conversation. I've written about the strange tale of Albin here before in my Jurassic Park post, but for this presentation I was thinking about naming as a form of worldbuilding. I was considering how a chronicle presents everything side-by-side even as individual colonizers attempt to write over what came before. Here is the basic presentation (minus, of course, spontaneous ad-libs and larger discussion):

Every schoolchild in medieval Europe knew that countries worth a name could trace that name back to the battle of Troy. And every schoolchild in medieval England knew that a man named Brutus climbed from the wreckage of his fallen city and sailed to an island on the edge of the world, which he called Britain for himself. Conquest, lineage, and naming are all interconnected in England's mytho-historic beginnings. But the island has another name, Albion, and thus another origin story. Texts such as The Anonymous Short English Metrical Chronicle describe a Greek princess, Albin, who plots to murder her husband because he attempts to restrict her wild nature. Exiled from her homeland, she lands on an unnamed, uninhabited island, naming it for herself and populating it by mating with a devil to produce giant offspring who rule the island until Brutus arrives to rename it. I contend that the tale imagines national origins as deriving from words as much as actions. Speech acts claim the island for each named character. When Albin names the island for herself, she makes it in her own image. Naming is both the catalyst for worldbuilding and also a kind of worldbuilding. Just as important as their actual building is their imagined construction of the place by virtue of the names they choose.

The Chronicle opens with a declaration that "Here may men rede whoso can/ Hou Jnglond first bigan" [Here men may read if they can/ How England first began] (1-2). The text itself is a "here," a place for readers to discover their own national background. And though the tale begins in faraway Greece, Albin soon arrives on an island called "þis lond" [this land] and "here" (306, 307). Thus we have a tangible connection between the story and the current location. When Albin arrives with her sisters on “this land,” she colonizes with a speech act: "'Listeneþ sostren þat be min,/ Y schal ȝou telle hou it schal be:/ Þis lond ichil sese to me,/ After mi name Albion/ ȝe schullen it clepe euerichon'" [Listen sisters that are mine,/ I shall tell you how it shall be:/ This land I shall seize to me,/ After my name Albion/ you shall call it everyone] (312-316). The colonial fantasy of an uninhabited and unnamed land allows Albin a blank slate upon which to create a society in her own image. The island contains nothing "Bot wode & wildernisse" [but wood and wilderness], and their main impact on the land is to populate it with giants (325). The giants hold the land until Brutus arrives 800 years later, finding that "Al was wode & wildernisse," indicating that neither Albin nor her giant progeny did much to cultivate the land (369). The fantasy of arriving on an empty island is followed by the fantasy of arriving on an island populated only by monsters. Brutus gives the island the familiar name of Britain for himself, replacing an earlier title as he reinscribes the land with his own culture. He and his men kill off the giants and "falwede erþe & felled wode/ Of þis lond þat was so wilde./ Þai bigun tounes to bilde" [tilled earth and felled wood/ Of this land that was so wild./ They began to build towns] (450-452). He repurposes the wood and stones he finds, creating an urban landscape out of a wild one. 

Even fences can't contain what was there before
(A photo I took in Scotland, 2011)

Like Albin before him, Brutus displays the power of words to shape reality. The narrator explains that as "Brut sett Londen ston" [Brutus set London's stone] he announced that if kings who were to come after him continued to care for the city as he did in his day, then men would be able to see hereafter "'Þat Troye nas neuer so fair cite/ So þis cite schal be.'" [That Troy was never as fair a city/ As this city shall be] (457; 463-4). The scene concludes his speech with the comment that the city was named "Þilke time, þurth Brutus mouþe" [At that time, through Brutus's mouth"] (465). Brutus's speech is conflated with an image of literally setting London in stone, giving his words a monumental quality. The words Brutus uses to discuss his city look forward to future generations, extending the line and connecting to the larger chronicle leading to contemporary London. Yet if Brutus's words are meant to ring true and if the stones he placed contain in them a tangible connection to the readers' own environment, then Albin and her giants must also be connected. Brutus might build upon Albion and add his name to it, but his is a palimpsestic relation to Albin. Her name and her wild country still remain underneath British cities. Maybe she and her giants bear no blood relation to later people of the island, but they bear a chronological relation. They trod the same ground and called it their own.

Both Brutus and Albin exist for British history only insofar as their names link etymologically to the names associated with that island. The land Albin claims and the giants she produces are both wild, and both must be restrained and re-envisioned in order for Brutus to create a land in his own image. But Brutus's words, though they can reimagine and restructure the island, cannot undo the words spoken by Albin. Albin's name is still associated with the land to this day, and the ground is still that her giants tread, the wood and stones that make up the city still those that she claimed when she arrived on the island and called it her own. Words, even spoken words, can be written permanently onto a landscape and shape how a nation sees itself. If worldbuilding serves to construct an imaginary world, then perhaps a chronicle works to build an imaginary past for an existing world. Brutus places his name over Albin’s, but the chronicle presents them side-by-side, creating a national identity out of an amalgam of fantastic origins.

When Giants Walked the Earth: Jurassic Park, The Legend of Albina, and Inherited Topography

Having recently been to see Jurassic Park in 3D, I have felt a renewed enthusiasm for dinosaurs. Kate's delightful post on "Deadline Anxiety and Dinosaurs" further reminded me of the wonders of the classic film. At the same time, I was working on a paper about the legend of Albina for Plymouth's 34th Annual Medieval and Renaissance Forum, which led me to connect the two in my mind. Let me start with a recap of each story:

Jurassic Park is a tale about scientists who figure out how to bring dinosaurs back through the magic of DNA. Chaos ensues.

The legend of Albina (or, sometimes in Middle English, Albin) gives an origin story for the name Albion. Albina is a princess from Greece (or perhaps Syria) who plots with her many sisters to murder their husbands and is thus exiled on a rudderless ship. Fate intervenes, and the women land safely on an unnamed, uninhabited island at the edge of the world. Albina calls the mysterious land Albion after herself and goes about setting up a home there. Mating with incubi, Albina and her sisters produce giant offspring and populate the island with their monstrous progeny. The giants rule the island for 800 years, and then Brutus shows up from the wreckage of Troy. He kills the giants and renames the island Britain for himself. He tames the wilderness and cultivates the land. From the wood and stones of the island, he fashions a New Troy that we call London.

On the surface, I will admit that these two stories have little in common. A modern warning story about the dangers of unexamined scientific exploration and a medieval mytho-historic explanation for the name Albion might seem, quite literally, worlds apart. And yet fortune has thrown them together in my mind, and I'd like to humor myself by thinking about possible connections.


The edge of the world seems like a good place to stop Like dinosaurs, the giants of the Albina story walk the same land that we inhabit. The only thing that separates us from these frightening and yet fascinating forebears is time. Though we're not descended from them -- both dinosaurs and giants have been extinct since prehistory -- we have inherited their realm. As Jurassic Park opens, paleontologists in Montana are digging up fossils. The ease with which they dig up these fossils has been making paleontologists chuckle and children look optimistically at their toy shovels ever since the film opened. The image of these fossils, hidden away by the sands of time and yet still just below the surface of our landscape, connects these ancient bird-lizards to our own countryside. Time may separate us from the dinosaurs, the movie seems to indicate, but only by a couple feet of dust. Their bones lie under our feet, and our land was theirs first.

Similarly, the Albin story imagines British history beginning with monstrous creatures: a murderous woman, a mother of monsters. The image of a man called Brutus pulling himself from the carnage of his fallen city and making his way to an island on the edge of the world was widely recited in medieval England. The story usually begins with Brutus landing on the island, finding it populated with barely-human giants, and conquering the land by dispatching of these unpleasant natives. Surely this is a colonial fantasy, in which the colonizer need not feel guilt for taking over a new land because the inhabitants can be discounted as less than human. The versions of this story that insert the Albina legend in the beginning, however, shift the reader's perspective. In these texts, we follow not Brutus but Albina to the island; we sit with the giants on the shore as Brutus sails up to claim the land and rename it for himself. Brutus may kill these giants, Brutus may remake the landscape into his own version of civilization, but the story still begins with Albina and her larger-than-life children. They stomp around, and their movements undoubtedly shift and mold the topography, carving out lakes and valleys and mountains with their rumbling steps. The wilderness that Brutus discovers when he arrives on the island still lurks beneath and beyond the streets and buildings he commissions. The people who live in the London of the 14th century (or today) may not be able to trace their ancestry back to Albin or her outsized offspring, but the chronological and topographical link is nonetheless inherent in the narrative. In The Short English Metrical Chronicle, readers are told that Albina landed "here" and on "this land" (307, 306). There is never any doubt in the text that her location, even before it has a name, is the reader's location as well. We can kill off the monsters, the legend seems to tell us, but we can't escape their influence. The island may be Britain, but it is Albion as well. As with the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park, only time stands between us and the monsters from whom we inherited our earth.


What is this strange, four-wheeled creature? Jurassic Park increases this uneasy sense of chronology with a particularly 1990s fable in which technology can bridge the gap between past and present. Dinosaur DNA, with a little frog DNA thrown in for good measure, initiates a shocking confrontation with the past. As with the story of Saint Erkenwald speaking to a long-dead judge (see my Titanic post for more on that), our paleontologists can see the bones they've studied come to vibrant life. I was speaking with some fellow medievalists recently about how Jurassic Park is a fantasy for anyone who studies the past. We can collect our evidence, we can imagine how it must have been, but we know that there's always a little bit of guesswork, a little bit of our own time and place getting in our way. The centuries are, despite our best efforts, an unpassable obstacle to full engagement with past people and places and events. When Doctors Alan Grant and Ellie Sattler (played by Sam Neill and Laura Dern, respectively) gaze in wonder at the living versions of the fossils they have studied for so many years, it's hard not to feel a sympathetic twinge. When Alan Grant murmurs gleefully "They do move in herds," I can't help but think that I would make similar comments if I got to view a performance of the medieval York Cycle or a production of Shakespeare at the original Globe. And when the doctors pet and hug a living triceratops, the tactile interaction means that they are literally touching a creature of the past. The new 3D version enhances these interactions and confrontations by making the dinosaurs appear to pop out of the screen toward us as we watch. The years have been kind to these dinosaurs, and they appear more real than ever. Yet these dinosaurs, made from prehistoric DNA, are still born here and now. They're still in a contemporary landscape, no matter the efforts put into recreating a proper habitat (maybe this is why that triceratops is so ill). The bit of modern frog DNA making up each one means that, even on a genetic level, they are modern creatures even as they are ancient ones. The closest we can come is still imperfect. Still, ultimately, dangerous in its imperfections.

Even as time in Jurassic Park is both then and now, place is both real and imagined. We may recognize the Montana badlands, but Snakewater is a fictional Montana city. The backstory of this fossil paradise is that it was originally an island. In other words, a fictional place was once a fictional island, subsumed into the middle of the modern-day United States. The park itself is built upon a fictional island as well, Isla Nublar (meaning something like "clouded island" or even "obscure island"), just off the coast of Costa Rica. As with Snakewater, Isla Nublar is given a specific location in relation to real geography (and, of course, was filmed in a real place that we may visit if we wish), and yet it is imaginary. Off the coast of the known lies the land of the film, connected to the world we know and yet always separate from it.

Albina is given a much more specific location in that she lands where the reader now stands. Her time at sea may exist in a geotemporal shadow realm, but before and after she travels we can point to her on a map. As I mentioned above, she lands "here." And when Brutus comes to the island, the city he builds is the city we now call London. Her island is not ours -- it is a mythic wilderness ruled by overly-ambition women and their overly-corporeal descendants. They are vanished into the past. Their imaginary bones are dust, and we cannot simply dig them up in our backyards. Yet if their bones are dust, even the dust of legend, then that dust makes up the story of the modern island. Albion both is and isn't Britain.


Not as cuddly as you might think The monsters of our past (the monstrosity of the past?) is both frightening and fascinating. (For a detailed examination of this paradox, see Monster Theory, especially Jeffrey Jerome Cohen's sixth thesis: "Fear of the Monster is Really a Kind of Desire" (16).) Albina may create giants from her lust, forging progeny with an incubus to populate the island, but her desire isn't totally disconnected from our own readerly desire. Albin and her giants and her alien-familiar wilderness are tantalizing fictions of British chronology. Similarly, dinosaurs maintain the capacity to terrify and attract us. When I was four or five, I received a blow-up Tyrannosaurus Rex for Christmas. Obsessed with T-Rex, I was delighted with this gift. I couldn't wait for my father to blow up the toy so I could exist in an imaginary dinosaur world with my T-Rex friend. Yet when night came, I was suddenly panicked because I knew that a T-Rex prowled in my house. I begged my father to deflate it for the safety of everyone involved. For the next several days, we repeated this pattern. By day, I loved my T-Rex; by night, I wanted him annihilated. Finally, my dad, exhausted from blowing up a four-foot-tall dinosaur day after day, said I could choose special days to play with my T-Rex, but that it couldn't be everyday. The terror induced by the T-Rex and velociraptors in the film is not the only reason it has been so popular. Yes, we love to be afraid of dinosaurs, but we also just love dinosaurs. The tender moments of the film in which characters lovingly pet peacefully plant-eating dinosaurs are there for a reason. Whether we would hide from T-Rex in a bathroom or wave a flare at her to distract her from the children, we know that she is deadly. The way that Dr. Grant revels in frightening an obnoxious child with a description of the velociraptor's hunting style at the beginning of the film gets echoed in the famous last words of Robert Muldoon (played by Bob Peck) as a velociraptor leaps toward him: "Clever Girl!" He admires her for outsmarting him even in his last breath.

An aspect of the monsters of the past that makes us love and fear them is that they can't really be controlled. Albina's father sends her away on a rudderless ship, a punishment which is surely a death sentence. A punishment which robs her of narrative control as she floats powerlessly around the world. Yet she manages to claim a land for herself, to attach her name to that land and to become a part of a nation's history. Even as she and her sisters consider their position as an island full of women, they find a way to reproduce, monstrous and unnatural as that way is, producing as it does children who are both more and less than humans. Brutus may tame the land by killing Albina's monster-children, but they haunt British chronicles nonetheless.

In Jurassic Park, modern science and technology may seem to contain and control the past even as they resurrect it, but the monsters of the past defy such efforts. The opening scene, in which a velociraptor manages to kill a worker even in the most carefully planned situation, indicates for us from the first moments of the film that modern knowledge has met its match. When we are told later that the velociraptors methodically test each section of their fence for weakness, it's clear that they do not take well to their high-tech cage. Dr. Ian Malcolm (played by Jeff Goldblum) sums up the dangers of such attempts at containment when he states that "the kind of control you're attempting simply is... it's not possible. If there is one thing the history of evolution has taught us it's that life will not be contained. Life breaks free, it expands to new territories and crashes through barriers, painfully, maybe even dangerously, but, uh... well, there it is." In this speech, monstrous vitality is life itself, that which breaks free of control and simply finds a way. Everything on Isla Nublar is an attempt at control, down to the jeeps which can't be steered (am I going too far to compare these to medieval rudderless ships, outside of their riders' control and yet firmly on the track of fate?). The designers of the park may have automated the vehicles, but it never occurred to them that riders could (or would) simply open the jeep doors and step outside. Given all of these hints, we're not terribly surprised when we see a dinosaur egg in the wild. Despite the careful breeding of only female dinosaurs, we learn that these dinosaurs, made partly with frog DNA, can switch sexes in order to reproduce. Like Albin and her sisters, the dinosaurs manage to procreate even when denied the normal means of doing so. They can neither be kept in cages nor kept from expanding their population.


At least Skull Island had King KongWe might say that the real monster of the film is human greed, but this very greed is predicated on human desire to encounter dinosaurs. The monsters can only menace us because we bring them back in order to do so. John Hammond (played by Richard Attenborough) speaks with wonder of creating a park in which people can see and touch real dinosaurs, and he says plainly that "this park was not built to cater only for the super-rich. Everyone in the world has the right to enjoy these animals." But his wonder at scientific possibility, in the real world, translates into the chaos that characterizes the film from the opening scene. We never believe that things are going to go well, even as we also to want to see and touch the dinosaurs.

I am not saying that Jurassic Park is a modern-day Albina myth, nor that either Michael Chrichton or Steven Spielberg had considered or even read the obscure medieval tale when they created first book and then movie of this modern story. Rather, I suggest that attempts to engage with the past, or to imagine how that engagement might take place, may partake of the larger-than-life. The past is monstrous in that it is both wholly other and wholly familiar, in that it is distant and yet part of us, in that the here and now will inevitably become the past. The past, whether we understand it or not, will always swallow the present. The giant lurks just beneath the surface of our modern world, unattainable and yet tempting us with possible proximity. Albina, giants, dinosaurs, titans -- all are creatures of the past both consumed and consuming. And, yes, I would probably visit Jurassic Park, even knowing what I know. Who could resist?

In fields where they lay: The Second Shepherds' Play as the original Christmas special

Second Shepherds' Play Manuscript
Huntingdon Library MS HM1, fol. 38r

In keeping with my tradition of writing a holiday blog (started last year with Gawain and the Green Knight), I would like to write this year on another of my favorite medieval Christmas stories, The Second Shepherds' Pageant. The Second Shepherds' Pageant, also called The Second Shepherds' Play, has been burdened with its confusing title simply because it's the second play on shepherds in the Towneley manuscript (though the two weren't necessarily meant to be performed as a pair). Though the play is anonymous, the author has become known as the Wakefield Master. The play inserts common shepherds into the nativity story, and it combines social commentary and humor with piety. Simultaneously medieval England and biblical Bethlehem, the play is a beautiful example of the ways in which biblical stories were alive for medieval people through medieval dramatic practices.

The play opens with a lone shepherd's complaint. The weather is cold, and conditions are intolerable for poor men, who are beaten down by hard living and made submissive to the gentry. Both the weather and the social structures described sound an awful lot like late medieval England. As other shepherds arrive on the scene, squabbling (good-natured and otherwise) ensues. When Mak, a man of unsavory reputation, makes an appearance, the shepherds greet him with suspicion. Their suspicion soon proves well-founded, as Mak slips away while the shepherds nap and steals a prize sheep. He takes it to his wife, Gill, and the two concoct a plan. If the shepherds come looking for their missing sheep, they will put the lamb in their cradle and Gill will pretend to be in childbirth. Mak and Gill are known for having children constantly (sometimes twice a year, Mak complains earlier in the play), so her sudden condition shouldn't take any one by surprise. The trick works well at first. The shepherds do show up quickly (and angrily) to seek their lost lamb, but Mak begs them to pity his wife in her childbed while Gill makes terrible moans. The shepherds finally leave, and Mak and Gill breathe a sigh of relief. But then one shepherd realizes that he gave the new baby no gift, and the others respond in kind. Their generosity proves troublesome for our thieving couple, when the shepherds return and pull the swaddling clothes aside to present the child with birthday presents. They cry out that the child is a monster, and then recognize that monster as their own missing lamb. It's no accident that they only discover their lamb once they turn from anger against Mak and Gill to generosity toward the "child." At this point the play, so farcical in tone, could turn deadly. The shepherds have a right to execute Mak for what he's done. After some deliberation, they turn merciful and decide to toss him up in a blanket instead, a humorous solution to the problem. Tired out, they lie in their field to sleep. As if in response to their mercy, a star appears and an angel tells the shepherds of the birth of a savior. They go to seek the Christ child in his manger, and this time they do remember gifts. They give cherries, a bird, and a ball (meant to symbolize life in a time of death, the holy spirit, and a royal orb, respectively). This story, an alternate to the Magi, shows us not wise men, but everymen. They are common shepherds, people the audience might know, granted entrance into the joyous and miraculous scene of the nativity itself.

The setting of the play is particularly resonant, since it is always both Yorkshire and the Holy Land. The characters talk of walking on the moors, and mention many English locations throughout the play. When Mak first arrives, he pretends to speak with a southern English accent, and the others tease him until he resumes his customary Yorkshire speech. People and place all seem firmly located around Wakefield itself. Yet when the star appears, the shepherds need not travel far to find Bethlehem. And, as David Bevington notes in his Medieval Drama, there would have been two platforms for the play. Mak and Gill's house would have been parallel to the manger on the set, with the shepherds' field in between, connecting the two and presumably holding the audience as well. Bevington explains how the staging gives "a visible form to the parallelism of the farcical and serious action. Although the Wakefield Master never calls explicit attention to the resemblance between the two births, the stage itself would help make the point" (384). The playing space would have visually enacted the themes of the play, yoking together sacred and profane, past and present, there and here. For many people in medieval England, the Bible itself was inaccessible. Books were expensive and the Bible was in Latin. Medieval Drama was thus an important way in which people of the period engaged with scriptural material in a highly interactive way. They wrote and acted in these plays. They stood in their city centers among biblical set-pieces and cheered and laughed and booed and cried. Perhaps they threw things at devils and perhaps they sang along with songs they knew. Puritans were horrified by such spectacles, wanting people to have access to scripture itself instead. But the plays give us insight into the way people of late medieval England saw these as living stories, as stories that were real parts of their own lives and with which they could engage actively. Real emotions, including humor, could be part of sacred drama. Biblical time and place collapsed with contemporary English spaces. The Second Shepherds' Play takes the collapse of time and place to an extreme as the play inserts Yorkshire shepherds into the nativity. In fact, the majority of the play follows these shepherds, who could be anyone from anywhere and anytime, and yet are also clearly from Yorkshire. It's not until the star appears near the end of the play that we get any overt hint that this is a Christmas story. The play seems to suggest that even mundane moments can be part of a miraculous larger narrative, that we are all part of this narrative together and that it thus continues to have real existence in the world.

I had the good fortune to see the play performed at the Folger Institute several years ago when my good friend and colleague Dan Stokes and I participated in an Early English Drama workshop there, and the performance was engaging, beautiful, hilarious, and moving. I laughed; I cried. I know that sounds cliché, but I really did laugh and cry over the course of the production. And I wasn't the only one. The most amazing part was the mixed audience. Scholar of medieval drama sat next to families with small children, and all were captivated. Dan and I were having a pint at the pub after the performance, and we saw the actor who played Mak there. When we told him how much we'd enjoyed it, he was thrilled and offered to buy us a round. Apparently, the actors had been terribly nervous that night, since they knew that the academics were coming to the show. We reassured him that they had managed to make the play both wonderfully accessible and scholarly fascinating. In fact, I found it fitting that this play had remained so engaging to so wide an audience. The way in which the play infuses the familiar and yet incredible story of the nativity with everyday people and their hijinks is striking even to modern audiences. The way that these quarreling, complaining, scheming characters can be so moved by the baby in the manger lends the final scene a real sense of awe.

As funny as the play is, the ending is surprisingly poignant. These characters we have come to know seem a bit awkward in the holy scene, but they are so genuinely enamored with the baby that it's hard not to feel a shared sense of joy in the moment. Their gifts to the child may be simple, but they are heartfelt. And the manger is a humble space not unfamiliar to our common shepherds. A play that could have ended in death (either of the sheep or of Mak), ends instead in miraculous birth. And while the symbolism of the lamb in not lost, nor is the audience unaware of the larger story which includes the Passion, we are allowed for a moment, like the shepherds, to just enjoy the scene. Affective piety was popular in the later Middle Ages, and holy people imagined themselves at the foot of the cross and felt the pain and sorrow of that moment. The Second Shepherds' Play gives us a chance for a different kind of affective engagement, one in which we place ourselves instead in the manger and feel the shared joy. After I saw the play performed, the group of us remarked at how moving it was to all of us, despite our different belief systems. The message is one of mercy and joy and hope, a sense that any one of us could play a part at any moment in something greater than ourselves. This year has been difficult for many, and these last few weeks filled with unimaginable heartache (see Kate's recent beautiful post on the Coventry Carol). I only hope that we can respond to tragedy with compassion. Like the red cherries picked in the frozen white winter, like the baby born when nights are longest and days are coldest, even the bleakest moments are available to hope and beauty. And the beauty of basic human compassion is that we all have the power to bring it into the world. Perhaps this is the perfect time to think about how the simplest things can be miraculous. Even moments that are common or silly or petty or sad can be made precious if we remember to treat each other with kindness. With that in mind, I wish you all a season filled with love.

One foot in the sea and the other on land

What it looks like between coasts when I fly

As I transition from one coast to another, one school year to another, and one season to another, I think a lot about thresholds. I try hard to think of each phase or moment or experience in my life as a thing unto itself instead of a place between. Graduate school, for example, could be a liminal space between college and career, but it seems a shame to think of such an extended period of my life as simply a means to an end (especially in this uncertain market). Sometimes I sit in a coffee shop, reading or writing, and I really reflect on how privileged I am to be able to spend some years of my life learning and thinking and growing as a person and a scholar. How amazing it is to sit in the afternoon sunlight, reading a book and learning even more about the things I love. How incredible it is to work with students and to see them really think about literature and the world around them. Even the struggle to come up with new ideas, the intensity of teaching, the insecurities which come with grad school -- those are a part of my life, a part of all that's good in it and all that makes it worthwhile to me. These years, I must remind myself, are valuable unto themselves.

An overflowing border

As a medievalist, the struggle against the idea of middles is constant. Though the term "Middle Ages" is certainly less pejorative than "Dark Ages," it still gives a sense of a period between the glory of Rome and the Renaissance. A placeholder in history. It seems doubtful to me that people woke up on New Year's Day of 1500 (or 1495 or 1450 or 1350 or 1300 …) and felt suddenly reborn. Even midnight on New Year's, which seems to be a crystal-clear liminal point, shatters when we consider all of the time zones of the world. Watching through a television set in the United States as the ball drops in Australia, I can't help but feel a bit unsettled about our privileging of that particular moment. Nor can I fail to notice when I reach the new year in New York before my friends in California do. And this is not to mention the fact that there are different calendars in the world that have different New Year's, and the fact that even our Gregorian calendar has been used with different New Year's in mind. In the Middle Ages there seem to have been several possible dates, and people in the Early Modern period celebrated on March 25th. How are we to find the point of transition if it keeps moving? And what do we do with a transition period, a middle, that takes up a thousand years? It's interesting that we often think of middle as center, as central. We often see those things on the periphery as less important. Yet in history as in our lives it's easy to see moments or years or centuries as simply between the real thing. Not only does this kind of thinking ignore realities of connection and continuity, but it denies the importance of the individual dots on the timeline.

Fleeting traces of our threshold presence

On my trip home I spent some nice afternoons at the beach, visiting my much-missed Pacific Ocean, and I thought about how hard it often is to pinpoint a precise spot where one time or space ends and another begins. I walked through that tricky line on the shore where dry feet and wet feet are only moments apart, and I examined that strip of sand. What was above water one moment was below it the next, and even the extent to which the water reached was always different. The curved border between dry sand and wet sand (and even wetter sand) shifts constantly, and must be slightly different each day. Indeed, it must change throughout the day as well, and in more subtle ways than just the changing tides. As I rolled up my jeans and moved closer to the water, I noticed that the way the water moves over the sand is new each time, that the ripples of water are ever-changing and that they leave an imprint both of their shape and their substance on the sand behind them. As I tried to discern the line between the realms of ocean and sea, I found that there really is no simple answer. There is no line and there's always a line and there are a million different lines. I spoke in my paper at the recent NCS conference on the Man of Law's Tale about how the realms of land and sea are never as separate as they appear on the map, and it was good to actually look at the space between and in those realms. So often I find myself getting caught up in the theoretical. Of course I am a literature person -- examining texts is what I do. And I'm a medievalist -- thinking about things long ago is my job. But after writing so much about concepts of time and space and the ocean, it's good to get reacquainted with the ocean itself. To get my feet wet again, as it were.

The waves leave behind remnants of sea, land, and air

On my trip I was reading Rachel Carson's The Sea Around Us, and was struck by a passage from the preface to the 1961 edition describing how the floor of the deep sea "receives[s] sediments from the margins of the continents" such as "bits of wood and leaves, and … sands containing nuts, twigs, and the bark of trees" (x).The abyssal plains, therefore, include tangible pieces of the coast. And it is also the waters of the world that have carved out valleys and canyons now well above ground. Water has in many ways shaped our landscapes, just as the land provides the floor of our oceans and rivers. Carson explains of the ocean's formation that water wore away the land to create the ocean, while the minerals from these worn-away continents gave the sea its saltiness in "an endless, inexorable process that has never stopped" (7). In other words, the water continually shapes the land, while the land ceaselessly gives the ocean its salty form. Over the long history of the earth, land and sea have merged, shifted, and forged one another. Geological time, it seems, has its own ideas about topographical and temporal boundaries. To try to think of any particular space or time as its own separate entity really only works in a single instant. Even in that instant the lines are fraught, but only in that instant are lines really visible. Boundaries and borders are shifting, fleeting, intersecting. I played with this notion by snapping pictures of the space where ocean meets shore in order to try to capture some of those threshold moments. And even in my photographs, I cannot really tell for sure where water ends and sand begins. Can you?

Where does the sea end and the land begin?

On Time and the Garden

Asheville skyline and Blue Ridge Mountains

I've had a whirlwind summer thus far, and it's gone by too fast (especially since there's still so much more work to do . . .). I've tried to research and write, and taken on many (too many) side projects (as my last post mentioned). I've been planning a brand-new ESOL course, which I'll teach in the fall and spring. I had a beautiful road trip to Asheville, North Carolina to help my friend Ali move, and enjoyed spending time there with close friends and exploring both the city itself and the surrounding Blue Ridge Mountains. I also attended my first New Chaucer Society conference in Portland, Oregon. I found the conference to be, as the best conferences always are, equal parts invigorating and exhausting. All of the panels I attended were excellent and the discussion lively. My own panel went really well. I got great questions, and I felt that all of the papers worked together beautifully to bring out new ideas. I was also lucky enough to be presenting on the same panel with my friend Sharon, who gave her first conference paper, which was excellent. I was reminded once again of how lucky I am to be in a field with such intelligent, warm, lively people.They're people who pose interesting questions and allow for productive dialogue.

Portland Chinese Gardens
(Where the reflections are more real than the buildings.)

This conference is set up particularly well for graduate students, with generous financial assistance, a full-day graduate seminar, and a generally welcoming environment in which all are made to feel part of the community. I met some new people and spent time with old friends; I saw many wonderful papers and a really outstanding plenary lecture by Carolyn Dinshaw. Dinshaw spoke eloquently about history and temporality and Mandeville's Travels. I also got to explore Portland a bit and to visit some delightful family members whom I don't see often enough.

Countryside outside my hometown
(Where I've had some new adventures this trip)

Now, after two years away, I am home for a visit to Northern California. The last time I was home, I was here for the birth of my friend Dominique's son. This time I made it to that son's second birthday party. The differences between the newborn baby and two-year-old make concrete for me the temporal distance between my last visit and this one. I am staying with my grandmother in my childhood home, a place filled with memories of the times I had there and the people I've loved who used to live there and who live there still. I still expect to discover my grandfather dozing in a chair when I walk into a new room. I still expect to hear my father's voice calling for me from the next room to come and see something he's discovered in the newspaper or in a book or online. I am aware of the way in which the space I'm in exists relatively unchanged, and only time separates me from previous moments in the same locations. I'm particularly struck by the garden, much grander than it was when I was a child. I spent so many happy hours in that yard, swinging on my swing set or having adventures or pretending to be in a fairy land.

Roses from our garden

My grandpa spent many hours in the yard as well, working in his treasured rose garden and planting new varieties of tomato. Three activities my grandfather loved above all: photography, hiking, and gardening. I would swing and he would garden and we would need no words to express our contentment. I see traces of him everywhere in this garden. Flowers that he planted still bloom each year, their colors bursting forth from the past into the present. My dad loved the garden, too, and had information and opinions on every plant. When we had landscaping done some years back, my father would bake treats and make snacks and bring them out to the gardeners and just talk to them for hours. When I stand in the garden now, I feel comforted in knowing that a space they both loved so much is still thriving.

Park outside of Portland

I was primed by the NCS conference to think about time and the garden. There was so much discussion at the conference of time, history, and space (as with the plenary I mentioned above), of ecologies, of objects. (There was also a whole thread on oceans! I presented on a panel in this thread, and saw some other incredible oceans panels as well.) One of the conference receptions was held in the beautiful Chinese Gardens, a lush location which fostered much happy mingling between scholars young and old (aided by a generous sprinkling of champagne). I had also gone for a walk outside of Portland with my cousins Susan and John, who had explained to me that the topography we saw (verdant trees and brooks) would have covered downtown Portland, a fairly new city, only about a hundred years ago. Trees have been cleared away to make room for streets and buildings, but wild greenery still makes its presence known around the margins of the city. We walked from this landscape past the mowed lawns of suburban Portland, and I noticed the similarities and differences of these landscapes. I also visited the Buffalo Botanical Gardens earlier this summer, a Victorian greenhouse wonderland filled with spaces that seem wild (carnivorous plants lurk in one spot, koi fish swim playfully in another), and yet in which everything is contained and categorized. The rooms are carefully themed and the enclosed nature of the space allows for a great deal of control. With all these experiences this summer, both recreational and professional, I was uniquely prepared to think about urban spaces and greenery as I returned to my childhood home.

Buffalo Botanical Gardens

Gardens are complex spaces; they're natural and yet cultivated. My grandmother talks brightly to me of one plant that has been carefully chosen and another, right next to the first, which, as she puts it, "the birds brought to us -- a delightful surprise." No matter how deliberately a garden is maintained or controlled (I'm looking at you, topiary), the natural world will make its mark. Animals and weather patterns, for example, cannot be easily regulated. So the garden is both natural and manmade. Gardens are popular spots in medieval literature because of their liminal existence in a variety of categories. They blur the line between public and private, outside and inside. Medieval dream vision poems most often begin in gardens, complicating the distinction between awake and asleep, reality and dreaming. I am reading Bachelard's book on The Poetics of Space right now, and he praises the house for enabling us to dream. In medieval literature, it is often the garden that facilitates dreaming (though Chaucer sometimes writes about falling asleep in bed while reading a good book, a practice all too familiar to me).

Can you spot the swing?

There's also a real way in which the garden we have now is the garden of my family's dreams. Much planning and discussion and work and love went into the garden, and everyone felt as if they were witnessing, as the plants grew and blossomed, their floral visions coming to vivid life. And, in some cases, exceeding imagination. Plants grow and change and interact in surprising ways. I walked into the backyard and was astonished at how plants have covered my old swing set. A tiny swing emerges from a tangle of leaves and flowers, barely visible from a distance. When I was young, it was the swing set which defined that backyard space for me. Its crisp lines divided the space and were easily visible from inside the house. Now, from inside, I could almost miss the swing if I didn't know it were there. I moved into this home when I was seven, and the swing set was there waiting for me. It is the same swing set that my dad and aunt and uncle played on before I was born. My grandpa put that swing set up in the yard in 1964 when they moved to this house, but it had been in the family before that, traveling with them from Oxnard to Santa Cruz to Sunnyvale before landing here in Petaluma. My grandparents first set up the swing set around 1950, before my father was born, so he played on it his whole childhood and then I did the same. The swing set always seemed to me a tangible object connecting me to my father's childhood. It connected me to past and future, ground and sky. If I swung high enough, I could see both our own yard and over the fence to the plum trees in the yard next door. There's a freedom for a child in swinging, but a contained freedom, a comfortable kind of freedom. Within the confines of our yard I could have adventures and know that an adult was right around the corner. The swing set always seemed a permanent fixture, rooted in the ground like a metal tree, a part of the yard more reliable than the fleeting petals that visited the garden in spring. The fact that the swing set had in fact been relocated multiple times, that it neither grew from the yard nor originated there, simply didn't fit with my conception of my childhood.

A new photo I made to look old
-- more playing with time

Flowers bloomed and wilted, but that swing set was always there, would always be there. Now, as the leaves and flowers cover and enclose the swing, I see that the swing set really has been taken into the garden. The overgrowth has made the set its own, has turned it into a kind of trellis, covered by plants but also holding them up in a kind of symbiosis of metal and paint and flower and leaf. Unlike the inside of the house, the garden really looks nothing like it did when I was little; changes happen and are made to happen. But if I look close enough I can see traces of my childhood, of my dad's childhood and my grandparents' adult life. The swing is still there, hidden amidst the leaves like a secret memory; the baby rosebush my grandpa planted for me in seventh grade (a rough year for me, as for many kids) still blooms amid newer plants. Layers of vegetation and layers of memory intertwine in that space which is both of the house and separate from it. Some of the same plants bloom, but their petals are new each year, highlighting the ways in which temporality and tangibility can be both very fragile and very real.