Image Credit: Michael Robinson via Dalle
It is my mid-adolescence, where few fixed memories now exist for me to differentiate between the ages of fifteen and the nominal passage into adulthood. Throughout these days I take my bicycle across the bridge, which spans the sluggish brown bilgewater separation of a dying town and a dying countryside. The dying town has been picked apart into fragments by bigger centres of industry and commerce and trivial luxury, centres which once were the peripheries of the dying hub itself. The dying countryside has been filled gradually with the sludge of first acreage, then suburb, then flats - nowhere can one travel to escape the inevitable sight of a cluster of new-built black roofs around the next hill. The river makes for an apt boundary - or meeting point - of the two. It is low at this time, drained to dredges by the irrigation ditches that divert its flow further upstream - and what does fill it is only the trolleys and trash of the town nearby. The dissipation of the town centre into a thousand farm-swallowing suburbs happens as gradually as the passage of my teenage years. And despite being almost unnoticeable, the dissipation can be felt - even if it cannot be identified.
Escape is needed. But no apocalypse occurs to show forth the passage out of this place and time. ‘Teenager’and ‘suburb’ are phenomena of the same era, an era in which the fear of apocalypse was unparalleled. But they must have been perfected in our own century. The end of the world was perfected too, perhaps, such that time and place can disappear without anyone paying attention. I ride my bicycle over the bridge, and enter the remnants of a town. I am searching for a different time and place - something to fix my memories to. Because the river is now a wasteland, it must be crossed. There was once an old bridge, from before the beginning of the end of the world. Then, in the fifties, they built a new one to match the new era. Something changed. The river once had to be crossed because it was powerful; the bridge was a contrast. Now the bridge links the two halves of the world around here as a compliment to the river, to carry on its work. It chains together the dying places, so they cannot escape.
I wander the town. I need a bridge, of any kind - the old or the new. The bridge in either form does not have to be a bad thing. There are still things in dying worlds that are worth taking out to a dying frontier. You just have to choose - and carry - them carefully. Anything that causes wonder will do.
The bookshop stands then at the beginning of the end of the main street. Today it is gone. But in that time, it is filled with many things. I wander inside, awestruck. It is so filled, right to overflowing, that it is almost impossible to find the most wonderful things. Standing before the littlest shelf - that of the poetry books - I search its crowded capacity for the bridge: something that stands apart.
What it is I need, lost as I am in my hometown, is something that can take me back - to an era before the world began to end. Perhaps there I can encounter wonder, and, if the bridge that takes me is strong, recover it. The backbone of the passage might be high, but if it is strong I will climb it regardless. I thumb the spines of the flimsy paperbacks of comic and light verse. All of them belong to living memory. Even as I turn these aside, I come across something beginning to decay - a dark blue, well-bound book with fading gold letters embossed on the tattered cover. It is a collection of poems by Rudyard Kipling, titled: the Sea and the Hills.
Here is the poem that I read as a open the volume - a hundred years old and more as I pass the first leaf:
Who hath desired the Sea? - the sight of salt water unbounded -
The heave and the halt and the hurl and the crash of the comber wind-hounded?
The sleek-barrelled swell before storm, grey, foamless, enormous, and growing
Stark calm on the lap of the Line or the crazy-eyed hurricane blowing -
His Sea in no showing the same - his Sea and the same 'neath each showing:
His Sea as she slackens or thrills?
So and no otherwise - so and no otherwise - hillmen desire their Hills!
Who hath desired the Sea ? - the immense and contemptuous surges?
The shudder, the stumble, the swerve, as the star-stabbing bowsprit emerges?
The orderly clouds of the Trades, the ridged, roaring sapphire thereunder -
Unheralded cliff-haunting flaws and the headsail's low-volleying thunder -
His Sea in no wonder the same - his Sea and the same through each wonder:
His Sea as she rages or stills?
So and no otherwise - so and no otherwise - hillmen desire their Hills.
Who hath desired the Sea? Her menaces swift as her mercies?
The in-rolling walls of the fog and the silver-winged breeze that disperses?
The unstable mined berg going South and the calvings and groans that declare it -
White water half-guessed overside and the moon breaking timely to bare it -
His Sea as his fathers have dared - his Sea as his children shall dare it:
His Sea as she serves him or kills?
So and no otherwise - so and no otherwise - hillmen desire their Hills.
Who hath desired the Sea? Her excellent loneliness rather
Than forecourts of kings, and her outermost pits than the streets where men gather
Inland, among dust, under trees - inland where the slayer may slay him -
Inland, out of reach of her arms, and the bosom whereon he must lay him -
His Sea from the first that betrayed - at the last that shall never betray him:
His Sea that his being fulfils?
So and no otherwise - so and no otherwise - hillmen desire their Hills.
That first line: “Who hath desired the Sea? - the sight of salt water unbounded - “ has never left my memory. And the refrain by which each line finishes - “So and no otherwise - so and no otherwise - hillmen desire their Hills” has remained with and within me through every move of home and habit since. It is a poem that begs to be read - aloud and carefully. It has a cadence that rolls: up, and down, with songlike qualities to its refrain and powerful resonance in its imagery. “Unheralded cliff-haunting flaws” immediately calls to mind not just powerful imagery but sharp emotion, even from those who have not been on open waters along a headland. It is also just a uniquely beautiful sequence of words. The feelings and longings that this poem stirs in me at that time, open up my ears to the calling of farther-flung places. Soon, I find myself on trains flying through the colossal hills inland as far as they can take me - but more often than that, I ride the tracks to the sea. I search for desolate places to take my poetry, solitary times in which to write; I reclaim parts of the world around me. I begin a journey up.
Yet through seeking, striving, and struggling in turn, I learn why it is that people use the word ‘stark’ to describe desolate places. It is a word that once in English meant ‘unyielding’ and today in German carries the meaning ‘strong’. The strength of these places at times can be used for me; at other times it is used against me. The same sea in which I find exhilaration and freedom from a dying world can, and has, almost killed me. This is not a reason to flee, or to abandon the journey up. Like the pilgrims on an exodus, it is the troubled sea that is passage onward.
Hence, the Incidental Encyclical takes as its second theme this very stage, and inevitable step, of our journey as a project - as a project that hopes to inspire others, by the wonderful things hidden in an obscured and now-dying past in our present world. We invite you, through the classics of our rich history, onto Troubled Seas.
In our second issue - due to arrive in the inboxes of paid subscribers to this Substack in just over a month - we will be drawing inspiration from three classics:
the Odyssey of Homer
the Anglo-Saxon poem ‘the Seafarer’
and, lastly, Hemingway’s ‘The Old Man and the Sea’
From these timeless literary works of the ancient, medieval, and modern eras, we take our theme, ‘Troubled Seas’, which our columnists are weaving into poems, satires, essays, and stories of their own for your reading pleasure. And of course, our editorial team will be writing accompanying essays to highlight the heights and depths of each of these powerful works. Join the full community on our Substack today to get access to our quarterly magazine past and future, in their entirety. Free subscribers will still have access to our podcast, to any preview releases and more content that we offer!
We look forward to joining in discussion with you as we move forward in our exploration of the classics. Get in touch via our email, editors@incidentalencyclicalmagazine.com, follow us on Facebook and Instagram (@incidentalencyclicalmagazine), or ask about our Discord to keep up with all our contributors and editors on a frequent basis!