Show notes
Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s classic poem, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings. Follow:Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:00 Wes: represented, it's not about our need for it. So if it's a painting of an apple, it doesn't satisfy us by allowing us to eat the apple or enjoy it as an apple, but we enjoy it as a representation. We enjoy it qua representation. In this case, they are actually in a position of need. So the undrinkability of the water or the. The ships being, in a sentence, painted by no longer being moving is a problem. And that's the form of their interest in the situation. So for us as readers of the poem, we're in a much different position than the characters within the poem, obviously. And our enjoyment, this is something, I think, that has come up before, maybe in the turn of the screw. But our enjoyment, in a way, is predicated on their suffering, which goes for, you know, it's not real suffering, obviously, but it goes for a lot of art, especially tragedy. So pain out of hypothetical, getting pleasure, the fantasy of human suffering or human pain, which is one of the paradoxes of tragedy and one of the questions of how we do that. Because we're not just sadistically enjoying the pain of the other. We empathize, for instance, in tragedy. And yet it is a pleasurable empathy or pity, or however you want to put it. Which is not to say that in this case, this is, you know, a tragic medium. Exactly. Or that it induces pity. It doesn't, you know, it's too. It's too surreal. And, you know, I don't. I. I think it's too surreal to. To induce that. Those kinds of emotions in the audience. I don't know if you. You agree it's. It's too fairy tale, like. And if there is, I, I don't think I have a, you know, I don't have a strong emotional response to the content, to the narrative of the, the poem. 1:41 Erin: No, no, I think it's. I think it's more about the, the imagery it creates, which is quite, you know, it can be quite scary to a kid if this is convincingly recited as. Or read aloud rather, as it was to me when I was a little kid and I was, I was really freaked out by the water snakes. But what you said it reminds me of, or the relationship that we have to the art object reminds me so much of that famous anecdote from ancient Greece about the artistic contest between. Is it. Oh, it's two really strange names like Zeuxis. Zeuxis and Parrhasius, I think, are the names. And this is in Pliny. Oh, this is a story that Pliny tells that there was a contest to determine who was the best at art. The two greatest painters had a contest with each other. And one of them, I can't remember, which revealed this painting of grapes. And it was so realistic that birds came down to peck at the painting. And so this was considered to be like, okay, who's, you know, how could he possibly be beaten? And so then they move to the next painting and they're waiting to see what his competition is going to be. Because it's behind a curtain, since someone says, okay, you know, reveal the curtain. Right. And it turned out the curtain itself was the painting and it was so realistic that the, the one who, who painted the curtain, I can't remember if it was Zeuxis or Parrhasius anyway, but the one who painted the curtain one, because in the end it was like, ah, you only tricked the birds. But, you know, but I tricked everybody with, with my curtain painting. Right, but you know, and there, and there's a bird in that story as well, right? No, but it reminds me of this, this idea of this orientation towards the art object as being something like, quite literally here, having to do with appetite. Right. At least like the, the appetite of the birds. And then I, I don't know about the curtain and concealment, but it just, it reminded me of the, of the, the grapes that induce. Right. That something would be such an amazing painting that it could induce hunger or, or, or some other type of appetitive drive that your discussion of this idea of the water that is also undrinkable in a painting. Yeah, yeah. 3:53 Wes: Maybe there's a curse in A way he's drawing our attention to the unrealness of this. It's as if the real world is becoming like a representation and they are coming to live within a representation as such, instead of the real world, the real world is starting to behave as a representation. Let's say, at least if you think of representations as static in this way. So maybe they have broken a wall of sorts. I don't know which wall it would be by breaking into this silent place. Right. They've. It's not the fourth wall they've broken, but they've broken some sort of wall and entered into. It's almost like waking up and hey, am I in a poem or am I in a right representation? Is everything a simulation? Is the simulation broken down? In any case, it's. It accentuates the surreal aspect of this. And then we get. We get a transition from stasis to the. An organic metaphor, a really interesting organic metaphor in which, first of all, the deeps did rot. Is it. It's as if the ocean is a body, is a decomposing corpse. And then you have slimy things crawling with legs upon the slimy sea. So there's the obvious irony of how could the sea be crawled upon? But I suppose, you know, I think if the deeps are rotting, we would think of maggots. It being infested with maggots of some sort. But these slimy things are actually have legs and scurry on top. Very strange image. 5:20 Erin: Yeah. Though they, they, they lose them later. No, I mean, are these the same as the water. As the water snakes or. 5:27 Wes: I don't know. 5:27 Erin: Yeah, I think I read something that said, oh, you know, they. First they have legs and then they don't. But I don't. This is a different kind of animal. But yeah, I noted the same thing. Like the idea that this is like a decomposing corpse and that therefore, like the containments of the body, creatures within the sea are like the organs. Right. Within the body or as you're suggesting, like maggots or something. This idea that natural creatures are evidence of a kind of rot is a really interesting one, considering that these are sailors who are. Who are in a completely foreign place. Right. Like they're the invader, if you will, or like a kind of a virus in this. They're the thing that's not native. Not to say that that's indicative of a rot or a decomposition. Right. But if we want to think of the sea as like a. Like a body, as I think this is suggesting, then the ship and the people on it are the foreign object that's. That's been lodged in the middle of this body. And, you know, certainly the mariner's transgression of killing the albatross is proof perhaps of the potential deadliness of this invasion or the capacity for the people on the ship to wreak some kind of havoc or to, you know, leave death in their wake. And so, you know, something about like taking the rot that perhaps the mariner himself induced by killing the albatross, he now has a rotting thing around his neck and turning that around and kind of submerging that in the physical environments which seem to be particularly inhospitable to him at this particular moment. 7:03 Wes: Right. 7:03 Erin: And it seems to me to be a case of. Of what would we call it? And I mean, obviously I'm not the psychoanalyst, but. Right. This seems like a case of projection, perhaps, is what I'm trying to get at. I don't know, is that. Is that going too far or to 7:17 Wes: see the rotting out outside of himself, outside in the sea? Yeah. So you're taking the rotting as being part of something, something that's going on within him. 7:27 Erin: I mean, it must be, right? Because, I mean, certainly it's possible for things to rot in the natural world, but to, you know, paint with such a broad brush as he's doing here and to say that, you know, the entire sea is kind of rotting or that, you know, things which are. Which seem to be perfectly natural and native to this particular water are inverted and become something undead or, you know, even kind of perverse, I think is kind of. You know, there seems to be some too, I think. I'm trying to suggest that the desire for the projection is to see the inhospitable landscape as being somehow corrupt. Right. When it's. When it's being inhospitable to us, there's something sort of inherently wrong with it or it's. It's turned inside out. It's. It's blamed. It's right here. It's. It's called basically dead or undead, however you want to call it. I'm envisioning like a zombie, a zombie sea filled with zombie slimy creatures. So there seems to be like the desire again, to. To blame external circumstances or to see things as being perverse or perverted in light of this inhospitable situation in which they find themselves. 8:36 Wes: Yeah. You could see this in part as an expression of guilt, I suppose. So the progression here is he's killed. This link to the natural world I think that's part of the way we were looking at the albatross, and something to do with dependency on the natural world. So asserted a kind of independence from the natural world that we don't really have. And there's something grandiose in that. And that pushes him into a world of aesthetic stasis, as we've described it, motionlessness. And then there's the immediate association to death, which is a natural association. And it's oft explored in the history of philosophy and criticism, this relationship between the aesthetic and the deathlike. So for Schopenhauer, we've already described a sense in which it. The aesthetic is abstracts from. From need and appetite and desire, ultimately, which is the way Schopenhauer described the aesthetic relation to the world as a. In the Apollonian sense, as an involving, a cessation of will. It's different with music, different with the Dionysian, but. And then from death we get motion again. It's a circle of life. Hey, don't worry. There'll be worms crawling through your body. Things will come alive again. There'll be motion. So we get dynamism reintroduced through rot and through the dancing of the death fires and this kind of, like, psychedelic treat that they get with the witch's oils and the burnt green and blue, and then spirit. So the next step from rot and from this new sort of dynamism is the concept of spirit. And in this case, a spirit that plagues, which you could read as a fury or as a representative of conscience or justice or vengeance, I suppose. Nine fathom deep. He had followed us from the land of mist and snow, so it turns out. So is it the spirit of the albatross? Yeah. Is it something else? 10:34 Erin: I don't know. I didn't read it as such, but that's an interesting idea. 10:39 Wes: I didn't either until this moment, I'm wondering, because it's been following them all along, it turns out. So even before they burst into this static, deathlike world, they had been pursued by this. He finds out. 10:53 Erin: Yeah, it's very. You know, when I see spirit and then nine fathoms deep. I was trying to think about the significance of nine fathoms or the number nine biblically. And the only thing I could think of was that 9 is the number of the fruits of the Holy Spirit. But this is, you know, rather than being above the ship, right. It's below. So it's like this shadowy figure. I mean, it could very well be. If we wanted to read this literally, it could be A whale or so, you know, I mean, it could be something that's like literally been following them around. 11:24 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I think albatrosses do. They do dive into the water right when they're feeding. But yeah, could be a whale, a shark. Do they need a bigger boat? 11:36 Erin: Could be Steven Spielberg. Yeah. 11:40 Wes: Right. So, yeah, spirit of the albatross. Some sort of angry spirit, spirit of the natural world. Some representative of that has followed them from the moment that he killed the albatross. And how does he find out? Some of dreams assured were. So apparently some of the crew have dreamt this and that's. That's the idea now it's come from their dreams. 12:03 Erin: Well, I love that. 12:04 Wes: But now communication stops because they've run out of water. I guess they've been without water for a while now and they can no longer speak. Yeah, I suppose. And then this is the moment where they put the albatross around his neck. I don't know where it's been the body of the albatross has been all this time, but now it goes around his neck and there's this direct comparison to across. 12:25 Erin: I really like the word psychedelic that you used for the witches oils. And I suppose that now they're tripping, right? Like they're hallucinating from lack of water. Is this, by the way, is the albatross that they hang around his neck? Is it a skeleton at this point? Right. Like they must have actually. I mean, they must have eaten it. I'm still convinced that the most logical explanation is just that the mariner was hungry and they all just needed a snack. So. 12:53 Wes: Well, it depends on how superstitious they are. 12:56 Erin: That's right. 12:57 Wes: Well, maybe freaked out enough to not eat it no matter how hungry they 13:00 Erin: get, at some point when, when they decided it was a good thing, maybe they. They roasted it. 13:06 Wes: Yeah. I never read this as a skeleton. I mean, I. Neither did I. I how the skeleton would stay together. But. 13:11 Erin: Yeah, yeah, that's true, that's true. Yeah. I suppose it's even more cross like though if. If there was some way for the skeleton to stay together to. To hang the albatross around the neck as a skeleton rather than as a white and now probably rather stinky corpse. Just to briefly backtrack. I was thinking too about, you know, the idea of a rotting deep related to this idea of the witch's oils. So something here about, you know, nature and the feminine again being perverted or, you know, seen as some sort of like evil force or things that are natural and Normal, taking on a kind of inhuman valence. But then we have this. You know, I was thinking a lot about this idea of the cross and the albatross. Right. Like, there's an inversion here happening as well, where obviously a cross is a sort of. It's a sign of the promise of salvation. It's a sign of redemption. And here, you know, this is inverted. So instead, this is a sign of doom and shame. And it's rather heavy as well. Right. Like, this is a huge bird, so lighter if they've been snacking on it. But it should be really weighing him down physically. And so it's. You know, it puts me in mind, rather than someone, like, wearing a cross around their neck, it puts one in mind of the Mariner as a Christ figure, you know, shouldering the cross on the way to Calvary. 14:37 Wes: So, you know, is the albatross the Christ figure or is it the Mariner? Or is it both in a way, you know, getting your identification? 14:45 Erin: Right, right. 14:46 Wes: But, yeah, I thought it does seem much more like Christ carrying his own cross at this point. So it foreshadows an even greater possible sacrifice or suffering on the…
Full show notes at the publisher 
Our TOPPODCAST Picks 
Stay Connected
