The Sea Inside

by Philip Hoare

  As I resume my climb, I’m forced to stop every now and again – not because I’m running out of breath, but because the view itself is breathtaking. Behind me is the landscape I have known all my life, levered up and flattened at the same time; a three-dimensional map of my hinterland, from Bournemouth’s beaches to Portsmouth’s towers, signalling the south-eastern sprawl towards London.

  Everything falls away, as if seen from a lurching helicopter. At the feet of the cliff, the sea is turned cloudy, as though scattered with bath salts. Beyond, its open surface is pooled with shifting shafts of sunlight and mercurial upwellings. It seems to move under itself, inexorably, a great slow mass beneath a rippling skin. The quiet is unnerving. You’d think such a vast vista would evoke an awful noise, echoing with what Tennyson called ‘the moanings of the homeless sea’. This is as far as I can go. Any further and I’d have to take to the water. I feel a sudden surge of inexplicable homesickness, perhaps because I can see my home, near and far away.

  I think the silence is getting to me.

  William Davenport Adams bellows – it’s the former schoolmaster in him. ‘Oh, there is such a glorious prospect from this bold headland!’ he shouts, making himself heard over the long-departed wind, ‘a vast sweep of the Channel blends strangely in the distance with the deep-blue sky, and when you turn, lo, beneath you lies the silent peninsula-plain, with its villages, and wooded knolls, and sequestered farm-houses, and sparkling streams.’

  I’ve reached the top, staked out by a grandiose granite monument, erected in 1897 –

  IN MEMORY

  OF ALFRED

  LORD TENNYSON

  THIS CROSS IS

  RAISED A BEACON

  TO SAILORS BY

  THE PEOPLE OF

  FRESHWATER &

  OTHER FRIENDS

  IN ENGLAND

  AND AMERICA

  – while the etched aluminium plate of a range-finder at its feet tells me that if I sailed due south-west from here, I’d reach the Azores. The world below is dazed by the light, as if everything had evaporated into the ether. Except that someone has neatly used chalk fragments, all of a size, to spell out the word Google on the grass. Next time I come by, the word will be replaced by a pair of lovers’ names.

  The clouds are rushing under the sun, casting shadows on the sea, creating fluffy stealth bombers. Their shapes seem to slide under the surface as underwater islands. I’m ever more aware of the tentative land on which I stand, a white wound gouged out of England’s underbelly, studded with flint and sutured by grass.

  The chalk hurts my eyes. I lie back. The turf is springy and surprisingly comfortable, and worn out by my early rising and the afternoon sun, I fall asleep. I wake abruptly – with that disconcerting sense of not knowing where I am or how much time has passed – and realise I’m not in bed, but on the edge of a five-hundred-foot cliff. There are strident voices coming out of the air. ‘… That’s a risky business …’ says one. For a moment I assume they’re talking about my perilous nap, but they soon drift by and I scramble to my feet.

  As I walk on, the ground grows more fissured as the island narrows and the sea expands. The sheer unboundedness seems to invite me to throw myself off. ‘It is as well, however, not to go too near the cliff-edge,’ my 1950 guide cautions in solemn tones, ‘as in this exposed corner the wind often comes with sudden gusts that might have awkward consequences.’ I’m too close. I can hear my mother telling me to be careful, and see my father frowning when I persist in my daredevil ways. He feared for her heart. But then, so did I.

  Here where the grass parts company from the white, chunks of cliff are preparing themselves for collapse, as if the whole thing might give way any minute. As the wind gusts enticingly around me, I wonder that the Poet Laureate and his photographer friend weren’t caught up in its embrace; billowing cape, wide-awake hat, Indian shawl, red velvet dress, glass plates, manuscripts and notebooks, all sent flying over the edge as an airborne bundle to be dashed on the boulders below. As for me, there’d be no audience to my final piece of play-acting, only the birds, whose careless launchings encourage my fantasy of falling or flying, the same fear that feeds my apprehension in the sea. I trust to the water; they place their faith in the air.

  As I stand there, I hear a sudden whoosh by my ear. A raven rises on the updraft, near enough for me to feel the wind from its wings. Riding on fingertip darkness, stark black against the bright white and wide-winged, it looks more like a bird of prey than a passerine, commanding the air around it. Landing deftly, it is joined by its partner, eyes glinting as they stalk the turf, a twitchy, mythological presence. Ravens, I have decided, are my new favourite animal.

  If an animal’s brain exceeds the size which the efficient running of its body would require, the excess is measured as an encephalisation quotient, or EQ. It is one way in which we can measure the capacity of the forebrains that govern sensation, memory and emotion. In the global clan of corvids – crows, magpies, rooks, jays and jackdaws – this index far exceeds that of all other birds. Above them all is the raven, Corvus corax, the über-crow. It boasts a brain-to-body size comparable only to primates and toothed cetaceans such as dolphins and sperm whales, even though a raven’s brain weighs a fraction of an ounce compared to the latter’s eighteen pounds.

  If we were once aquatic apes, owing our brains to our seafood diet, then such is their intelligence that some biologists go so far as to call corvids ‘feathered apes’. And as ever with science, one conclusion only invites another in the endless cycle of what may or may not be true. ‘It may be impossible to prove in a literal or absolute sense that any one particular animal has or does not have emotions, consciousness, or capacity for insight,’ as Bernd Heinrich, a biologist who has raised ravens by hand in order to study them more closely, writes. ‘These subjective, individual, and hard-to-define qualities of mind are found in separate independent evolutionary lines, with the highest end-points reached in some species of primates, cetaceans, and perhaps corvids and parrots.’

  A carrion crow will place nuts on a pedestrian crossing for cars to crack, and wait for the red light to retrieve its meal. New Caledonian crows hook food out of holes with leaves and sticks, displaying the same insight and creativity that Aesop related in his fable of the crow and the pitcher, in which the thirsty bird learns to drop pebbles into the jar to raise the level enough to allow it to drink. Magpies recognise themselves in the mirror, suggesting a sense of individual identity. Jays remember the ‘what-when-where’ of past events. Rooks will support their fellow birds after a fight in a manner which in humans we would not hesitate to call sympathetic. These birds all demonstrate co-operative action which is clearly not instinctual. They are intensely social, bound by life-pairs and the kind of wider ties associated with cognitive animals – such as ourselves. Clever, knowing, tricksy, sometimes it seems the entire family are conspiring to hide their intelligence from us, for fear of what might happen if we found out what they really knew.

  Despite their superior size, ravens are the most timid corvids, scared of a snapping twig, if not a passing cloud. They also deceive one another, pretending to bury food in one place, whilst surreptitiously taking it elsewhere. And unlike almost every other animal, they appear to possess the ability of ‘gaze-following’, taking note of where their peers are looking, and anticipating accordingly. Their ‘observational memories’ allow them to remember earlier crimes, assess the results of repeating them. In effect, they lie, like us; and like us, they also exhibit emotion – especially fear. They do well to remember who their enemies are, since they seem to have so few friends.

  One raven will distract an eagle whilst the other steps in behind and steals its prey. Nesting ravens steal eggs from seabirds to feed their own young. Sometimes the relationship is mutually beneficial. A raven’s call will summon wolves or foxes to a dead animal; the birds will then wait while the mammals pull apart the carcase, allowing them access to the meat. Such talents earned ravens the name wolf-bi
rds; the Inuit would follow them too, led to their prey by the ravens’ ‘gong-like’ calls.

  Given such greedy behaviour, one might be forgiven for thinking that these birds must be the root of the word ‘ravenous’ – especially as they’ll eat anything from offal to dogshit. In fact – although the word derives from the Old French, ravine, and before that, from the Latin rapere, to seize or snatch – the same root gives us rapacious and rape, and thus raping, which can also mean the act of tearing prey, and might have been made for these birds – which actually derive their name from the Norse, hrafn. Ravens can kill seal pups, reindeer and lambs, first pecking out their victims’ eyes. They even stand accused of murdering one another. Such sombre crimes sustain their gothic air – yet in the past they were regarded not as harbingers of death and disaster but as companions or even begetters of creation itself; ceremonial birds, part of our rituals, as well as their own.

  I must have seen my first raven on a childhood visit to the Tower of London, where they stalk the lawns with clipped wings, kept captive to warn of danger. The Roman founders of London believed the birds augured violent death and foul weather; and as they bore the characteristics of Saturn, they were a sign of that planet’s ill-disposition: if the ravens left their nests, famine and calamity were sure to follow.

  To blame human fates on a bird is as bad as Ahab investing a whale with evil. But like the whale, the raven has ever laboured under an elusive profile, one which shifts as fitfully as the animal itself. It presides over Christian legend: it was the raven, rather than the dove, which was the first to leave the Ark, searching for land and food, flying ‘to and fro until the waters had dried up from the earth’; and far from signifying doom, ravens appear as servants to saints. Although the woebegone Job, a man never short of self-pity (‘even young children despise me’), complained, ‘Who provides for the raven its prey, when its young ones cry to God, and wander about for the lack of food?’, his cheerier fellow prophet Elias was visited by ravens which brought him bread and meat in the wilderness, as ordered by Jehovah: ‘You shall drink from the brook, and I have commanded the ravens to feed you there.’ As a result, the bird recurs in Renaissance art, as well as in the words of the metaphysical poet Henry Vaughan:

  Here Jacob dreames, and wrestles: there

  Elias by a Raven is fed

  One saint who found such succour was Paul, the first Christian hermit. As a fifteen-year-old boy, Paul fled from persecution into the Egyptian wastes, only to be followed by so many others that the wasteland became a virtual city of penitents. The Desert Fathers, as they became known, displayed extravagant acts of abstinence and denial. They faced the same devil with whom Christ had wrestled when he fasted for forty days among the wild beasts, cared for by angels. These first monks lived ‘in a twilight between the real and the visionary’, as Walter de la Mare wrote, starving themselves for weeks on end and even chaining themselves to the ground in an effort to outdo each other’s piety.

  As Helen Waddell records in her charming Beasts and Saints, a translation of their stories published, with elegant engravings by Robert Gibbings, in 1934, many Desert Fathers demonstrated a remarkable affinity with animals. St Mark the Wrestler cured a hyena whelp that had been born blind by spitting on his fingers and signing on its eyes. St Pachome walked unharmed among snakes and scorpions and summoned crocodiles to ferry him across the river ‘as one calls a cab from a rank’. And St Simon of Stylites, who lived on a pillar for forty years, took a tree out of a dragon’s eye, in gratitude for which the creature promptly turned Christian. Such acts evoked Eden, as Waddell wrote in an era which itself was rapidly darkening: ‘In the first paradise that lies behind the memory of the world there was no cruelty …’

  Rational thought might ascribe these scenes – for which there is a term, zooscopy, a form of mental delusion in which the sufferer sees imaginary animals – to isolation and malnutrition, but Paul thrived on just such a miracle. He settled cosily in a cave, wearing a garment of palm leaves, and until the age of forty-three lived off the fruits of the same tree. His diet doubled in variety when a raven came bearing half a loaf of bread – and repeated the feat every day for the next sixty years. Since ravens live to fifty or more, this is not entirely impossible, if one sets aside the other practicalities.

  Still sustained by heavenly bread, the elderly Paul was visited by Anthony, another hermit who lived in the wilderness ‘with no fear of the wild beasts which were therein’, and who was himself ninety years old. That day the raven arrived with a whole loaf for the saints to share, an act of corvid catering depicted, sensationally, by Velázquez in a sublime painting that shows the bird flying out of the clouds and down a sheer cliff to the two aged eremites, clutching what looks suspiciously like a bagel in its beak. Evidently a diet of bread and dates was an aid to longevity: Paul lived to one hundred and thirteen, thanks to his reliable raven. At his death, around AD 345, he was buried by Anthony – who lived to one hundred and five – in a grave dug by a pair of friendly lions, as seen in the background of Velázquez’s work.

  The stories of the desert monks show how distanced we are today from animals. They evoke an age when beasts and birds meant more than just meat or servitude, since they represented the inexplicable wonder and fear of the created world. It is why medieval bestiaries resemble typological tracts and religious analogies, with their islands that turn out to be whales, unicorns able to diagnose a maiden’s virginity, and pelicans which pluck their own breasts to suckle their brood on their blood. The raven flits through such myths, shifting from creator and sustainer to destroyer and back again. Not long after Paul was interred in the desert, the mortal remains of the martyred St Vincent of Saragossa – who’d been roasted on a gridiron – were guarded from scavenging beasts by a raven. Later, St Benedict, the sixth-century founder of the famous order, was saved by a raven that snatched away a piece of poisoned bread which the saint was about to eat.

  To Christians, the raven represented the immortal soul; some even saw in the bird’s blackness a reflection of the brightness of the sun, just as the Roman followers of Mithras had seen the bird as a solar messenger. But more northerly beliefs began to darken its reputation. At the feet of the Norse god Odin sat two wolves, Gere the greedy and Freke the voracious, who fed him, while on his shoulders perched two ravens, Hugin, or Reflection, and Munin, Desire. These birds whispered in Odin’s ears of what they had seen on their daily flying missions around the world, during which they occasionally stopped to drink the blood of wounded men. They were the enablers of Odin’s omniscience and earned him the name of Rafnagud, the Raven God; his symbol was borne on the standard of his earthly armies, bent on their own predatory plunder. Unfurled on their banners, the raven was a harbinger of war. If it hung its wings, defeat loomed. If victory was imminent, it flew outstretched as though to warn its victims, ‘This is what’s coming for you,’ shortly before turning them into carrion for the real corvids that would soon descend on the scene.

  At sea, Norse sailors carried ravens as navigational aids as they sailed from one northern island to the other, as they would otherwise have become lost under the starless skies of high summer latitudes. Released, the birds would rise up looking for land. If they didn’t find it, they’d return to the ship. The north was the home of such resonant creatures of the forest and the sea, their names eliding with internal rhythms – ravens, wolves, whales and bears – a zoomorphic cast endowed with all manner of semi-human characteristics. In his History of the Northern Peoples, Olaus Magnus maintained that there were ‘extremely savage ravens, including white ones’, that lived in the icy lands, capable of ‘clawing out the eyes of babies as they lie squalling in their cradles’. He also claimed that the birds could make sixty-four different sounds, from Cras, cras, ‘Tomorrow, tomorrow,’ to Erit, erit, ‘It shall be, it shall be,’ although neither of these messages could be trusted. ‘And so it is with all the other calls which ravens babble, cluck, bark, croak, gargle, and wheeze, telling of fierce an
d terrible storms, rains, and other disasters.’ The raven was a liar and a trickster, the bird who cried wolf.

  Such myths merged with the coming of Christianity. In early English churches, stone porches were carved with rows of raven beaks, reminders of Odin’s servants as well as of the brutal behaviour of the tattooed Vikings, said to have flayed Christians alive and nailed their skins to church doors, as witnessed by fragments of human tissue found under nail heads driven into the oak. (My own ancestors may have been among those raiders: my mother’s red hair inherited from her illegitimate grandmother, and my crooked little fingers, bent by Dupuytren’s contracture, betray our Nordic roots.) Along with the wolf and the eagle, the raven was one of the Beasts of Battle, haunting emblems of death and destruction in Germanic, Norse and Old English verse. ‘The Battle of Brunanburh’ recorded corpses left ‘for the dark/Black-coated raven, horny-beaked to enjoy’. In ‘Judith’, the raven is ‘the slaughter-greedy bird’ that rejoices at the coming feast. And in ‘The Fight at Finnsburh’, the raven circles, ‘swarthy and sallow’, over the fallen heroes: the original Anglo-Saxon expresses it better, in alliterative half-lines that emphasise the bird’s eerie blackness: Hræfn wandrade sweart and sealobrūn.

  St Oswald, the Dark Age king of Northumbria, was often portrayed with a pet raven which carried his ring to the Wessex princess he intended to marry. Later, the bird performed a posthumous service for its master, when in 642 Oswald was slain in battle and his body dismembered by Penda, the pagan ruler of rival Mercia. In order to propitiate Odin, Penda had the saint’s head, hands and arms hung on stakes, but this macabre display had the opposite effect of spreading his opponent’s cult throughout England. Oswald’s raven flew off with one of his master’s arms to a sacred tree – an echo of Yggdrasil, the heavenly ash which bound all time and space – where a holy well promptly sprang from the ground. One limb ended up in Ely, another in Peterborough, and in Durham, Oswald’s head was placed in the coffin containing the incorrupt remains of a yet more revered saint, one with his own extraordinary relationships with animals.