Possession

by A. S. Byatt

  And made of him the elements of earth,

  Body and sweat and bones and curly hair,

  Made soil and sea and hills and waving trees,

  And his grey brains wandered the heavens as clouds.

  These three were Odin, Father of the Gods,

  Honir, his brother, also called the Bright,

  The Wise and Thoughtful, and that third, the hot

  Loki, the hearth-god, whose consuming fire

  First warmed the world, then grown beyond the bounds

  Of home and hearthstone, flamed in boundless greed

  To turn the world, and Heav’n, to sifting ash.

  Two senseless forms, on the wet shore o’the world

  Lay at the tide’s edge, and were water-lapped,

  Rising a little with the creeping wave,

  Then slipping back, with motion not their own.

  Log-like they lay uprooted, simple forms

  Of ash and alder, shorn of their green pride

  But not quite dead perhaps, but nourishing

  A kind of quickening shrunk back to the core

  Of all the woody circles of their trunks.

  (Circles of years not lived by the new wood

  But sempiternal years, a present past

  Stirred into being by the hand of time

  As lines of water spired in the new pools.)

  The new sun stood in the blue; her chariot’s course

  Not more than twice completed, who has since

  Circled and run from dawn to dawn as Earth

  Grows cool and cloudy in the calmer light,

  Nor ever fails, nor swerves a pace from true

  Till all be swallowed in the final Fire.

  Allfather in her heat felt his own force.

  He said: shall these trunks live? and saw the life

  The vegetable life, that sang i’ th’ quick.

  Bright Honir said: if these could move and feel

  And see and hear, the lines of leaping light

  Would speak to ears and eyes. The garden’s fruits

  Would render life to life. This lovely world

  Would be both known and loved, and so would live

  An endless life in theirs, and they should hear

  And speak its beauties, then first beautiful

  When known to be so.

  Last he spoke, the dark

  God of the hidden flames. He said, “Hot blood

  I give them, to make bright their countenance,

  To move in them the passionate motion

  Which draws them to each other, as the iron

  Springs to the lodestone always. I give blood—

  A human warmth, red with a human fire

  A stream of vital sparks, which if preserved

  Speaks each to each divinely, but which spilt

  Is mortal ruin till the end of Time

  For they are mortal.”

  And so the laughing Gods, pleased with their work

  Made man and woman of the senseless stumps

  And called them Ask and Embla, for the ash

  And alder of their woody origins.

  Odin breathed in the soul, and bright Honir

  Gave sense and understanding and the power

  To stand and move. The quick-dark Loki last

  Knitted the veins of circulating blood

  And blew the spark of vital heat, as smiths

  Stir fire with the bellows. So a sharp

  And burning pain of apprehension

  Stirred life in those who had been logs of peace

  And thrilled along new channels, till it roared

  In new-forged brain and ventricles of blood

  And curling membranes of the ear and nose

  And last, opened new eyes on a new world.

  Now these first men were quite unmanned by light.

  The first wet light, of the first days, that washed

  Silver and gold the sand, gilded the sea

  With liquid gold and silvered every crest

  That crisped and curled and wrinkled into smooth.

  What had lived by the whispering of the sap

  Had feelingly discerned the shivering air

  Known dark and light along the rugged bark

  Or smoothest treeskin, kissed by warm and cool—

  Now saw with eyes, waves of indifferent light

  Pour on and over, arch and arch, a gold

  And sunny wash, a rainbow fountain, shot

  With glints of bright and streams of gleaming motes.

  All this they more than saw and less than saw.

  Then turning, saw those forms majestical

  Wrought by the cunning of the watching gods,

  White skins, blue-shadowed and blue-veined, with rose

  And tawny gold inwoven, pearly-bright

  Untouched unused, and breathing the bright air.

  Those four eyes darkened by the burning Face

  Of the bright lady of the sky, now saw

  The milder circles of each other’s gaze

  Crowned with curls of glossy golden hair.

  And as the steel-blue eyes of the first Man

  Saw answering lights in Embla’s lapis eyes

  The red blood Loki set to spring in them

  Flooded hot faces. Then he saw that she

  Was like himself, yet other; then she saw

  His smiling face, and by it, knew her own—

  And so they stared and smiled, and the gods smiled

  To see their goodly work, so fair begun

  In recognition and in sympathy.

  Then Ask stepped forward on the printless shore

  And touched the woman’s hand, who clasped fast his.

  Speechless they walked away along the line

  Of the sea’s roaring, in their listening ears.

  Behind them, first upon the level sand

  A line of darkening prints, filling with salt,

  First traces in the world, of life and time

  And love, and mortal hope, and vanishing.

  —RANDOLPH HENRY ASH, from Ragnarök II. I et seq.

  The Hoff Lunn Spout hotel had existed in 1859, though there was no mention of it in Ash’s letters. He had stayed at The Cliff in Scarborough, now demolished, and had had lodgings in Filey. Maud had found the hotel in The Good Food Guide, where it was recommended for “Uncompromising fresh fish dishes, and unremitting if unsmiling good service.” It was also cheap, and Maud was worried about Roland.

  It stood at the edge of the moorland, on the road from Robin Hood’s Bay to Whitby. It was long, low, and made of that grey stone which to a northerner signifies reality, and to southerners, used to warm bricks and a few curves and corners, can signify unfriendliness. It had a slate roof and one row of white-sashed windows. It stood in a car park, a largely empty expanse of asphalt. Mrs Gaskell, who visited Whitby in 1859 to plan Sylvia’s Lovers, remarked that gardening was not a popular art in the North, and that no attempt was made to plant flowers even on the western or southern sides of the rough stone houses, In spring the dry stone walls are briefly bright with aubretia, but in general, at places like the Hoff Lunn Spout, this absence of vegetation still prevails.

  Maud drove Roland up from Lincoln in the little green car; they arrived in time for dinner. The place was kept by a huge handsome Viking woman, who watched incuriously as they carried packets of books up the stairs between the Public Bar and the Restaurant.

  The Restaurant had recently been fitted with a maze of high, dim-lit cubicles in dark-stained wood. Roland and Maud met there and ordered what seemed to be a light meal: home-made vegetable soup, plaice with shrimps, and profiteroles. A younger Viking, substantial and serious, served them with all these things, which were good and hugely plentiful, the soup a thick casserole of roots and legumes, the fish an immense white sandwich of two plate-sized fillets containing a good half-pound of prawns between their solid flaps, the profiteroles the size of large tennis-balls, covered with a lake of bitter
chocolate sauce. Maud and Roland exclaimed frequently about this gigantism; they were nervous of real conversation. They made a businesslike plan of action.

  They had five days. They decided to go to the seaside places on the first two of these—Filey, Flamborough, Robin Hood’s Bay, Whitby. Then they would retrace Ash’s inland walks by rivers and waterfalls. And leave a day for what might come up.

  Roland’s bedroom had blue-sprigged rough wallpaper and a sloping roof. The floor was uneven and creaky; the door was old with a latch and sneck as well as a monumental keyhole. The bed was high, with a stained dark wooden head. Roland looked round this small private place and felt a moment of pure freedom. He was alone. Perhaps it had all been for this, to find a place where he could be alone? If his solitude was disturbed by a memory of the last time he had slept near Maud Bailey, of their electric encounter outside Sir George’s wonderful bathroom, of the electric shock, Ash’s “kick galvanic,” that had passed between them, he hardly admitted it to himself. The wall between their rooms was a mere lath-and-plaster partition, and he heard mysterious movements, close at hand, and imagined, briefly, the long vanishing serpent of her dragon kimono in Lincolnshire. But that was not in the real world, he told himself. Was it? He slid into bed and began on his familiarisation with Christabel LaMotte. Maud had lent him Leonora Stern’s book on Motif and Matrix in the Poems of LaMotte. He leafed through the chapter headings: “From Venus Mount to the Barren Heath”; “Female Landscapes and Unbroken Waters, Impenetrable Surfaces”; “From the Fountain of Thirst to the Armorican Ocean-Skin”:

  And what surfaces of the earth do we women choose to celebrate, who have appeared typically in phallocentric texts as a penetrable hole, inviting or abhorrent, surrounded by, fringed with—something? Women writers and painters are seen to have created their own significantly evasive landscapes, with features which deceive or elude the penetrating gaze, tactile landscapes which do not privilege the dominant stare. The heroine takes pleasure in a world which is both bare and not pushy, which has small hillocks and rises, with tufts of scrub and gently prominent rocky parts which disguise sloping declivities, hidden clefts, not one but a multitude of hidden holes and openings through which life-giving waters bubble and enter reciprocally. Such external percepts, embodying inner visions, are George Eliot’s Red Deeps, George Sand’s winding occluded paths in Berry, Willa Cather’s cañons, female-visioned female-enjoyed contours of Mother Earth. Cixous has remarked that many women experience visions of caves and fountains during the orgasmic pleasures of auto-eroticism and shared caresses. It is a landscape of touch and double-touch, for as Irigaray has showed us, all our deepest “vision” begins with our self-stimulation, the touch and kiss of our two lower lips, our double sex. Women have noted that literary heroines commonly find their most intense pleasures alone in these secretive landscapes, hidden from view. I myself believe that the pleasure of the fall of waves on the shores is to be added to this delight, their regular breaking bearing a profound relation to the successive shivering delights of the female orgasm. There is a marine and salty female wave-water to be figured which is not, as Venus Anadyomene was, put together out of the crud of male semen scattered on the deep at the moment of the emasculation of Father Time by his Oedipal son. Such pleasure in the shapeless yet patterned succession of waters, in the formless yet formed sequence of waves on the shore, is essentially present in the art of Virginia Woolf and the form of her sentences, her utterance, themselves. I can only marvel at the instinctive delicacy and sensitivity of those female companions of Charlotte Brontë who turned aside when she first came face to face with the power of the sea at Filey, and waited peacefully until, her body trembling, her face flushed, her eyes wet, she was able to rejoin her companions and walk on with them.

  The heroines of LaMotte’s texts are typically watery beings. Dahud the matriarchal Sorceress-Queen rules a hidden kingdom below the unbroken waters of the Armoric Gulf. The Fairy Melusina is in her primary and beneficent state a watery being. Like her magical mother, Pressine, she is first encountered by her husband-to-be at the Fontaine de Soif, which might be construed as either the Thirsty Fountain or The Fountain which satisfies Thirst. Although the second may seem “logical,” in the female world which is in-formed by illogic and structured by feeling and in-tuition, a sense can be perceived in which the Dry Fountain, the Thirsty Fountain, is the hard-to-access and primary signification. What does LaMotte tell us of the Fontaine de Soif?

  Her poem draws extensively on the prose romance of the monk Jean d’Arras, who tells us that the Fountain “springs from a wild hillside, with great rocks above, and a beautiful meadow along a valley, after the high forest.” Mélusine’s mother is discovered by this fountain singing beautifully, “more harmoniously than any siren, any fairy, any nymph ever sang.” They are perceived, that is, by the male view, as temptresses, allied with the seductive powers of Nature. LaMotte’s fountain, by contrast, is inaccessible and concealed; the knight and his lost horse must descend and scramble to come to it and to the Fairy Melusina’s “small clear” voice “singing to itself” which “sings no more” when the man and beast disturb a stone on their damp descent.

  LaMotte’s description of the ferns and foliage is Pre-Raphaelite in its precision and delicacy—the “rounded” rocks are covered with a “pelt” of “mosses,” “worts,” “mints” and “maidenhair” ferns. The fountain does not “spring” but “bubbles and seeps” up into the “still and secret” pool, with its “low mossy stone” surrounded by “peaks and freshenings” of “running and closing” waters.

  This may all be read as a symbol of female language, which is partly suppressed, partly self-communing, dumb before the intrusive male and not able to speak out. The male fountain spurts and springs. Mélusine’s fountain has a female wetness, trickling out from its pool rather than rising confidently, thus mirroring those female secretions which are not inscribed in our daily use of language (langue, tongue)—the sputum, mucus, milk and bodily fluids of women who are silent for dryness.

  Melusina, singing to herself on the brink of this mystic fountain, is a potent being of great authority who knows the beginnings and ends of things—and is, as has been pointed out, in her aspect of water-serpent, a complete being, capable of generating life, or meanings, on her own, without need for external help. The Italian scholar Silvia Veggetti Finzi sees Melusina’s “monstrous” body in this sense as a product of female auto-erotic fantasies of generation without copulation, which female desire, she says, has received very little expression in mythology. “We find it most frequently in myths of origin as an expression of the chaos which precedes and justifies cosmic order. Of this kind is the Assyro-Babylonian myth of Ti’amat, or the myth of Tiresias, who saw the primordial reproduction of serpents and measured the superior quality (plus-valore) of female desire and the mythemes [mitemi] of the vegetable cycle of lettuce.”

  Roland laid aside Leonora Stern with a small sigh. He had a vision of the land they were to explore, covered with sucking human orifices and knotted human body-hair. He did not like this vision, and yet, a child of his time, found it compelling, somehow guaranteed to be significant, as a geological survey of the oolite would not be. Sexuality was like thick smoked glass; everything took on the same blurred tint through it. He could not imagine a pool with stones and water.