We know no more about the constitution of water than we do about that of blood. What is most easily discerned, in the case of the seawater mucus, is that it is simultaneously an end and a beginning. Is it a product of the innumerable residues of death, who would yield them to life? That is without doubt a law; but in fact, in this marine world, of rapid absorption, most beings are absorbed live; they do not drag out a state of death, as occurs on the earth, where destructions are slower.
But life, without arriving at its supreme dissolution, moults or sheds, ceaselessly, exudes from itself all which is superfluous to it. In the case of us, terrestrial animals, the epidermis is shed incessantly. These moults which could be called a daily and partial death, fill the world of the seas with gelatinous richness from which newborn life profits momently. It finds, in suspension, the oily superabundance of this common exudation, the still animated particules, the still living liquids, which have no time to die. All this does not fall back into an inorganic state but rapidly enters new organisms. This is the most likely of all the hypotheses; if we abandon that, we find ourselves in extreme difficulties.
It can be understood why Ash wrote to this man at this time that he "saw the inner meaning of Plato's teaching that the world was one huge animal."
And what might a stringent modern psychoanalytic criticism make of all this feverish activity? To what needs in the individual psyche did this frenzy of dissection and "generative" observation correspond?
It is my belief that at this point in time Randolph had reached what we crudely call a "mid-life crisis," as had his century. He, the great psychologist, the great poetic student of individual lives and identities, saw that before him was nothing but decline and decay, that his individual being would not be extended by progeny, that men burst like bubbles. He turned away, like many, from individual sympathies with dying or dead men to universal sympathies with Life, Nature and the Universe. It was a kind of Romanticism reborn-gemmated, so to speak, from the old stock of Romanticism-but intertwined with the new mechanistic analysis and the new optimism not about the individual soul, but about the eternal divine harmony of the universe. Like Tennyson, Ash saw that Nature was red in tooth and claw. He responded by taking an interest in the life-continuing functions of the digestive functions of all forms, from the amoeba to the whale.
Maud decided she intuited something terrible about Cropper's imagination from all this. He had a peculiarly vicious version of reverse hagiography: the desire to cut his subject down to size. She indulged herself in a pleasant thought about the general ambiguity of the word "subject" in this connection. Was Ash subject to Cropper's research methods and laws of thought? Whose subjectivity was being studied? Who was the subject of the sentences of the text, and how did Cropper and Ash fit into Lacan's perception that the grammatical subject of a statement differs from the subject, the
"I," who is the object discussed by that statement? Were these thoughts original, Maud wondered, and decided almost necessarily not, all the possible thoughts about literary subjectivity had recently and strenuously been explored.
Elsewhere in his chapter, almost inevitably, Cropper had quoted Moby Dick.
Still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.
Narcissism, the unstable self, the fractured ego, Maud thought, who am I? A matrix for a susurration of texts and codes? It was both a pleasant and an unpleasant idea, this requirement that she think of herself as intermittent and partial. There was the question of the awkward body. The skin, the breath, the eyes, the hair, their history, which did seem to exist.
She stood by the uncurtained window and brushed her hair, looking up at the moon, which was full, and hearing a few faraway airy rushings off the North Sea.
Then she got into bed, and, with the same scissoring movement as Roland next door, swam down under the white sheets.
Semiotics nearly spoiled their first day. They drove out to Flamborough, in the little green car, following their certain predecessor and guide, Mortimer Cropper in his black Mercedes, his predecessor, Randolph Ash, and the hypothetical ghost, Christabel LaMotte. They walked out, in these footsteps, to Filey Brigg, not sure any more what they were looking for, feeling it impermissible simply to enjoy themselves. They paced well together, though they didn't notice that; both were energetic striders.
Cropper had written:
Randolph spent long hours poring over rockpools, deep and shallow, on the north side of the Brigg. He could be seen stirring the phosphorescent matter in them with his ashplant, and diligently collecting it in buckets, taking it home to study such microscopic animalcules as Noctilucae and Naked-eye Medusae "which are indistinguishable to the naked eye from foam bubbles" but on inspection turned out to be "globular masses of animated jelly with mobile tails." Here too, he collected his sea-anemones (Actiniae) and bathed in the Emperor's Bath-a great, greenish rounded hollow in which a legendary Roman Emperor disported himself. Randolph's historical imagination, ever active, must have taken pleasure in this direct connection with the distant past of the region.
Roland found a sea-anemone, the colour of a dark blood-blister, tucked under a pitted ledge above a layer of glistering gritty sand, pink and gold and bluish and black. It looked simple and ancient, and very new and shining. It was flourishing a vigorous crown of agitating and purposeful feelers, sifting and stirring the water. Its colour was like cornelian, like certain dark and ruddy ambers. Its stem or base or foot held the rock and stood sturdy.
Maud sat on a ledge above Roland's pool, her long legs tucked under her, The Great Ventriloquist open on her knee. She cited Cropper citing Ash:
"Imagine a glove expanded into a perfect cylinder by air, the thumb being removed and the fingers encircling, in two or three rows, the summit of the cylinder, while at the base the glove is closed by a flat surface of leather. If now on that disc which lies within the circle of fingers we press down the centre, and so force the elastic leather to fold inwards, and form a sort of sac suspended in a cylinder, we have by this means made a mouth and stomach…"
"A curious comparison," said Roland.
"Gloves in LaMotte are always to do with secrecy and decorum. Covering things up. Also with Blanche Glover, of course."
"Ash wrote a poem called The Glove. About a mediaeval Lady who gave one to a knight to wear as a favour. It was 'milky-white with seed-pearls.' "
"Cropper says here that Ash supposed wrongly that the ovaries of the Actinia were in the fingers of the glove…”
“I couldn't understand, as a little boy, where the knight wore the glove. Still can't, as a matter of fact."
"Cropper goes on about how Ash meditated on his own name. That's interesting. Christabel certainly meditated on Glover. It produced some fine and disturbing poems."
"Ash wrote a passage in Ragnarôk about the time when the god Thor hid in a huge cave which turned out to be the little finger of a giant's glove. That was the giant who tricked him into trying to swallow the sea."
"Or there's Henry James on Balzac, saying he wriggled his way into the constituted consciousness like fingers into a glove."
"That's a phallic image."