Last week I
bestowed my handbag upon the waters of Venice. The strap had snapped open as I
was getting out of a boat. The contents spilled into the lagoon.
I experienced
several strange sensations while watching my beautiful red eel-skin purse
sinking irretrievably through the green murk. I thought about the eel’s skin
going back where it belonged, travelling fast as if with a homing instinct for
the depths in which it was born and once lived.
I thought of the
plastic bottles that tourists throw into the water in Venice, as if that is
what the city deserves after offering them so much beauty, history and life.
And I thought about
other things lost or given to the water, as discovered in my recent researches.
There is the precious psalter that the intemperate King Sweeny (or Swiney)
threw into a lake in Dark Ages Ireland, with the consequence that he was cursed
to live bird-brained in the trees, even though a spiritually aware otter fished
the book out of the water.
No otters in
Venice, sadly, and certainly none to save my purse.
But that Irish otter
had spirit brothers at the time of St Cuthbert, who gave himself as a gift to
the icy water one winter, standing in it up to his armpits all night, singing
the praises of God. When he finally emerged from the sea, a pair of otters came
and twined themselves around him, warming and reviving him.
Back in Venice, in
January 1894, a distraught Constance Fenimore Woolson threw herself from a
window at the Palazzo Semitecolo. She was found dying by a gondolier. Henry
James, whom she had loved in vain, was her executor. He tried to drown her black
silk dresses in the lagoon, but the lagoon did not want this gift. The dresses
filled with air and floated like great black bubbles around him. James fled.
The water takes
more often than it refuses.
And this week, very
sadly, the wonderful Tales on Moon Lane Bookshop in London’s Herne Hill gave
many involuntary gifts to the water when a burst water main flooded the
premises and indeed the street, up to a metre deep. The owner of the bookshop,
Tamara Macfarlane, a great lover of Venice, is also the person who gave me my beautiful
drowned eel-skin purse … and her poor flooded bookshop reminded me of the scene
in my novel The Floating Book, in which Windelin and Lussieta, the printer and
his wife, take their boat out into the lagoon to launch the first ever printed
edition of Catullus into the water. Their idea is that publishing a book is
like casting it upon the water, to see if it will sink or float. So they enact
the metaphor, with hope, as Venice is all about enacting metaphors.
And that reminded
me of a trip to the zoo this week with another History Girl and her enchanting
daughters. We saw a chameleon who runs so fast and is so light that it can walk
on water. Here’s a video of one doing just that. The only gift this chameleon
is offering is the brief imprint of his tiny feet. The water quickly palimpsests
itself, ready to receive other impressions.
James George Frazer’s
Golden Bough describes how young women are given to the water, a ceremony that
finds parallels all over the world:
Among the Nyanja-speaking tribes of Central Angoniland, in British
Central Africa, when a young girl finds that she has become a woman, she stands
silent by the pathway leading to the village, her face wrapt in her calico. An
old woman, finding her there, takes her off to a stream to bathe; after that
the girl is secluded for six days in the old woman's hut. She eats her porridge
out of an old basket and her relish, in which no salt is put, from a potsherd.
The basket is afterwards thrown away. On the seventh day the aged matrons
gather together, go with the girl to a stream, and throw her into the water. In
returning they sing songs, and the old woman, who directs the proceedings,
carries the maiden on her back.
Sometimes it was a
tree dressed as woman that ended up in the water:
in Russia at Whitsuntide the villagers go out into
the wood, fell a birch-tree, dress it in woman's clothes, and bring it back to
the village with dance and song. On the third day it is thrown into the water.
An architect friend
told me, ‘Water in architecture of course brings peace and above all
reflection.'
Yet reflections can
be dangerous. Frazer again:
As some peoples believe a man's soul to be in
his shadow, so other (or the same) peoples believe it to be in his reflection
in water or a mirror. Thus “the Andamanese do not regard their shadows but
their reflections (in any mirror) as their souls”. Some of the Fijians thought
that man has two souls, a light one and a dark one; the dark one goes to Hades,
the light one is his reflection in water or a mirror …The Zulus will not look
into a dark pool because they think there is a beast in it which will take away
their reflections, so that they die. The Basutos say
that crocodiles have the power of thus killing a man by dragging his reflection
under water.
…We can now
understand why it was a maxim both in ancient India and ancient Greece not to
look at one's reflection in water, and why the Greeks regarded it as an omen of
death if a man dreamed of seeing himself so reflected. They feared that the
water-spirits would drag the person's reflection (soul) under water, leaving
him soulless to die. This was probably the origin of the classical story of the
beautiful Narcissus, who pined and died in consequence of seeing his reflection
in the water …The same ancient belief lingers, in a faded form, in the English
superstition that whoever sees a water-fairy must pine and die.
Vikings gave their
kings to the water on burning boats. The Chinese and the Indians set fire to
water too.
A shaman has recently
taught me a lovely act of redemption. I wrap painful thoughts and vivid nightmares,
often recorded in the form of poems, around rocks. Then I throw paper-swaddled
rocks into the Thames. Sometimes they land on the stony river bed, awaiting the
high tide to take them away at its leisure. Other times they sink straight into
the great grey greasy waves of the Thames.
Archaeologists of
the future will perhaps think that an icy kind of Bluebeard, a
horny-skinned rhinoceros and an implacable rapacious monster terrorised the
decent women of Southwark in the early twenty-first century. Or maybe a
novelist downstream is reading my words every now and then and basing a work of
‘fiction’ around them.
More than a decade
ago, in another life, I passed an extraordinary evening in Venice with an
American, two Venetians and another Anglosassone like myself. Each of us was beset
by demons. Between us, we had broken hearts, cancer, bereavement and financial
woes. Each of us wrote our troubles and tied the paper into a scroll. Then we inflated
an eight foot plastic crocodile, to whom we tied our troubles. At midnight we
launched the crocodile into the Grand Canal at San Vio and let it float
downstream, taking our griefs away. We watched it in silence until it
disappeared.
A few years later,
when my friend Marilyn died, her daughter brought her ashes from America to
Venice. Marilyn had been at her most serene in La Serenissima. We gave her
ashes to the Grand Canal along with a dozen pale peach roses. Ashes and roses
promptly set off in the direction of Marilyn’s favourite café, as she herself
did so often.
So many fleeting trains
of thought, quickly sinking, as my purse did, into the soft debris of
subterranean history. Someone once said – who? – that it is cruel to detain a
fleeting thought. So I’ll stop here.
Your turn now.
What gifts have you
given to the water? What might you like to give to the water? In your novels,
in your historical researches and in your real lives?
Michelle Lovric's
website
