Magic And Water

Wonder is not only a thing of childhood, although that’s when everyday things seem most miraculous. The child has been waterproofed by adults, but it is the hand with the missing glove he attends to.

We sense the mystery as a caterpillar turns into a butterfly, but there’s a magic in the way some writers use language that we rarely attend to. Written 1910-13, published 1934, these sentences describe another form of water as a small boat is tossed on a violent storm somewhere off the Venetian coast:

“Like unto oil, was the sea – the high sea, lifted high from its deepness. Never, no never before, had he sailed on a sea lifted so haughtily high as this sea, whose unfaltering billows rolled with velocity by, like high gods in pursuit.”

– Frederick Rolfe, from ‘The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole’.

The author, writing as Baron Corvo, ends each chapter of his novel with a summary sentence or a verbal set piece and this is the latter. Simple enough, you might say, but it works for me at three levels – the sense; the way the phrasing of the words mimics high waves; and the way it conjures up an actual sea I have known.

Rolfe is punctuating for a rolling movement. There is no real need for a comma after oil, but I don’t believe it’s accidental. He’s mimicking the waves in words and phrases.

I’ve savoured this description many times. You need to flow with it, of course: resistance is rarely futile when it comes to enjoying any form of art. If you read with an ear for the waves in the prose, you can feel them build up, crash and roll. You might call it reading for the seasickness. I think it’s connected to breath control, though the concept of that is in itself strange when we are reading silently and – presumably – can breathe whenever we like.

I could analyse the passage to bits – observing, for example, how ‘high’, repeated four times, helps create a rise and fall pattern; how the very shape of the word ‘high’ has a rolling motion, measured from the top off the ‘h’ to the bottom of the ‘g’ and back up again – that sort of thing. But perhaps that’s stretching a point.

I’ll never put my finger on it, and never really know if it’s just something that happens in my imagination when I step back and read the passage listening to its rhythm and movement, rather than for the sense.

We all know some mimetic words, (e.g. ones for sounds creatures make, like ‘ribbit’), but rarely see a mimetic paragraph. This one makes me understand how people can find poetry in unrhymed lines, or where the rhythm dances around a fixed pattern rather than adheres to it.

You may not be able to feel any waves in the passage, or might say it’s just a fluke, and that’s fine too. With all the artists out there, we will each find some that resonate with our character and experience with peculiar directness.

And I don’t want to imply Rolfe always gets it right for me. He also wrote as a set piece to end another chapter:

Truth is tarter than taratiddles; and nothing is tarter, terser, than truth on the track of tired trash in a trance.

I’ve always thought that was a step too far, although, reading it for movement rather than sense, you can feel, as the sentence thumps its way out, Rolfe’s alter-ego’s weary ‘So there then!’ with particular force .

I’m relying on my copy of ‘The Desire and Pursuit Of The Whole’, published by Gibson Square Books, which has ‘taratiddles’ rather than the form you’ll find floating around the internet. Is it a typo, did Rolfe invent the word, or recklessly (or unconsciously) adapt it to squeeze in another ‘t’? 

Shared for the weekly photo challenge: liquid.