81 - Ariel IV: Ship
Eliot on Pericles and Marina, and a TV/Movie review bumper issue!
Ariel IV – Ship
Quis hic locus, quae regio, quae mundi plaga?
What seas what shores what grey rocks and what islands
What water lapping the bow
And scent of pine and the woodthrush singing through the fog
What images return
O my daughter.
Those who sharpen the tooth of the dog, meaning
Death
Those who glitter with the glory of the hummingbird, meaning
Death
Those who sit in the sty of contentment, meaning
Death
Those who suffer the ecstasy of the animals, meaning
Death
Are become insubstantial, reduced by a wind,
A breath of pine, and the woodsong fog
By this grace dissolved in place
What is this face, less clear and clearer
The pulse in the arm, less strong and stronger—
Given or lent? more distant than stars and nearer than the eye
Whispers and small laughter between leaves and hurrying feet
Under sleep, where all the waters meet.
Bowsprit cracked with ice and paint cracked with heat.
I made this, I have forgotten
And remember.
The rigging weak and the canvas rotten
Between one June and another September.
Made this unknowing, half conscious, unknown, my own.
The garboard strake leaks, the seams need caulking.
This form, this face, this life
Living to live in a world of time beyond me; let me
Resign my life for this life, my speech for that unspoken,
The awakened, lips parted, the hope, the new ships.
What seas what shores what granite islands towards my timbers
And woodthrush calling through the fog
My daughter.
- “Marina” by T.S. Eliot
We link two, or more, voyages here: the travels of Hercules and the voyages of Pericles, Prince of Tyre This is the first of Eliot’s Ariel poems where he moves away from Christmas-time itself, and it is also the least directly thematically connected.
Eliot is going for literary deepcuts here. Odyseus, Aeneas, and The Tempest seem the obvious touchstones, but Eliot wants to reflect spiritually on the moment of recognition in the play when Pericles realizes his daughter has returned to him. He must reflect on loss, but also on redemption and hope. The Seneca epigraph sets the scene – the disoriented, emotionally dislocated Hercules, looking at the alien shore, wondering if he has been thrown to the far east or north. That is physically true, perhaps, for Marina, but certainly emotionally true for Pericles. He has lighted on a new shore and must find his bearings.
What seas what shores what grey rocks and what islands
What water lapping the bow
And scent of pine and the woodthrush singing through the fog
What images return
O my daughter.
That is the sense of both the repeated “what” and the sudden rush and return of images from the memory. Pericles sailed back and forth to Tarsus, to deposit and then recover Marina; he has wandered the Aegean shore, he has seen grey rocks and islands and a lot of water lapping the bow; in a shock he remembers the scent of the resiny pines of Ionia, the haunting sound of birdsong in the fog; like Childe Roland before the Tower, it all rushes in on him at once.
It has been a waste, and no waste. He has – via the most convoluted and even absurd set of circumstances – comes, after the end of all hoping, to his destination. The voyages led him here.
Those who sharpen the tooth of the dog, meaning
Death
. . .
Are become insubstantial, reduced by a wind,
A breath of pine, and the woodsong fog
By this grace dissolved in place
Earthly power and grace and comfort has proven useless, or its evil has been foiled; comfort and contentment mean only death, where a fruitless voyage brings life from the dead (we recall “Accounting that God was able to raise him up, even from the dead”). The moment of recognition is not, for Pericles, solely about the temporal waste or recovery, but about a deeper revelation.
In fact, the barren journey – like the equivocal journey of the Magi we have already read about – is what now destroys the illusions of the world. The pine and wind and thrush-in-fog are now the stuff of salvation, and (we realize) always were. Without them, no Mytilene, no Lysimachus, no Marina.
What is this face, less clear and clearer
The pulse in the arm, less strong and stronger—
Given or lent? more distant than stars and nearer than the eye
Whispers and small laughter between leaves and hurrying feet
Under sleep, where all the waters meet.
I wonder if “where all the waters meet” is the single most poignant, nostalgic, heaven-seeking line in all of Eliot, even including the Quartets. Is Marina given or lent? She is a gift, that is what Pericles understands now. She – all good things – point somewhere else. They are near – they are physical realities – but also far, because their signified is Elsewhere.
Bowsprit cracked with ice and paint cracked with heat.
I made this, I have forgotten
And remember.
. . .
This form, this face, this life
Living to live in a world of time beyond me; let me
Resign my life for this life, my speech for that unspoken,
The awakened, lips parted, the hope, the new ships.
Pericles is old, nigh-dead, and his ship is the reflection of his self. Of course he looks forward to a new life with Marina, but he looks beyond that too. He looks to the ships that go to the Happy Isles – here, actually, I wonder if there is just a hint of Odysseus. The eye that has seen the Atlantic – travelling beyond the Pillars of Hercules, perhaps, or sailing out from Bristol, or entranced like Sundiata’s uncle – cannot help but know that beyond the great grey salt vastness, beyond that trap of cross-winds and ice fields and trackless foam, lies some far green country. The grace we are given now is the waymarker on that journey, if we will follow the signs.
Which is why this is a Christmas poem, too.
Sanshiro Sugata, d. Kurosawa (1943)
Kurosawa’s directorial debut and it’s an interesting, if raw, work, further confused by missing reels replaced (by the studio in the 1950s) by intertext. It’s about a would-be martial artist in Edo-era Japan who takes tutelage under a judo master, and becomes the standard bearer of that relatively novel art against various jujutsu combatants. There is a slightly airy romance subplot (probably affected by a missing reel) and a very light “anti-Western” theme, with the final rival dressing in western clothes throughout…but this is Kurosawa tipping the hat to his wartime government censors, and not at all important to the film.
What works here are the fights, which are nearly all well-set and entertaining – with one also taking place on a windswept hillside, a piece of visual language Kurosawa will not forget – and the apprenticeship period of Sanshiro, especially his stubborn despairing vigil clinging to a pole in the lily-strewn pool outside his master’s dojo. There is a genuinely spiritual sense to those scenes which again has just a touch of mature Kurosawa.
3/5
Sense and Sensibility (2008)
The three episode miniseries. Directed by John Alexander, but more importantly written by Andrew Davies, the adaptor for the great Pride and Prejudice miniseries.
There is an odd sense of a world and style in transition. This is heavily dependent on Austen dialogue, and the costumery is excellent. The use of stately home exteriors and interiors plainly calls back to the classic “trilogy” of the ‘90s, and the music is in the older style.
There are “modern” notes, though. Some are simply intelligent shooting decisions – the direction and cinematography is probably bolder here, at its best, than in Pride and Prejudice. There are misjudgements, though, and not small ones. Exempla gratia: the whole series opens with a largely unseen, “steamy”, but really slightly, unintentionally, comical sex scene (presumably Willoughby up to his tricks). There is also a fairly confusing Willougby-Brandon duel scene. (Did they agree it had been a misunderstanding after the first pass? It’s not just contextually out of nowhere, but doesn’t make sense on its own terms.)
The casting largely works. Though Andrew Davies explicitly sought to set a different course from the Ang Lee film, Hattie Morahan and Charity Wakefield are in many respects (successfully) reworking the Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet performances – though Morahan is more contained and Wakefield just a little more vibrant. Mark Williams as Sir John Middleton is excellent, and perhaps underutilized casting, and David Morrissey as Colonel Brandon is apropos. Everyone else does fine work, though Dominic Cooper offers a Willoughby performance that, vocally and physically, is just a little too modern.
This doesn’t feel terribly rushed, though it is more cramped than Pride and Prejudice or the Romola Garai Emma. S+S is a shortish book, though, and there is probably some flam to ditch.
Broadly successful.
3.5/5
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, Episodes 6-7 (1979)
Really a summary, as we finished this a month ago!
This is one episode which really concludes the “plot” of the series, and then an important wind-down. “Gerald” was Haydon, and Smiley gets the pleasure of taking him down, aided by his offbook team of Guillam, Mendel, Fawn, and Tarr. Of course, all along he has turned to the rejected and outmoded for aid and information – Sachs, Westerby, and Prideaux all fall into the same category. There is some sort of Carrean psychology in all that, I think it’s easy to surmise.
The final episode is Haydon’s debrief before exchange, and everything that comes with that. Haydon slept with Ann to queer Smiley’s pitch – it made Smiley unable to target him in any Control-era investigation, as it would seem personally motivated. But Haydon also betrayed his best friend, Jim Prideaux, and Jim knows where Bill is. The Circus is put under Smiley’s informal control, and so we get painfully vindicatory scenes of a broken Alleline nodding along, knowing he’s for the chop.
This is a series that faithfully, carefully, and ambitiously adapts pretty much the whole novel. It makes structural decisions, some of them book-based and some not, which regularly strain the format, but wholly successfully. Can you have a whole episode of falling action? Well, yes, turns out you can. Can you spend a whole episode in flashback in Portugal with characters we’ve not met? Yes, you can. Can a detective story pan out over six of the episodes, drip-feeding information? Yes, indeed.
Of course, the core performances – Guinness and Richardson as the protagonist and antagonist, but also Ian Bannen as the deuteragonist Prideaux – are central to the achievement. Guinness is the definitional Smiley, it’s clear to me, having been cultivated in a greenhouse for the role, seemingly. There is an interesting contrast with his directly parallel performance in the Star Wars trilogy to be made – Smiley is sadder, earthier, and harder all at the same time, where Obi Wan is Guinness’ gentler, happier aspects shown in full.
A perfect series.
5/5
His Dark Materials, Season 1 (2019)
Eight episodes. This, in retrospect, came out at an interesting juncture – just pre-Covid, which was also the time when the streaming giants switched to an even higher and more expensive pitch in regards to fantasy book and comic adaptations.
Most of those adaptations – not all – have turned out mediocre at best, and almost wickedly bad at worst.
His Dark Materials is almost unique in that it is actually good. Very good.
I think there are a few key elements. There is fantastic casting, yes, but also sensitive and creative direction – there are countless small gestures, thoughtful angles and lighting, and proofs of stage chemistry that betoken the closest and most successful collaboration between director and actors. You can have good actors give something very flat, or rage against mediocrity in a way that only highlights everything else being indifferent – but here even the weaker moments of script are covered by the rest of the production.
There is also a very successful envisioning of Lyra’s world, though I could really have done with even more time spent on it. Sometimes we get the atmospheric time dwelt on the rich and interesting sets; sometimes we are caught up by the modern style and hurry away. Nonetheless, Jordan College, the airships, Trollesund, the stark Modernist architecture of the Magisterium’s buildings – all of this is very good.
The CGI is surprisingly unobtrusive most of the time – surprising because this is a show featuring a royal duel between two intelligent polar bears! The daemons are all very nice-looking.
There is a striking but correct decision in adaptation to note – we get a chunk of The Subtle Knife adapted here, alongside the whole of Northern Lights. The point is to get Will Parry into the action at the “correct” time, so that he comes across as the co-protagonist he in fact is. His inclusion also grounds us, cleverly, in our own world, and gives us an earlier sense of the potential scope of events.
It is worth returning to the cast, because this is probably, finally, what lifts this from a triumph of physical production into something genuinely special. Lyra and her parents – Dafne Keen, James McAvoy, and Ruth Wilson – are particular standouts. Wilson gradually develops Mrs Coulter’s strange, tortured, half-abuser and half-victim persona over the course of the season, and Keen is endlessly captivating as an articulate, tricky, glib Lyra. Amir Wilson is a less obviously theatrically gifted Will, but he inhabits the part fully and really belongs. (I think of the often-limited cast of Babylon 5 who did so well with their single golden coin.) there are strong supporting cast members as well, particularly Father MacPhail (played, with a bit of offstage humour, by Dafne Keen’s father Will), Dr Lanselius (Omid Djalilli), and Lord Boreal/Charles Latrom (Ariyon Bakare).
There is one dubious point of casting – not a poor performance, but a plain miscast. Lin Manuel Miranda plays a younger, even glibber Lee Scoresby, and the role never quite comes off. The “historical” Lee is 20 years older than Miranda was in 2019, and his plot function fits the old grizzled explorer/gunslinger part well. Ironically, I thought of those I might prefer to cast, and thought of, for instance, contemporary Nathan Filion or Idris Elba, or an aged Jason Robards, or Sam Elliott…forgetting (consciously, at least) that Elliott had played Scoresby in the abortive film adaptation!
There are a few silly moments and unusual adaptation choices, not all of which are strictly failures. I did laugh out loud when Ma Costa snapped a man’s neck with her bare hands; nope, sorry, can’t believe in it. I loved the effect of the clearly Nazi-inspired Magisterium architecture, but was left pondering a few things, which are really problems with the original text as well. Which institution actually provided the most public, consistent, and successful resistance to Naziism? (This is the “who was Konrad von Preysing?” section of the quiz.) Why did the Magisterium build lots of beautiful sandstone buildings in Oxford, including presumably churches, before veering off in the 20th century into stark, even ugly blocks? Are the showrunners critiquing the liberal turn in the theology of architecture? I doubt it!
Also, the Gyptians commit their dead to God here – which can only be seen as unfaithful adaptation, even if it does not bother me.
Excellent stuff.
4.5/5