RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR Read online

  And if we are mostly water, hardly here at all, then other celestial bodies might be entirely aquatic. An astrophysicist once told me about newly discovered exoplanets that may be composed of water hundreds of kilometres deep, with only a few rocks at their hard core. Disdaining our need for land, these globular oceans, spinning translucently in some distant galaxy, may be inhabited, as astrobiologists hypothesise – it being their business to study that which may or may not exist – by giant whale-like creatures, half-swimming, half-flying through their atmospheres.

  The ubiquity of the sea – from this grey estuary in which I swim, to the great open oceans – is itself interplanetary, connecting us to the stars, not really part of our world at all. It doesn’t begin until it begins, and then it never seems to end. It writes itself in the clouds and the currents, a permanently changing script, inscribing and erasing its own history, held down by air and gravity in a tacit agreement between land and sky, filling the space in between. It’s a nothingness full of life, home to ninety per cent of the earth’s biomass, providing sixty per cent of the oxygen we breathe. It is our life-support system, our greater womb. It is forever breaking its own boundaries, always giving and always taking. It is the embodiment of all our paradoxes. Without it we couldn’t live, within it we would die. The sea doesn’t care.

  Down there lies another history, the unseen record of what is going on up above. Preserved in the freezing vaults of the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton are sample cores from the sea bed, long columns of mud and sediment whose layers tell out deep time like the rings in a tree or the waxy plugs in a whale’s ear. Composed of falls of marine snow – minute animals and plants and minerals, the makings of limestone- and chalk-to-be – along with dark strata deposited by ancient tsunamis, their past is our future foretold. The water itself has an age, up to four thousand years old, a story of its own. And even if the sea has become a carbon sink, absorbing the energy we have released from the sun, this cistern of our sins is still the repository of our dreams.

  But as I just told you, the sea doesn’t care. It deals life and death for innocent and guilty alike.

  The Tempest, Shakespeare’s last and most watery play, was first performed at court for James I on All Saints’ Day, 1611. It opens uproariously, slapping the audience in the face with a life-threatening storm and ‘fraughting souls’ on a ship about to split. In the dramatic tumult, panic spreads blame. Antonio, the usurping Duke of Milan, curses the boatswain – who is trying to save the ship – as a ‘wide-chopped rascal – would thou mightst lie drowning | The washing of ten tides!’ He is arrogantly invoking the practice of hanging pirates on the shore, leaving their corpses to swing in successive tides: ‘He that’s born to be hanged need fear no drowning.’

  Yet, as the audience slowly becomes aware, these scenes of rip, wreck and panic – overturning all order as the crew fight for their lives and the aristocrats’ status counts for nothing in the face of the waves: ‘What cares these roarers for the name of king?’ – turn out to be nothing more than a magic trick, a theatrical effect within a theatrical effect, a storm raised by a sorcerer’s art and his impish familiar. As Ferdinand, the king’s son, his hair up-staring, leaps from the sinking vessel set aflame by Ariel’s divided fire, he cries, ‘Hell is empty | And all the devils are here.’ (It is an image which may have been inspired by James I himself, author of Demonologie and personal supervisor of the torture of witches, who believed that during a voyage back from Oslo in 1590 his ship had been beset by storms summoned by witchcraft, and demons had been sent to climb its keel.)

  Suddenly, and as if in a dream, the castaways find themselves in an eerie calm, on an island full of strange noises, peopled by beings they cannot quite discern; an alien place, although the survivors themselves are aliens too. Some of its spirits are only rumoured, like Sycorax the witch, named after sys for sow, and korax for raven, a fated bird from an ‘unwholesome fen’. Others are all too present, like her son Caliban, a bastard creation, ‘a savage and deformed slave’, amphibious, half-man, half-fish, ‘Legged like a man! And his fins like arms!’ He is a chimeric creature, as if slithering out of an evolutionary sea; his counterpart is Ariel, an ambivalent, fluid spirit of the air who eludes definition and can be anywhere in an instant. Both are ruled over by the all-powerful magician Prospero in his water-bound exile.

  Recently, on a shelf of stranded books being sold to benefit a bird sanctuary overlooking the Solent, I discovered a 1968 Penguin edition of the play. It was an oddly apt place to find it: this silted-up seventeenth-century harbour, overflown by marsh harriers and stalked by godwits and avocets, was the domain of the Earl of Southampton – Harry Southampton, Shakespeare’s Fair Youth and possibly his lover, who lived at nearby Titchfield Abbey, where the playwright’s works were performed.

  I paid fifty pence for the book, attracted by its cover, designed by David Gentleman. Splashed with broad swathes of solid colour, the wood engraving, inspired by the work of Thomas Bewick, seemed to span the turbulent year of its nineteen-sixties publication – when protestors lifted up pavement stones, to find the beach below – and the uncertainties of its seventeenth-century contents.

  A three-masted ship tilts in a stylised sea, rolling on waves below stormy clouds towards a tree-blown island and a rocky cave, all rendered in sludgy, overlapping shades of subdued blue and green, grey and teal, like the birds and land and sea around the building where I’d bought the book. The design was almost cartoon-like, folkloric, and layered. It caught the dark mystery and music of the words within.

  The Tempest is a ceremony, a ritual in itself, publicly performed in a sky-open theatre on the site of the Blackfriars monastery on the Thames, a river into which sacrifices were once thrown to propitiate the gods. It is a pared-back, mysterious work, ‘deliberately enigmatic’, as Anne Righter says in her introduction to the Penguin edition, ‘an extraordinarily secretive work of art’, so emblematic that it might be acted out in mime, without any words at all.

  Its origins lay in the fate of Sea Venture, which sank off Bermuda in 1609 while carrying colonists from Plymouth to Jamestown; Harry Southampton himself was an investor in the Virginian settlement. Shakespeare drew on William Strachey’s account of the wreck, a natural history of disaster, with its tales of St Elmo’s fire at the height of the storm – ‘an apparition of a little round light, like a faint Starre, trembling, and streaming along with a sparkling blaze’ – and the eerie calls of petrels coming in to roost, ‘a strange hollow and harsh howling’. Their cries earned Bermuda its reputation as an island of devils, one which Strachey rationally dismissed, although he did acknowledge the presence of other monsters: ‘I forbear to speak what a sort of whales we have seen hard aboard the shore.’

  The Tempest is the closest Shakespeare comes to the New World. It is almost an American play, although two centuries later its castaways might have been washed up on another colony: Van Diemen’s Land, on whose remote south-western shores one can still imagine a seventeenth-century shipwreck and its stranded sailors stumbling about on the alien sand. Some saw Caliban and Ariel as symbolic representations of newly-discovered native peoples, whose countries were already being plundered by the West; others have seen a reflection of an island nearer to home: Ireland, a troublesome place filled with its own wild people, and regarded as a plantation to be conquered. But equally, Prospero’s isle might be utopia, a nowhere place over which his magic rises as a mist veiling time and space – just as a century earlier, Columbus, researching his expedition, had written notes and marginalia about strange people cast up on the shores of the Azores and the west of Ireland: ‘We have seen many notable things and especially in Galway, in Ireland, a man and a woman with miraculous form, pushed along by the storm on two logs.’

  Shakespeare, nearing the end of his life, appeared to have recreated himself in the omniscient magician; others have seen Prospero as a reflection of Elizabeth I’s astrologer, John Dee, who communed with angels using a golden disc, a
nd peered into his black obsidian mirror – stolen from the New World – in order to see the future and the past. The whole play seems to be happening before it was written. It is fraught in the original sense of the word, as a ship filled with freight, as well as with meaning. Shakespeare was familiar with the ocean: he refers to it more than two hundred times in his works, and some critics believe that he was once a sailor. Certainly he knew its meaning, and set The Tempest on a ‘never-surfeited sea’, a transformative place. After the storm, Ariel tells Ferdinand that his father, the king, lies ‘full fathom five’; he has been made immortal by the water, becoming a baroque jewel in the process:

  Of his bones are coral made;

  Those are pearls that were his eyes;

  Nothing of him that doth fade,

  But doth suffer a sea-change

  Into something rich and strange.

  For the artists and poets who came after, The Tempest lingered in its magical power and deceptive simplicity. Samuel Taylor Coleridge thought that Prospero’s art ‘could not only call up the spirits of the deep, but the characters as they were and are and will be’, and that Ariel was ‘neither born of heaven, nor of earth; but, as it were, between both’. For Percy Shelley, who would be nicknamed Ariel, the play evoked ‘The murmuring of summer seas’ and his own in-between state. And for John Keats, in whose volumes of Shakespeare’s works the play was the most heavily scored, it became a pattern for his imaginative life, like a map to be followed. Indeed, he sailed down Southampton Water with The Tempest in his pocket.

  In April 1817, Keats, then a medical student in London, took the coach to Southampton in search of distraction. He had loved the sea ever since he’d read of ‘sea-shouldering whales’ in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene – ‘What an image that is!’; his poetry habit had made him ‘a Leviathan … all in a Tremble’, and in a letter to his friend Leigh Hunt, he evoked ‘a Whale’s back in the Sea of Prose’. But as he walked along the port’s medieval walls and looked down the grey waterway, the young poet did not see what Horace Walpole had seen a generation before, ‘the Southampton sea, deep blue, glistening with vessels’, nor even any of the dolphins which sometimes swam up it. Instead he found muddy shores laid bare at low tide; the sea had run out. ‘The Southampton water when I saw it just now was no better than a low water Water which did no more than answer my expectations,’ he told his brothers, ‘– it will have mended its Manners by 3.’ Keats’s nerves were raw, so he took out his Shakespeare and quoted from The Tempest for solace: ‘There’s my comfort.’ That afternoon he left on the rising tide, sailing to the Isle of Wight where, troubled by the island’s strange noises and unable to sleep, he began his long poem, Endymion, filled with moonbeams and snorting whales and leaping dolphins and the tale of Glaucus, the fisherman-turned-god with fins for limbs, whom Endymion frees from Circe the witch.

  Keats’s contemporary J.M.W.Turner was also stirred by the restless sea. His imagination stained southern skies: he sketched this shore and painted storms off the Isle of Wight, and when he claimed to have had himself lashed to a ship’s mast in a blizzard so that he could create a great swirling vortex of waves and cloud – as if he were seeing into the future – he gave the vessel’s name as Ariel. And in this stormy story, Shakespeare and Turner would in turn influence another writer. Herman Melville’s eyes had been damaged by scarlet fever in his childhood and rendered as ‘tender as young sparrows’; he was thirty years old, with a career at sea behind him, when he read Shakespeare, discovering a large-print edition of the playwright’s works in 1849. As he began to write about his great white whale – his head full of Turner’s spumey paintings he’d seen in London that year – Melville read The Tempest and drew a box around Prospero’s ‘quiet words’, the magician’s wry response to his daughter’s naïve exclamation on seeing the aliens:

  Miranda. O! wonder!

  How many goodly creatures are there here!

  How beauteous mankind is! Oh brave new world,

  That has such people in’t!

  Prospero. ’Tis new to thee

  Melville, himself the scion of a colony, saw the prophecy in Shakespeare’s drama and in Turner’s art: both helped him create the strange, ominous world of Moby-Dick. In it, Captain Ahab is a monomaniacal Prospero, and as the opening of The Tempest is lit by St Elmo’s fire, so the same eerie light garlands his ship, the Pequod, in a ghostly glow; animals acquire symbolic meaning – whales and birds accompany the narrative as familiars, swimming and flying alongside the story – and the sea rises up as if with a mind of its own, as it does in Turner’s paintings. Meanwhile mortal men pursue their deadly trade: a restive crew sails into the unknown – among them a tattooed cannibal, Queequeg, a kind of Caliban – and Ahab blasphemously baptises his harpooneers in the name of the devil. Nor would the American’s fascination with Shakespeare’s play end there. At the end of his own last work, Billy Budd, Melville imagines the hanged body of his Handsome Sailor consigned to the deep, entangled in oozy weeds; it is an echo of Jonah’s fate in a biblical sea – ‘where the eddying depths sucked him ten thousand fathoms down, and the weeds were wrapped about his head’ – but also of Alonso in The Tempest, who, believing his son to be drowned, wishes he too was ‘mudded in that oozy bed’.

  Constantly recreated, constantly re-enacted, The Tempest lived on beyond its creator, passed on from hand to hand. It became a secret cipher, a futuristic shipping forecast, an extended magical spell. It conjured a queer sea out of its strange beasts and its masquerades, and stood against time and tide even as it rose with them in a storm stirred up by a dramatist whose own identity still seems fluid and uncertain.

  As a new century loomed, the play gained momentum, gathering clouds rather than diminishing with distance and time. A few years after Melville left Billy Budd on his desk unpublished, another former sailor, Joseph Conrad, drew on The Tempest for his Heart of Darkness, with Kurtz as a terrible Prospero. Two decades later, Eliot embedded fragments of the play in The Waste Land, as if Shakespeare had foreseen the undone. Eliot’s work was rivered with the brown god of the Thames and the ship-wrecked, sea-monstered coast of New England he’d sailed as a boy; and as his Madame Sosotris lays out the Tarot card of the drowned Phoenician Sailor – ‘Those are pearls that were his eyes’ – she warns ‘Fear death by water.’ Meanwhile, the bones of another sailor, ‘a fortnight dead’, are picked clean by the creatures of the sea, the slimy things the Ancient Mariner saw down there.

  Haunted and haunting, The Tempest accompanied the twentieth century as a parallel rite; few other works of art have been so replicated, remodelled, and re-presented. W.H. Auden reimagined its characters’ fates in his verse drama The Sea and the Mirror; Aldous Huxley drew on it ironically for his brave new world; and the science-fiction film Forbidden Planet turned Ariel into Robbie the robot for an era fearful of its own aliens. And at the end of the darkened nineteen-seventies – as a British satellite named Prospero spun into outer space, following its fellow transmitter, Ariel, launched a decade earlier – Derek Jarman, living in a London warehouse on the Thames and fascinated by John Dee, filmed his alchemical version as ‘a chronology of three hundred and fifty years of the play’s existence’, with Prospero played by the future author of Whale Nation, a sibilant blind actor nicknamed Orlando as Caliban, an androgynous man-boy as Ariel, and Elisabeth Welch singing ‘Stormy Weather’ surrounded by dancing sailors. In this lineage of otherness, filled with hermaphrodites and shape-shifters, it does not seem a coincidence that the director wanted Ariel’s songs to be sung by the starman who obsessed me, and who presided over my blue notebook.

  The word ‘tempest’ itself derives from the Latin tempus, for time. Everything is new and old on Prospero’s island. Like the sea itself. Always changing, always the same.

  Out of the blackness obscure noises drift from the docks, booming over the water. The red lights of the power-station chimney blink like an industrial lighthouse, summoning and warning. You can be what you want to be in the da
rk. For me, it used to be nightclubs under London streets. Now it’s another nocturnal performance.

  An hour before dawn, before the light starts to stain the summer sky violet, I ride back to the beach. Foxes sidle out of the woods and rabbits flash their white scuts at the approach of my bike light. High in the trees over the shore, a pair of tawny owls converse in screeches. Crows hang in the branches, all angular tails and beaks, as if they’d been born out of the boles. All these creatures own this place in the interregnum of the dark; they should not be anywhere else. No one could have told you when you were young what would happen. They didn’t dare. It’s enough to realise that what we have lost is still ahead of us. I see things that are not there.

  One magical moment; I feel like a penitent. The sea is so still it seems like a sin to break its surface. But I do. Swimming at night, with diminished sense of sight, only makes the act all the more sensual. You feel the water around you; you lose yourself in its sway. Fish bite me, leaving loving grazes.

  I turn on my back, watching the stars fall.

  I first saw it slumped on the weedy slipway one afternoon. A deer, sprawled at the high water mark. It looked perfect, lying there, thrown up by the tide, staring glassy-eyed to the sky. Had it died trying to swim across from the forest? Or had it slipped and fallen, cloven hoofs clattering on the concrete with panic in its eyes? Perhaps it had been shot, although there was no wound in its russet pelt.