The above, I think, has to be our preferred title for this year’s wtw masterpiece, chosen from among the several which went on to the proposed list (see last post). Or a title something close to it. That is, if we can’t have Ballroom Dancing the Grete Sea, and I guess we can’t because, although it is a sell-a-million title, it is too wibblywobbly a one for the book we have in mind.
Wibblywobbly? A definition for that man-overboard mix of the good life lived rocking on the waves, part as a look-alike endless Bruce Forsyth with a new telegenic lovely (glowing ringlets in her hair, botox smooth, and plunging Grecian neckline) forever on his dinner jacketed forearm, part an opiate enriched Ancient Mariner, and part an assumptive Geoffrey Chaucer (via ‘critical theory’ et al – the Grete Sea being the name the English bard used for the waters on which the pilgrim ventured, the Mediterranean Sea, on his way to Jerusalem) being one tradition for writing the discovery and exploration of our world.
We are of course a British writing collective of men, and all the above wibblywobbly things at times, as well as at other times sullen, angry and spiteful hating of others good fortune, and equally sour about our own, and self-pitying too of course; witness several of the other wtw titles on our list of possibles.
The Little Darlings that we men are. That particular phrase comes from Lowestoft. It was one of the fonder names the fishermen of that East Anglia port gave to what they thought was the endlessly prolific and proliferating herring, up until about thirty or forty years ago that is when the fish stocks collapsed and the fishing industry died, and the phrase is peculiarly apt for us I think, as it reconnects us yet again to that long and detailed exploration of the herring by Max Sebald in the Rings of Saturn, undertaken during his walk south down the Norfolk and Suffolk coasts during the 1990’s…
And thereby also reconnects us, indeed grounds us alongside, with that other continental tradition, the vast rings of which we see curving forward and back beyond the close protection of Uncle Wally’s pointing arm (see his G.S. vol 5: P1060-1063 – The Ring of Saturn or Some Remarks on Iron Construction (1929)) towards other traditions of discovery and exploration, and writing upon images of limitless possibilities:
“A bridge – it's two ends could not be embraced as a single glance and its peers were resting on planets – led from one world to another by a causeway of wonderfully smooth asphalt. The three-hundred-thirty-three-thousandth peer rested on Saturn. There our goblin* noticed that the ring around this planet was nothing other than a circular balcony on which the inhabitants of Saturn stroll in the evening to get a breath of fresh air.”
Jean Granville (1844): Another World.
* ‘our goblin’ – a fantastical character, who is not of couse Uncle Wally!
And there strolling, our feet firmly planted on this metallic and mathematically sound circular balcony so vast the curve is almost invisible to our eyes, we find ways full of life in which it is possible to disagree, and discover further possible chapter headings such as:
Not the march of progress, but rings.
Not new beginnings, but the life of the Coda.
Not the Bildungsroman, but the Roman à Clef.
Forwards and backwards, from Eiffel to Tatlin’s Tower.
The wickedness of curves, and the birth of the statistical Narod.
Better headings, not North but South.