Belomor

by Nicolas Rothwell

  For years Warburg turned these rituals over in his mind: he had visited a world where man’s first beliefs could still be seen, and grasped—and he felt the resonances: it was a religion of danger, plea and intercession: this was the serpent’s part, to speak for man: ‘If the rain does not appear in August, the plants wither in the otherwise fertile, alkaline soil.’ How could he not recall the prayers of his childhood, the retold pattern of mirage and drought they sought to break, all the Old Testament’s familiar anguish: the urgent distress in the desert that only the rain god in his remote grace could alleviate?

  *

  These scenes concluded, Warburg, in a swift displacement, left the west, and America, returned to Europe, married, moved to Florence and embarked on the series of investigations into art history that secured his academic name. The discoveries of his journey through the Pueblo settlements played no part in his writings of those years. He felt the fierce press of change about him: aeroplanes, the electric telegraph, cars, speed, haste. The shadow of war hung over his world of émigrés and exiles: it can be felt in the extended studies he prepared then, as his children were growing, and the little circle of modernists around him in Florence was contracting. Each of those essays seem to be exclusively devoted to questions of art and the history of culture—but each is in truth a self-portrait, and a sketch of the time, shot through with premonitions of what lay close ahead.

  Warburg had an unusual way of writing, well suited to this slow infiltration of mood and tone from outside in. He wrote constantly, and with the greatest difficulty. His archive consists of endless drafts and sketches, fragments repeated over and over with minute variations. Ernst Gombrich, his biographer, an art historian as celebrated in his day as Warburg himself, describes this method in a book, now little known, that is itself a grand Renaissance portrait: man, time and culture—a work quite in the spirit of its original, thought and feeling in perfect step. As his biographer describes, Warburg’s way of making up the world was kaleidoscopic: he shook and rearranged the elements before him one by one: he would take up a theme, dart off like a butterfly on the wing, collect a fragment, then come looping back. It was his habit to bring together photographic images from far and wide and build them into collages, the better to isolate and trace motifs and enduring patterns as they evolved in time: ‘This dissatisfaction, this need to reshuffle and rearrange the elements of the picture had an almost paralysing effect’—so Gombrich—‘The picture refused to set.’

  War broke out. It was the Great War: its scale was soon plain. Warburg recorded events; he kept a diary of dark entries; he collected news cuttings; he was sleepless; he had to know the course of things. He was certain that the old world of form and grace was on the way to being lost. He wanted to involve himself: he set up and edited a short-lived publication, the Rivista, to advance the German cause in Italy. As the conflict extended, his health became precarious. It was in those years that he drafted the most disquieting and most beautiful of all his studies, Pagan-Antique Prophecy in Words and Images in the Age of Luther, which he first presented as lectures in the autumn of 1917, on a series of days when thousands of soldiers were dying on both the Eastern and the Western fronts. His chief focus was Dürer’s engraving Melencolia, which he interprets as a depiction of the conflict between superstition and enlightenment in the soul of man: it is a constant battle; there is never space for peace; the demons have been fought back, but the seated, reflective figure of Melencolia still fears the onrush of darkness—and the power of fear destroys the realm of reason and reflection. Detailed examination of an ancient printed image gives way: there is a strong kinship between Warburg and his subject. ‘We feel,’ says Gombrich, ‘that for him, too, victory is not yet. He, too, is crowned not with laurel but with nightshade, the remedy against the influence of Saturn.’

  The war’s outcome, and the defeat and breakdown of Germany, left Warburg prostrate. The chains of order in his mind were now quite rearranged: he saw delusion’s gleaming spider web. Late in 1918, a few days after the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II, he suffered a definitive collapse. He seized a pistol, and rushed through the house in search of his wife and children, whom he wished to shoot, so as to prevent them from falling into the hands of enemy soldiers and being murdered in dark prison camps. He was restrained, and swiftly transported to a private clinic in his home town of Hamburg. For three years he was held there, sedated, until it was decided that the best place for him would be the famous Heilanstalt Bellevue, the sanatorium in Kreuzlingen, on the Bodensee. Here he came under the care of Ludwig Binswanger, a pioneer of psychoanalytic treatment, and a nuanced follower of Sigmund Freud.

  At Bellevue, Warburg was heavily sedated with opium, and placed under a close observation regime. The Binswanger archives record the state of his mind, and his capacity to recall and describe with exactitude the events of the recent past: ‘He practices a cult with the moths and butterflies that fly into his room at night. He speaks to them for hours. He calls them his little soul-animals, and tells them about his suffering. He recounts the outbreak of his illness to a moth’—and this narrative, rather disturbingly, is given in full, as if a stenographer had been concealed, somehow, close by all through the night, and had been present as Warburg poured out his heart—the giving over of these confidences was natural for him; the butterfly had always been the emblem of dancing, escaping perfection in his eyes.

  ‘On November 18, 1918,’ said Warburg, ‘I became very afraid for my family. So I took out a pistol and I wanted to kill myself and my family. You know, it’s because Bolshevism was coming. Then my daughter Detta said to me, But, Father, what are you doing? Then my wife struggled with me and tried to take the weapon away from me. And then Frede, my younger daughter, called Max and Alice, my brother and his wife. They came immediately with the car and brought Senator Petersen and Dr Franke with them. Petersen said to me, Warburg, I have never asked anything from you. Now I am asking you please to come to the clinic with me, for you are ill.’

  This marriage of awareness and fantasy drew forth a detailed diagnosis from Binswanger. He greatly admired his patient, and lamented both Warburg’s condition and his prospects. In a letter to Freud, he sketched out his opinion. Even in childhood, he wrote, ‘Professor V’ had displayed tell-tale signs of anxiety and obsession; in adulthood there were always fears and delusions in him, which had harmed his literary productivity; his condition in the asylum was subject to extreme fluctuations. ‘He has been placed in the locked ward, but in the afternoon he is usually calm enough so that he can receive visitors, have tea with us, go out on excursions.’

  Indeed, Warburg’s formal logical capacities seemed intact; he was interested in everything; he possessed excellent judgement concerning people and the outside world, and still had full control of his remarkable memory—but fears and defensive manoeuvres were the pattern of his mind. Binswanger did not believe, in short, that Warburg would ever be able to resume the scientific activities that had been the core of his life before the acute psychosis struck. ‘Have you read his Luther? It is a terrible pity that he will most likely never be able to draw from his enormous treasure of learning or from his immense library.’

  And so years passed, with Warburg in his quarters, speaking to the moths and butterflies, his mind enchained by opium, his dream world full of snakes.

  Snakes—their species and their habits, their symbolic resonances and associations—have a hold on a good number of the high-relief figures one meets on life’s winding course, and the goal and logic of that journey seem at once more mysterious and decidedly more serpentine with each fresh twist and corrective turn. I see my friend John Dawe, the tall, sardonic park ranger who guided, for many years, the wetland management systems in place across Kakadu. His bearing was much like that of a file snake at rest amid camouflaging branches: watchful, inward, yet benign, full of a primordial innocence. Abrupt enthusiasms would sweep him up repeatedly: he developed a fierce obsession for the late-model Jeep Wrangler,
and subjected the vehicle in all its variants to extreme field tests in the jungles and paperbark swamps that stretch from the Mary River wetlands back to Humpty Doo. He threw himself into the task of breeding pig-nosed turtles in captivity; he built a freshwater lake system on his property so large its outline could be clearly seen on satellite photographs—but none of these passing crazes could rival his love of snakes, which was already full-fledged during his childhood in the sparse backblocks of Naracoorte.

  Reptiles, in that country, had to be searched for: they were precious rarities. Dawe escaped to regions of richer supply, and became a keeper—first at zoos, in Adelaide and in Melbourne, then at the Australian Reptile Park in Gosford—but despite this decade-long pattern of persistent snake handling, his charges never turned on him: the strange state of harmony that existed between the Pueblo dancers and their totemic rattlesnakes mantled him also; he tended and ministered to vipers, mambas and cobras; on one occasion a bushmaster wrapped its fangs around his index finger, paused, gazed up and withdrew tenderly, without injecting any of its venom into the puncture wounds left on his skin.

  Such experiences, much discussed, ensured his fame in the serpent world, and it was only a matter of time before my enquiring colleague Kelvin Cantrill appeared to pay homage and seek instruction at Dawe’s property on Darwin’s rural edge. What were the possibilities of locating obscure pythons in the savannah country of the North? The consultation began: their friendship blossomed, in the odd, glassy way that snake ties grow—they strengthen into a kind of brotherhood of shared affections, much like the feelings that Tolstoy pictures binding Karenin and Vronsky beside Anna’s sickbed: a species of love that vanquishes all rivalry and sense of self. Cantrill was a traveller in quest of pure emotions of this kind: he had pursued them; it was his life’s task to describe them. He was a fluent writer: his prose ran richly to metaphor, metaphor piled on metaphor, until it became hard to keep track of the thread of his initial intentions—and the theme of the work as well as its structure was often serpentine, so that a simple-seeming essay on volcanoes, or a treatment of the evolution of stringed instruments, would offer the unsuspecting reader an excursus that touched on various aspects of snake behaviour and taxonomy before returning to the main flow of the narrative. This focus was near constant, in person as much as in written word.

  ‘Elapid Tourism,’ Cantrill might well exclaim in greeting, when we met up in some remote roadhouse in the Gulf Country, or made a rendezvous on the straight, oppressive highways of the Barkly Tableland: ‘That’s the future for the Northern Territory—a tourism based wholly on the lure of venomous snakes.’

  ‘But aren’t they hard to see and find?’

  ‘Of course—that’s the whole point!’ And then it would be the moment for him to sketch again his beatific vision of the Australian tropics and the monsoonal country, flush with international visitors on reptile safari convoys, travelling deep into the snake-rich rangelands round the Simpson and Great Sandy deserts. Year in, year out, they would come: ‘And every visitor would have a special snake passport, with all the details of the most elusive species, and those places where you would have a reasonable chance of spotting them.’

  ‘And you could even have dedicated pages,’ I would say, lifted up by his excitement: ‘Something like the visa pages on a standard passport, divided up, and each rare snake would imprint its fang marks on the right page in the passport as identifying proof of the encounter.’

  ‘Absolutely. What a wonderful idea! And that level of contact would lead inevitably to a rise in incidents of snakebite, and antivenene sales, so it would improve our understanding of toxicology and increase our expertise in emergency medicine as well: a perfect economic circle!’

  Such was Cantrill. His happiest hours were spent at his dark home in Seaforth, on Sydney’s North Shore, peering into his elaborate terrarium, and whispering loving words to his indifferent-seeming diamond pythons, whose elegance he would seek constantly to recapture in word portraits—portraits that became baroque, self-sustaining cathedrals of wild imagery and speculative thought. Their tone and style were somehow familiar to me, and for some months I puzzled over this, as I made my way through the lengthy emails Cantrill liked to send off in the small hours of the night, each file containing whole cascades of these majestic compositions, works of beauty and allusive splendour so elaborate they resembled nothing so much as the growth of corals on some tranquil, sun-dappled reef.

  And then I remembered: I had come across just such patterns of snake rhetoric before, long before, when I worked in the Americas, and became caught up with the rattlesnake researches of José Díaz Bolio, the celebrated historian and poet of the Yucatán Peninsula. We corresponded for several months, and his letters, handwritten, in the most courtly style, gained in intensity and flourish with each exchange. It seemed essential, in the end, to pay a visit. I took the flight down to Mérida, and began a series of trips to the Mayan snake-cult sites of the inland, and immersed myself in Díaz Bolio’s vast outpouring of books and pamphlets: they contained his interpretations of the art and symbolism of the temple complexes, his calendric studies, his ideas about the snake as the axis of the region’s enduring traditions—and these works, printed on flimsy paper, available only in the back rooms of obscure provincial bookshops, seemed like hidden, fragmentary texts of revelation. In fact they were mere apéritifs. Díaz Bolio was still working on the definitive statement of his philosophy when at last we came face to face.

  It was late in the afternoon of a stifling summer day. At the appointed hour, I rang the bell at the gate of his palazzo. Díaz Bolio received me in a lovely tree-shaded garden. He was wearing a linen suit of fine cut. He shook hands. For a few seconds, he endeavoured to preserve a formality of manner—then the front broke.

  ‘To the study,’ he cried: ‘At once!’

  It was a large room, warm, sun-drenched, with antique maps and deep-shadowed photographs of temple friezes displayed above the bookcases: sheafs of manuscripts and notes were piled on adjoining desks. Behind them, wide-eyed, staring rattlesnakes of various sizes and colorations floated, coiled up in large preserving jars. He described each one: its characteristics, anatomical and mythological. We delved into the latest theories to come to Díaz Bolio’s thoughts. Was it not clear that the cosmos itself, as it was being progressively disclosed by modern astrophysics, had a snakelike quality? Had the gods of creation not revealed this cryptic structure in the first hallucinatory visions that were vouchsafed to the rulers of the Mayan realm?

  ‘It is crotalic thinking,’ exclaimed Díaz Bolio, stroking a small statue of a serpent deity perched on a table by his side.

  ‘Crotalic?’

  ‘From the classificatory name of the Mesoamerican rattlesnake,’ he said, looking a touch offended. ‘Crotalus. But of course you, as an enquirer yourself, will see these connections immediately. I have begun to set them out. Here.’

  He handed me a thick typescript: upon the cover there was a stylised tracery of snake scales and feather plumes: Mi Descubrimiento del Culto Crotalico, announced the title.

  ‘My last work,’ he said: ‘My synthesis: I draw my thoughts together; and in so doing, I draw myself.’

  I began reading from the first chapter: he listened. Even by Díaz Bolio’s own standards, the prose was labyrinthine; it was lush in sound; it took delight in its rhythmic unfurling of clause and paragraph.

  ‘It’s almost as if the beauty of the structure is what holds the key,’ I said.

  ‘You mean the meaning is there is no meaning? It’s only the convolutions? How much I fear those ideas. Throughout my life they have tempted me. But all the ideas in the world are our work: nothing more. We are vain interpreters. The thing remains. The longer I live, the more I succeed in thinking like a serpent, and the more I realise that the enemy of truth is man.’

  *

  Convictions of such a kind leave snake people exposed to easy detection, and almost as soon as I met the wildlife photographe
r Deion Palomor I caught the distinctive signs. It was the early dry season in Darwin, a time when spirits lift, sun returns to the sky, the bright colours of the tropics have not yet taken on their sterile, desiccated midyear hues. I found myself in the heart of town, in Smith Street Mall, a pedestrian stretch that runs past arcades and half-empty office blocks, a commercial wasteland, devoid of grace or elegance—but, in those days, at its eastern end there was a haven, a little sanctuary of vivid life: an unusual studio-gallery had just opened there, Monsoon, the brainchild of the North’s artist-photographer Peter Eve, an individual with cold contempt for market tastes. Monsoon’s glass display windows were very often veiled, the better to communicate this sharp defiance of the outside world—but from time to time its proprietor would put on view a handful of his own more enigmatic images, in largescale reproduction: bright-green lily pads, shot close-up from directly above; smoke plumes, unfurling at sunset; a tormented flock of wheeling birds.

  I called in. A young man was skulking in a corner of the gallery, shuffling photos, hanging work. It was Palomor.

  ‘What do you think?’ he asked, and held up two mounted prints.

  He wore khaki field clothes, but with a certain poise. He was thin, but with a sapling’s taut energy. He blushed as he asked his question, but held the eye. The prints showed a set of faint, blurred, lozenge-like patterns.

  ‘What are they?’

  ‘Can’t you tell? Snakes’ scales, of course. The undersides of heads of Pilbara death adders—and some from the Top End, too.’