Thalassic lessons : pedagogical aesthetics and the Mediterranean

Abstract

With some trepidation the poets plead to their sea. Their only hope is that the sea— the thalassa—offers a lesson. This expectation exudes a sense of liturgy and sacrifice. Not unlike a presbyter, the poet’s ritual seeks to mediate the world with the myriad singular experiences that make it. Heinrich Heine demands an answer from the North Sea by recalling the gods of Hellas in an effort to resurrect its ability to conjoin death with life. He is the presbyter who demands most. In contrast, in the presence of his sea, Montale sees himself as a mere mortal. He could only engage in a strange rhythm as he carefully traces back his upbringing along the Mediterranean coast. In the cycle of poems Mediterraneo Montale-the-poet encounters the limits of Montale-the-man. His liturgy happens every day, as it struggles with his poetic craft, looking for appropriate words that would somehow represent his bewildered sense of loss, fear and desolation as an individual. Overwhelmed by a presence that far exceeds what the brain thinks or his voice could utter, Montale-the-man is reconciled with Montale-the-poet by surrendering in a “struggling rhythm” to the limits of what the rest of his senses could feel, taste and hear in a sea that portends the weight of universality.