Caliban By The Woolloomollo Wharf At The End Of Time Considers The Great Pacific Garbage Vortex

Weak masters though ye be, I have bedimmed,

The noontide sun, called forth the mutinous winds,

And ‘twixt the green sea and the azured vault

Set roaring war – to the dread rattling thunder

Prospero (The Tempest 5.1.9-12)

The task here was to write a poem from the perspective of a contemporary Caliban, informed by some of the ideas in post-colonial readings of William Shakespeare’s 1611 play, The Tempest, and to further expand on those ideas in an essay exploring both play and poem. My Caliban is posited as an immortal, a wanderer, perhaps not wholly human, sickened not so much by the extent of his years but the sickness of the earth and sea to which he is inextricably bound.

Caliban By The Woolloomollo Wharf At The End Of Time Considers The Great Pacific Garbage Vortex

Is this a dream within a dream?

here, cold iron around my neck

-a fallen crown too large for misshapen head

on shoulders such weight as Sisyphus

once bore, the hill now without summit

I am the spine of coral

from whence

the land on which you walk is made anew

she is the storm from which you cow and run

the sea that folds and flowers

I am bleached to bone, but on my hide

great nations are made, and unmade at her roar

it is you, who in silence quakes

mute you say; I speak in the soughing leaves

in the cicada hum, I throw off my skin

and so become

an/other man

Now

we carouse, beneath the mooring lines

anchor slow, thoughts a fish-hook weight

in the ocean’s jaw, hold savagely

to where we are

the harbour heaves her sorrows

I am sick with rum and sentiment

the tide halts at the turn

detritus spills around

uncertain of which way

in her ink black writhing

you turn and say to me

these dead birds, and broken thing

jetsam, flotsam, storm-wrack, filth

have no agency

except in your ridiculous pretence

in the catch between my finger and my thumb

there is a reticulation

an old wound like a star

where the nail slipped like love

almost painlessly through

the way the spindrift words

of our half-remembered days

glaring, misunderstood

nevertheless wrought easily newfound images

your hands make sails, the sea rappels her skin

to cup a whited breath, to deep the laden mist

of that rancorous onshore stench

rigged in the elbow motion

of departure and return

going slowly nowhere

rocking side to side

she shudders and recedes

in incremental bends

Gyre and Charybdis with the swell

of this too persistent garbage

…

Poetry is, of course, made more of silence than words. It is the search for these mute, unsaid things that impels each silent reading. In enunciation, it is the quiet of measured breaths that hold and bestow meaning, that shape emphasis and significance. It is what remains unsaid, that often, most subtly, and most loudly speaks.

Robert Lindsay of Pitscottie’s Historie, published in the 1570s, reports that around 1493 James IV of Scotland sequestered two infants on a barren, storm-wracked island in the Firth of Forth, with only a mute woman to care for them, in an experiment to discover, in isolation, what native, primordial language might emerge. According to Norman Macdougall (2021.302) Lindsay was given to exaggeration, and the story is probably apocryphal, such experiments having been conducted in exotic and far-flung gilded halls, and back into antiquity, was of a type that “naturally attache[d] itself to a powerful and successful prince” (2021.302).

Lindsay himself had doubts, stating that the conclusion to the experiment was that the children now spoke in “goode hebrew, bot as to my self I knew it not bot be the author is reherse” (McMahon, 2012.3) Henri Cohen finds in that rehearsed, artificed outcome a validation of scripture, and thus a reaffirmation of the established order, the rights and divinity of kings, reporting further that in the verifiable instances of such experiments, as well as in the cases of feral children, raised without human language, the ability to absorb, to express themselves beyond non-verbal signs or inarticulate garbling, is severely curtailed; the “necessary ingredient for the emergence and development of language is the society of other human beings with language” (2013.7-8). That apes, parrots, ravens, dogs, poets and artificial intelligences seemingly gain sometimes rudimentary, sometimes complex language skills bears this out. Whether a human is necessary to the process, where children today in towering, glossy apartments and ultra-technological campuses could be receiving language from both physical and disembodied artificial intelligences, in our “brave new world/That has such people in’t” (The Tempest 5.1.182-83), itself becomes moot.

That Shakespeare’s The Tempest was first performed before James IV’s grandson, James VI of Scotland, James I of England, on Hollowmas Night, November 1st, 1611 (2023.RSC), takes on a particular significance. There is an anachronistic urge to see this as recolonisation. After an era in which fraught lineages and competing doctrines had meant both external and internal conflict, the dynastic legitimacy that bound Scotland and England, Protestant and Catholic together in the body of James I may have seemed like a Shakespearean resolution.

But these conflicts were far from resolved, irregardless of what poet or playwright, king or curmudgeon thought. The forays and experiments of monarchs and their playwrights meant not only the colonisation of new lands, but through language, the overthrow of divinity, the beginnings of the colonization of the soul. Our Caliban, raised by his storming, inarticulate mother, silent, given voice, made mute again, before the battlements and machinations of worldly kings, makes his own domain of utterances and silences, and here, in this poem, on the shore of an artificed littorality, speaks.

In poetic discourse, how do we decolonize? Do we pursue the same old didactic strictures received from the language that has colonised us, with its demands of perfected meanings and rigid taxonomies? Pursue an expression to which all can nod sagely and agree, in a kind of polite, reflexive act that is both assent and dismissal, that in acquiescence, acknowledges and disarms, in so doing demands that with only glib answers, we must always search anew? How do we turn words from pathological affliction to liberatory defiance? Do we abjure meaning and instead, assume our posture of unquestioning acceptance because, like the devil, words “hath power/T’assume a pleasing shape”? (Hamlet 2.2.518-19)

Here we are with our Caliban, a creature of indeterminate race, homeless, sick, in want, lost. We could be by any number of shores from whence the colonised once surveyed untrammelled vistas. Here, for its particular euphony and assonance, positioning our Caliban and our author on the margins of shell-shocked indigeneity, we are at Woolloomollo, where great steel warships berth. A wharf makes as good a stage as a ship, or any other platform, a dream an equally valid proscenium.

Here, the land, the sea, the sky itself, are, unlike Shakespeare’s mythic island, unmistakenly occupied. Our Caliban is in a peculiar state of reflective contemplation; in conversation, remaking his old master that, once, in stating “this thing of darkness I/ Acknowledge mine” (The Tempest 5.1.278-79) confessed to making him. Is our Caliban even human? “Thou earth, thou: speak!” (The Tempest 1.1.314) Prospero calls his creature. Perhaps like late 16th century rabbi of Prague Judah Loew ben Bezalel’s golem, he has feet, a heart, a soul of clay, still until a word, until language, forcibly delivered, imparting breath, has moved him. Like our poet’s forebears, governed under the same laws as fauna and flora until quite recently, only given the semblance of humanity (in some quarters at least), if not by empathy, at least by statute.* The golem, naive creature that it was, not unlike Shakespeare’s Caliban, fell in love and when rejected, went on a violent rampage (Bilefsky, 2009).

Here we might recall scenes animated by Gerald Scarfe for Pink Floyd’s video of Shine On You Crazy Diamond (1975), or for What Shall We Do Now in Alan Parker’s (1982) film of The Wall; against the orchestral sturm und drang, the swell and tempest of heavy rock, a drifting leaf becomes a man, folds, deforms, is swallowed and regurgitated by himself, spits out from unfolding lips again, a blank homunculus, a mouthless, emasculated, ill-formed creature, in a different film, but what seems an ongoing coalescence, two monstrous orchids battle and entwine, devour each other, the victor folds in on itself, becomes a winged death-shadow, flies into the oncoming storm, as walls and cities sweep and burgeon across the earth, across the architecture of the self, while a churning sea batters at an ever-growing, enclosing wall. M/other is both the monster that demands, the love that holds, in altogether overwhelming enclosure.

Caliban, our vacated subject, once his “own king” (The Tempest 1.1.341), under his mother’s voiceless tutelage, the lessons of instinct, of innate nature, the sole inheritor of his domain, is enslaved as much by Prospero’s spells and commands as by the discourses of his entangling, monstrous m/others. As Kessaci argues, in both Freud and Lacan, the mother that loves, and the mother that desires, coalesce into one, become the figure of the she-wolf, that both succours and devours (2015. para.17). Miranda is no innocent in this, despite appearances, she is the agent who, in guise of love, through language, curtails and enslaves him;

Abhorrèd slave,

Which any print of goodness wilt not take,

Being capable of all ill. I pitied thee,

Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour

One thing or other. When thou didst not, savage,

Know thine own meaning but wouldst gabble like

A thing most brutish, I endowed thy purposes

With words that made them known. But thy vile race,

Though thou didst learn, had that in’t which good natures

Could not abide to be with; therefore wast thou

Deservedly confined into this rock,

Who hadst deserved more than a prison.

(The Tempest 1.1.350-61)

Caliban responds;

You taught me language, and my profit on’t

Is I know how to curse. The red plague rid you

For learning me your language!

(The Tempest 1.1.362-64)

Expecting in return for his submission a concomitant love, it is language that has made our monster, enclosed him within a rock, and though returned to silence, he remains monstrous, that primordial state he longs for, in which he is no longer subject, is no longer obtainable. Neither the colonisation of the land, nor the colonisation of the mind can now be undone.

Shakespeare’s Caliban, according to Lupton is a creature, “always in the process of being created” (2019.212), “caught between mud and mind, dust and dream, measur[ing] the difference between the human and the inhuman while refusing to take up residence in either category” (2019.216). Rather, though brute and savage, he may have been human once, but through a failed experiment, through antipathy, he is unmade, uncreated, in the entropic hiss, a creature of earth now becomes “filth” (The Tempest 1.1.346).

Not only have our interlocutors taken his home, they have killed his mother;

This island’s mine by Sycorax my mother,

Which though takest from me.

(The Tempest 1.1.331)

Mother, storm, island are another coalescence. Noble Prospero, innocent Miranda, are unrepentant killers, disingenuous and morally ignorant in exception to their crimes. In an era of pragmatic scientific justification, amoral technological rule and secular humanist triumphalism, there is a tendency to write Caliban and Sycorax as merely human, the supernatural and mythic devalued to an amusement, the secular, anthropogenic view elevated to a cult.

If we accept this reading, then the “Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not”, the “thousand tangling instruments” and the “sometimes voices” that Caliban hears, that in leaving, leave him crying in want “to dream again” (The Tempest 3.1.129-36) in the madness that has degraded him, can only be the voices of his dead, the ghosts of his “vile race” (1.1.354), victims of a “red plague” (The Tempest 1.1.363), a genocide, brought to the islanders by Prospero and Miranda. Our Caliban is wounded, rocking side to side, in both joissance and delusion.

Carol P Christ writing in Feminist Theology gives a new model of patriarchy as, “a system of male dominance, rooted in the ethos of war which legitimates violence, sanctified by religious symbols, in which men dominate women through the control of female sexuality, with the intent of passing property to male heirs, and in which men who are heroes of war are told to kill men, and are permitted to rape women, to seize land and treasures, to exploit resources, and to own or otherwise dominate conquered people.” (Christ 2016)

We can only ask, given the anachronistic, secular-humanist, feminist, post-colonialist positioning of Sycorax and Caliban as merely human victims within a virulent and destructive patriarchy, that, as agents of war, enslavement, murder and genocide, when Prospero says;

I have used thee

Filth as thou art, with humane care, and lodged thee

In mine own cell till thou didst seek to violate

The honor of my child

(The Tempest 1.1.343-46)

whether his portrayal of the situation is not self-serving. Caliban is after all, at this time, on this island, her only legitimate suitor. And when Caliban responds;

Oh ho, oh ho! Would’t had been done!

Thou didst prevent me; I had peopled else

This isle with Calibans.

(The Tempest 1.1.347-49)

whether the threat of forced impregnation of his dispossessor is somehow a legitimate response to his mother’s usurpation, his people’s genocide.

But of course in the folio Sycorax is not the “blue-eyed hag” (The Tempest 1.1.269) of prosaic gloss and scholarship, with its tortuous debates around gender, identity, feminism and race, but, “blew ey’d” (The Tempest 1.1.269 textual note 3).

Not only was she known for “mischiefs manifold and sorceries terrible/To enter human hearing” (1.1.264-65) and “unmitigable rage” (1.1.276), but “with age and envy/[she] Was grown into a hoop” (1.1.258). From these and other images we can only conclude that Sycorax herself is the tempest, the waterspout, the wind funnel, the cyclone, the whirlpool, the maelstrom. She is the eye of the storm, that we imagine watches, jealous of all human endeavour, devouring us in her furiously turning winds, and the relentless, spiralling waters of her vortex.

Caliban is her child, made of vengeance, wreckage, flotsam, jetsam, everything uncreated, unvoiced, uprooted, destroyed, returned to barren earth itself.

Damaged by every word we have written upon him, Caliban in his mother’s name writes back on us in flood, and drought, and virus, in famine, war and disease. His mother, sickened by the heat of our every efflorescence, brings forth hurricane and tsunami, and we can only wonder if she is dead, but still raging in her throes.

We, our Caliban, are sickened as much by our own afflictions, our own indulgences, by our longing, our nostalgia, for worlds past, worlds yet to come, for worlds only imagined, that we in our denials, our refusals, our inability to return or make a more harmonious world, are driven to seek. Like Shakespeare’s Caliban, our rage, our desire poisons us, and we are so intoxicated, “sick on rum and sentiment” that we are blind and deaf to the voices that move and control us.

Still, (or perhaps, but soft) in response we have no choice but to succumb or carouse, stand below the walls of great warships, wondering if motherlands are the lost homes of exiles, as they succumb to fatherlands in all their brute incitements, demands and machinations. Smash a glass against the side of the monster, breathe in the (foetid) air, and consider, despite the stench, out on the wasteland of the great Pacific Garbage Patch, life gains new footholds, finds new ways to co-exist, on the wreckage, develops strange new forms. The ruin we leave behind, whether we remain part of it, becomes, itself, moot;

“‘If you can reproduce, then you can spread. And if you can spread, you can invade,’ says Linda Amaral-Zettler, a marine microbiologist at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research…’You’re not just a dead end; you’re not just hitchhiking and then perishing at the end of it.’” (Bartels, 2023)

Oh brave new world indeed.

References

Bartels M, (2023) ‘Surprising creatures lurk in the great Pacific Garbage Patch’, Scientific American.

Bilefsky D, (10 May 2009) ‘Hard times give new life to Prague’s golem’, The New York Times, accessed 21 May 2023. https://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/11/world/europe/ 11golem.html

Christ C P, (2016) ‘A new definition of patriarchy: control of female sexuality, private property and war.’ in Feminist theology, 24(3): 214–225. https://doi.org/ 10.1177/0966735015627949

Cohen H, (2013) ‘Historical, Darwinian, and current perspectives on the origin(s) of language’, in Cohen H, Comrie B, Lefebvre C, eds. New perspectives on the origins of language. John Benjamins Publishing, Philadelphia.

Kessaci L, (2015) ‘The two mothers; antagonistic and “ravaging” figures of the mother’, Recherches en psychoanalyse, 20, 133a-139a. https://doi.org/10.3917/ rep.020.0133a

Lupton J R (2019) ‘Creature Caliban’, in Shakespeare W, Hulme P, Sherman W H, (eds) The Tempest, W.W. Norton, New York.

Macdougall N, (2021), James IV, John Donald, Edinburgh.

RSC (Royal Shakespeare Company) (2023) Stage history: the history of The Tempest in performance, from 1611 when it was first performed to today. Royal Shakespeare Company, [website] https://www.rsc.org.uk/the-tempest/about-the-play/stage- history, accessed 21 May 2023

MacMahon A, MacMahon R, (2012) Evolutionary linguistics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Shakespeare W, Greenblatt S, Cohen W, Howard J E, Maus K E, & Gurr A, eds. (2015) The Norton Shakespeare, 3rd edn [Digital edn] W.W. Norton, New York.

Thomas M, (2017) The 1967 referendum. Parliament of Australia, [website] https:// www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/ Parliamentary_Library/FlagPost/2017/May/The_1967_Referendum, accessed 21 May 2023

Parker A (director) (1982) Pink Floyd – the wall [motion picture], Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, United Kingdom.

Scarfe G (director) (1975) Shine on you crazy diamond [concert screen music video], Harvest/Columbia Music Video, United Kingdom.

Shakespeare W, Greenblatt S, Cohen W, Howard J E, Maus K E, & Gurr A, eds. (2015) The Norton Shakespeare, 3rd edn [Digital edn] W.W. Norton, New York.

Notes

1. Sections 51 and 127 of the Australian Constitution, which came into effect on 1st of January 1901, originally provided that;

51. The Parliament shall, subject to this Constitution, have power to make laws for the peace, order, and good government of the Commonwealth… [for]…The people of any race, other than the aboriginal people in any State, for whom it is necessary to make special laws.

127. In reckoning the numbers of the people of the Commonwealth, or of a State or other part of the Commonwealth, aboriginal natives should not be counted.

These laws were not altered until May, 1967, when 90.77% of those eligible voted by referendum to enact the “(Constitution Alteration (Aboriginals) 1967) [which] sought to give the Commonwealth Parliament power to make laws with respect to Aboriginal people wherever they lived in Australia. It also sought to make it possible to include Aboriginal people in national censuses.” (Thomas, 2017)