The Castaway et al.

--Derek Walcott, Selections from The Castaway (1965), The Gulf (1970), Sea Grapes (1976), and The Star-Apple Kingdom (1979

The Castaway (1965)
The starved eye devours the seascape for the morsel
Of a sail.
The horizon threads it infinitely.
Action breeds frenzy. I lie,
Sailing the ribbed shadow of a palm,
Afraid lest my own footprints multiply.
Blowing sand, thin as smoke,
Bored, shifts its dunes.
The surf tires of its castles like a child.
The salt green vine with yellow trumpet-flower,
A net, inches across nothing.
Nothing: the rage with which the sandfly's head is filled.
Pleasures of an old man:
Morning: contemplative evacuation, considering
The dried leaf, nature's plan.
In the sun, the dog's feces
Crusts, whitens like coral.
We end in earth, from earth began.
In our own entrails, genesis.
If I listen I can hear the polyp build.
The silence thwanged by two waves of the sea.
Cracking a sea-louse, I make thunder split.
Godlike, annihilating godhead, art
And self, I abandon
Dead metaphors: the almond's leaf-like heart,
The ripe brain rotting like a yellow nut
Hatching
Its babel of sea-lice, sandfly, and maggot,
That green wine bottle's gospel choked with sand,
Labelled, a wrecked ship,
Clenched sea-wood nailed and white as a man's hand.

Crusoe's Island (1965)
I
The chapel's cowbell
Like God's anvil
Hammers ocean to a blinding shield;
Fired, the sea grapes slowly yield
Bronze plates to the metallic heat.
Red, corrugated-iron
Roofs roar in the sun. Above earth's open kiln
Writhes like a child's vision
Of hell, but nearer, nearer.
Below, the picnic plaid
Of Scarborough is spread
To a blue, perfect sky,
Dome of our hedonist philosophy.
Bethel and Canaan's heart
Lies open like a psalm.
I labour at my art.
My father, God, is dead.
Past thirty now I know
To love the self is dread
Of being swallowed by the blue
Of heaven overhead
Or rougher blue below.
Some lesion of the brain
From art or alcohol
Flashes this fear by day:
As startling as his shadow
Grows to the castaway.
Upon this rock the bearded hermit built
His Eden:
Goats, corn crop, fort, parasol, garden,
Bible for Sabbath, all the joys
But one
Which sent him howling for a human voice.
Exiled by a flaming sun,
The rotting nut, bowled in the surf,
Because his own brain rotting from the guilt
Of heaven without his kind,
Crazed by such paradisal calm
The spinal shadow of a palm
Built keel and gunwale in his mind.
The second Adam since the fall,
His germinal
Corruption held the seed
Of that congenital heresy that men fail
According to their creed.
Craftsman and castaway,
All heaven in his head,
He watched his shadow pray
Not for God's love but human love instead.
II
We came here for the cure
Of quiet in the whelk's centre,
From the fierce, sudden quarrel,
From kitchens where the mind,
Like bread, disintegrates in water,
To let a salt sun scour
The brain as harsh as coral,
To bathe like stones in wind,
To be, like beast or natural object, pure.
That fabled, occupational
Compassion, supposedly inherited with the gift
Of poetry, had fed
With a rat's thrift on faith, shifted
Its trust to corners, hoarded
Its mania like bread,
Its brain a white, nocturnal bloom
That in a drunken, moonlit room
Saw my son's head
Swaddled in sheets
Like a lopped nut, lolling in foam.
O love, we die alone!
I am borne by the bell
Backward to boyhood
To the grey wood
Spire, harvest and marigold,
To those whom a cruel
Just God could gather
To His blue breast, His beard
A folding cloud,
As He gathered my father.
Irresolute and proud,
I can never go back.
I have lost sight of hell,
Of heaven, of human will,
My skill
Is not enough,
I am struck by this bell
To the root.
Crazed by a racking sun,
I stand at my life's noon,
On parched, delirious sand
My shadow lengthens.
III
Art is profane and pagan,
The most it has revealed
Is what a crippled Vulcan
Beat on Achilles' shield.
By these blue, changing graves
Fanned by the furnace blast
Of heaven, may the mind
Catch fire till it cleaves
Its mould of clay at last.
Now Friday's progeny,
The brood of Crusoe's slave,
Black little girls in pink
Organdy, crinolines,
Walk in their air of glory
Beside a breaking wave;
Below their feet the surf
Hisses like tambourines.
At dusk, when they return
For vespers, every dress
Touched by the sun will burn
A seraph's, an angel's,
And nothing I can learn
From art or loneliness
Can bless them as the bell's
Transfiguring tongue can bless.

Crusoe's Journal (1965/1970)
I looked now upon the world as a thing remote, which I
had nothing to do with, no expectation from, and, indeed,
no desires about. In a word, I had nothing indeed
to do with it, nor was ever like to have; so I thought
it looked as we may perhaps look upon it hereafter,
viz., as a place I had lived in but was come out
of it; and well might I say, as Father Abraham
to Dives, "Between me and there is a great gulf fixed."
ROBINSON CRUSOE

Once we have driven past Mundo Nuevo trace
safely to this beat house
perched between ocean and green, churning forest
the intellect appraises
objects surely, even the bare necessities
of style are turned to use,
like those plain iron tools he salvages
from shipwreck, hewing a prose
as odorous as raw wood to the adze;
out of such timbers
came our first book, our profane Genesis
whose Adam speaks that prose
which, blessing some sea-rock, startles itself
with poetry's surprise,
in a green world, one without metaphors:
like Christofer he bears
in speech mnemonic as a missionary's
the Word to savages,
its shape an earthen, water-bearing vessel's
whose sprinkling alters us
into good Fridays who recite His praise,
parroting our master's
style and voice, we make his language ours
converted cannibals
we learn with him to eat the flesh of Christ.
All shapes, all objects multiplied from his,
our ocean's Proteus;
in childhood, his derelict's old age
was like a god's. (Now pass
in memory, I serene parenthesis,
the cliff-deep leeward coast
of my own island filing past the noise
of stuttering canvas,
some noon-struck village, Choiseul, Canaries,
crouched crocodile canoes,
a savage settlement from Henty's novels,
Marryat or R.L.S.,
with one boy signalling at the sea's edge,
though what he cried is lost.)
So time, that makes us objects, multiplies
our natural loneliness.
For the hermetic skill, that from earth's clays
shapes something without use,
and, separate from itself, lives somewhere else,
sharing with every beach
a longing for those gulls that cloud the cays
with raw, mimetic cries,
never surrenders wholly, for it knows
it needs another's praise
like hoary, half-cracked Ben Gunn, until it cries
at last, "O happy desert!"
and learns again the self-creating peace
of islands. So from this house
that faces nothing but the sea, his journals
assume a household use;
we learn to shape from them, where nothing was
the language of a race,
and since the intellect demands its mask
that sun-cracked, bearded face
provides us with the wish to dramatize
ourselves at nature's cost,
to attempt a beard, to squint through the sea-haze,
exposing as naturalists,
drunks, castaways, beachcombers, all of us
yearn for those fantasies
of innocence, for our faith's arrested phase
when the clear voice
startled itself saying "water, heaven, Christ,"
hoarding such heresies as
God's loneliness moves in His smallest creatures.

Elegy (June 6, 1968 [Robert Kennedy's assassination)
Our hammock swung between Americans,
we miss you, Liberty. Che's
bullet-riddled body falls,
and those who cried, the Republic must first die
to be reborn, are dead,
the freeborn citizen's ballot in the head.
Still, everybody wants to go to bed
with Miss America. And, if there's no bread,
let them eat cherry pie.
But the old choice of running, howling, wounded
wolf-deep in her woods,
while the white papers snow on
genocide is gone;
no face can hide
its public, private pain,
wincing, already statued.
Some splintered arrowhead lodged in her brain
sets the black singer howling in his bear trap,
shines young eyes with the brightness of the mad,
tires the old with her residual sadness;
and yearly lilacs in her dooryards bloom,
and the cherry orchard's surf
blinds Washington and whispers
to the assassin in his furnished room
of an ideal America, whose flickering screens
show, in slow herds, the ghosts of the Cheyennes
scuffling across the staked and wired plains
with whispering, rag-bound feet.
while the farm couple framed in their Gothic door
like Calvin's saints, waspish, pragmatic, poor,
gripping the devil's pitchfork
stare rigidly towards the immortal wheat.

Air (1970)

There has been romance, but it has been the romance of
pirates and outlaws. The natural graces of life do not
show themselves under such conditions. There are no
people there in the true sense of the word, with a character and purpose of their own.
FROUDE, The Bow of Ulysses

The unheard, omnivorous
jaws of this rain forest
not merely devour all
but allow nothing vain;
they never rest,
grinding their disavowal
of human pain.
Long, long before us,
those hot jaws, like an oven
steaming, were open
to genocide; they devoured
two minor yellow races, and
half of a black:
in the Word made flesh of God
all entered that gross un-
discriminating stomach;
the forest is unconverted,
because that shell-like noise
which roars like silence, or
ocean's surpliced choirs
entering its nave, to a censer
of swung mist, is not
the rustling of prayer
but nothing; milling air
a faith, infested, cannibal,
which eats gods, which devoured
the god-refusing Carib, petal
by golden petal, then forgot,
and the Arawak
who leaves not the lightest fern-trace
of his fossil to be cultured
by black rock,
but only the rusting cries
of a rainbird, like a hoarse
warrior summoning his race
from vaporous air
between this mountain ridge
and the vague sea
where the lost exodus
of corials sunk without trace -
there is too much nothing here.

New World (1976)
Then after Eden,
was there one surprise?
O yes, the awe of Adam
at the first bead of sweat.
Thenceforth, all flesh
had to be sown with salt,
to feel the edge of seasons,
fear and harvest,
joy that was difficult,
but was, at least, his own.
The snake? It would not rust
on its forked tree.
The snake admired labour,
it would not leave him alone.
And both would watch the leaves
silver the alder,
oaks yellowing October,
everything turning money.
So when Adam was exiled
to our new Eden, in the ark's gut,
the coined snake coiled there for good
fellowship also; that was willed.
Adam had an idea.
He and the snake would share
the loss of Eden for a profit.
So both made the New World. And it looked good.

Egypt, Tobago (1979)
There is a shattered palm
on this fierce shore,
its plumes the rusting helm-
et of a dead warrior.
Numb Antony, in the torpor
stretching her inert
sex near him like a sleeping cat,
knows his heart is the real desert.
Over the dunes
of her leaving,
to his heart's drumming
fades the mirage of the legions,
across love-tousled sheets,
the triremes fading.
At the carved door of her temple
a fly wrings its message.
He brushes a damp hair
away from an ear
as perfect as a sleeping child's. He stares, inert, the fallen column.
He lies like a copper palm
tree at three in the afternoon
by a hot sea
and a river, in Egypt, Tobago.
Her salt marsh dries in the heat
where he foundered
without armour.
He exchanged an empire for her beads of sweat,
the uproar of arenas,
the changing surf
of senators, for
this silent ceiling over silent sand --
this grizzled bear, whose fur,
moulting, is silvered --
for this quick fox with her
sweet stench. By sleep dismembered,
his head
is in Egypt, his feet
in Rome, his groin a desert
trench with its dead soldier.
He drifts a finger
through her stiff hair
crisp as a mare's fountaining tail.
Shadows creep up the palace tile.
He is too tired to move;
a groan would waken
trumpets, one more gesture,
war. His glare,
a shield
reflecting fires,
a brass brow that cannot frown
at carnage, sweats the sun's force.
It is not the turmoil
of autumnal lust,
its treacheries, that drove
him, fired and grimed with dust,
this far, not even love,
but a great rage without
clamour, that grew great
because its depth is quiet;
it hears the river
of her young brown blood,
it feels the whole sky quiver
with her blue eyelid.
She sleeps with the soft engine of a child,
that sleep which scythes
the stalks of lances, fells the
harvest of legions
with nothing for its knives,
that makes Caesars,
spattering at flies,
slapping their foreheads
with the laurel's imprint,
drunkards, comedians.
All-humbling sleep, whose peace
as sweet as death,
whose silence has
all the sea's weight and volubility,
who swings this globe by a hair's trembling breath.
Shattered and wild and
palm-crowned Antony,
rusting in Egypt,
ready to lose the world,
to Actium and sand,
everything else
is vanity, but this tenderness
for a woman not his mistress
but his sleeping child.
The sky is cloudless. The afternoon is mild.

The Figure of Crusoe (1965)
[This is part of a speech Walcott gave at the University of the West Indies, Trinidad campus; it is printed in the Hamner collection of essays referred to earlier in these headnotes.]

[. . . P]oets are in one way, nature's idiots. They are inarticulate. They are capable only of speaking in poetry, for the poetic process, in every morning of the poet's life, is an agonizing humiliation of trying to pronounce every word as if he had just learnt it, and was repeating it for the first time. Behind him, of course, is a morphology that comes to life when the word is set down, and when it is pronounced, but all that dead bush of tradition, of naming things anew can only come to life through some spark. It is now unfashionable to call the spark divine. It has been called, through different phases of our evolution, frenzy, imagination, inspiration, or the subconscious or unconscious. Whatever it is, and wherever it comes from, it exists.

An image may do better. It is that of a lonely man on a beach who has heaped a pile of dead bush, twigs, etc., to make a bonfire. The bonfire may be purposeless. Or it may be a signal of his loneliness, his desperation, his isolation, his symbol of need for another. Or the bonfire may be lit from some atavistic need, for contemplation. Fire mesmerizes us. We dissolve in burning. The man sits before the fire, its glow warming his face, watching it leap, gesticulate, and lessen, and he keeps throwing twigs, dead thoughts, fragments of memory, all the used parts of his life to keep his contemplation pure and bright. When he is tired and returns into himself, then he has performed some kind of sacrifice, some ritual.

[. . .] I have used that image of the hermit and the bonfire because I have found that it has a parallel for the poet. The metaphor of the bonfire, in the case of the West Indian poet, may be the metaphor of tradition and the colonial talent. More profound than this, however, is that it is the daily ritual action of the poet creating a new poem. He burns what he has made the day before by adding new wood to the flame. All becomes pure flame, all is combustible, and by that light, which is separate from him, he contemplates himself.

[. . .] What am I saying then: I am trying to make a heretical reconciliation between the outer world, and the world of the hermit, between, if you wish, the poet and the objects surrounding him that are called society. By objects I mean everything that can be loved, person, animal or thing, because a poet has no more respect for one noun, the thing by which an object is called, than he has for another, whether this is fish, stone, wife, cloud or insect, all are holy as he names them, although in his other life he cannot love them all equally, since he is not a saint. Now that I have said this, I realize what I meant by a poem of Mine entitled "Crusoe's Journal" [and here Walcott quotes the epigraph, from Defoe, reprinted above.]

I have, as you heard, summoned the figure of Crusoe. It is not the Crusoe you recognize. I have compared him to Proteus, that mythological figure who changes shapes according to what we need him to be. Perhaps my mythology is wrong. I am, however, also summoning, in the combination of Crusoe and Proteus, the Old Man of the Sea with whom a mythological hero wrestled. The commercial Crusoe gives his name to our brochures and hotels. He has become the property of the Trinidad and Tobago Tourist board, and although it is the same symbol that I use, you must allow me to make him various, contradictory and as changeable as the Old Man of the Sea. In the poem I have evidently see him in several shapes, and I bore you with a catalogue of these shapes because, to me, they represent various problems organic to West Indian life. My Crusoe, then, is Adam. Christopher Columbus, God, a missionary, a beachcomber, and his interpreter, Daniel Defoe. He is Adam because he is the first inhabitant of a second paradise. He is Columbus because he has discovered this new world, by accident, by fatality. He is God because he teaches himself to control his creation, he rules the world he has made, and also, because he is to Friday, a white concept of Godhead. He is a missionary because he instructs Friday in the uses of religion; he has a passion for conversion. He is a beachcomber because I have imagined him as one of those figures of adolescent literature, some derelict out of Conrad or Stevenson, or Marryat. In the poem he also becomes, in one line, Ben Gunn, the half-crazy pirate who guards Treasure Island, and finally, he is also Daniel Defoe, because the journal of Crusoe, which is Defoe's journal, is written in prose, not in poetry, and our literature, the pioneers of our public literature have expressed themselves in prose in this new world. [. . .]

I have tried to say this. That given a virgin world, a paradise, any sound, any act of naming something, like Adam baptizing the creatures, because that action is anthropomorphic, that is, like the pathetic fallacy, it projects itself by a sound onto something else, such a sound is not really prose, but poetry, is not simile, but metaphor. It is like that well known joke about Adam calling that shape a rhinoceros and when asked by God why he called it that, Adam answered, 'Well, sir, because it looks like one.' We surprise ourselves by watching, say, our children grow to resemble the names we give them, and for Adam, as for Crusoe, and as it should for prose writer and poet, the named thing should have an exact surprise.

I am claiming, then, that poets and prose writers who are West Indians, despite the contaminations around us, are in the position of Crusoe, the namer. Like him, they have behind them, borne from England, from India, or from Africa, that dead bush, that morphology I mentioned earlier, but what is more important is that those utterances, these words, when written, are as fresh, as truly textured, as when Crusoe sets them down in the first West Indian novel. The exhilaration that still carries across, like a gust of salt air, from the most putrid West Indian writing owes its health to this. Besides, it is the figure of Crusoe, as certain critics have found in the figure of Prospero, that supplies the anguish of authority, of the conscience of empire, rule, benign power. The metaphor can be stretched too far. There is now a fashionable, Marxist-evolved method of analysing figures from literature as if they were guilty. These analyses, we have seen them happen in brilliant re-creations, to Prospero as the white imperialist, and to Caliban as the ugly savage. If, as I shall, I draw a similar parallel to Crusoe and Friday, it is because all such dialectic is there in the text. It exists in Defoe the Pamphleteer as it does in Defoe as a novelist, not a poet, and a novelist deals with the human condition under pressure. In Robinson Crusoe the pressure is that of isolation and survival.

[. . .] I am claiming nothing exaggerated when I state that Crusoe, through Defoe's multiple combination of adventure story, religious Protestant tract of trust and self-reliance, and Christian zeal for converting brutish tribes, not with the belligerence of Kipling, but with honest, tender belief in the superiority of his kind, has give us a more real symbol than critics claim for Prospero and Caliban. Crusoe is no lord of magic, duke, prince. He does not possess the island he inhabits. He is alone, he is a craftsman, his beginnings are humble. He acts, not by authority, but by conscience.

It is his and Friday's children who have generated this disturbing society. Disturbing to others, because on one hand there is resolution in landscape and in faith in God, and on the other a desperate longing to leave these island prisons forever and to survive on nostalgia.

Besides, Crusoe is a figure from our schoolboy reading. He is a part of the mythology of every West Indian child. [. . . Then Walcott discusses a schoolbook picture of Crusoe that "terrified him" and says that] I associate a dull, smouldering red, more brown than really red, with Crusoe.

In the painting the figure seems to have resigned itself not only to abandonment, but to discomfort. The rusty, chafing goat's hide, touched by a tropical sunset, and looking, like the sea and sky, dully on fire, doesn't seem to itch him. Nor does the peaked, ruddy, goatskin hat. The patron saint of shipwreck, he sits in this hair-shirt looking out to the horizon out of habit. [. . .]

Of course Crusoe has now gone mad. He has already shouted to God, which is the echo of his own voice, all sorts of terrified obscenities. He is saved, for a time, by the consolation of that other voice, which is own. [. . .]

He publishes every day the newspaper of himself in the journal he now keeps. The craftsman, the artisan, has become the writer. Crusoe can now look at Crusoe as at another object. It is this act that saves his sanity. [. . .]

It is only when Friday arrives that Crusoe again withdraws into himself. He learns the fear of another. Now he stops becoming a writer, hermit, saint, and becomes by necessity, a master. He reverts to what he was taught and becomes self-righteous on such subjects as God, civilization, art and human nakedness. And, of course, race. He returns to a commonplace sanity, to the puritanism that he had abandoned, when, unlike most men, he once really understood nothing.

Crusoe now arms himself with the divine folly of the missionary and adapts Friday to himself. He cannot understand that for the savage, this could mean an abandonment as deep or deeper than his own, for it means not a denial but an exchange of gods. The savage thus surrenders his name, language, religion and nakedness for another man's, and his reward is servitude. The imperialist concept sees all this as inevitable, and it binds its servants to it by creating a sin new to them, ingratitude. Then, of course, it may have struck Friday as strange that the God of Crusoe was killed and eaten. Confrontation with Friday, and with Friday's barbarism and his limited knowledge of language and its graces creates homesickness in Crusoe. He has made the island his own home, but now he sees its "shortcomings." All that he has learned he now relegates to the level of experience and adventure. His sanity is preserved, his language and his equilibrium restored. And so, too, is the old order of things.

[. . .] We must not commit that heresy of thinking that because we "have no past," we have no future. [Walcott here quotes from a variety of writers who have 'chosen' exile; Walcott acknowledges that what they say may be generally true; he himself is trying to "accommodate a third truth." Here is what he quotes from Naipaul:]
The years I had spent abroad fell away and I could not be sure which was the reality of my life: the first eighteen years in Trinidad or the later years in England. I had never wanted to stay in Trinidad. When I was in the fourth form I wrote a vow on the endpaper of my Kennedy's Revised Latin Primer to leave within five years. I left after six; and for many years afterwards in England, falling asleep in bedsitters with the electric fire on, I had been awakened by the nightmare that I was back in tropical Trinidad.
I had never examined this fear of Trinidad. I had never wished to. In my novels I had only expressed this fear; and it is only now, at the moment of writing, that I am able to attempt to examine it. I knew Trinidad to be unimportant, uncreative, cynical . . . Power was recognized, but dignity was allowed to no one. Every person of eminence was held to be crooked and contemptible. We lived in a society that denied itself heroes. (The Middle Passage 41)

[. . .] To each his own terror, to each his own isolation. We evidently become more frightening, more vulgar every day to these writers, and I myself tend to agree with that judgment. But I have tried to show that Crusoe's survival is not purely physical, not a question of the desolation of his environment, but a triumph of will. He is for us, today, the twentieth-century symbol of artistic isolation and breakdown, of withdrawal, of the hermetic exercise that poetry has become, even in the New World, he is the embodiment of the schizophrenic Muse whose children are of all races. Crusoe's triumph lies in that despairing cry which he utters when a current takes his dugout canoe further and further away from the island that, like all of us uprooted figures, he had made his home, and it is the cynical answer that we must make to those critics who complain that there is nothing here, no art, no history, no architecture, by which they mean ruins, in short, no civilization, it is "O happy desert!" We live not only on happy, but on fertile deserts, and we draw our strength, like Adam, like all hermits, all dedicated craftsmen, from that rich irony of our history.

It is what feeds the bonfire. We contemplate our spirit by the detritus of the past.