Simon Schama’s monumental work, Landscape and Memory, asserts that nature and human consciousness cannot be independent of each other–that any appreciation of landscape may only approach completeness when it acknowledges the reciprocity of nature and culture in our understanding.* As Thoreau put it, “It is in vain to dream of a wildness distant from ourselves. There is none such.”** Enobarbus’s famous speech from Antony and Cleopatra, from which the title of this post has been taken, strongly suggest this interdependence as well.
In relating to Agrippa how Antony could have been so immediately taken with Cleopatra, Enobarbus describes the overwhelmingly intoxicating beauty and grandeur of the moment when Antony first sees the Egyptian queen, enthroned on her royal barge. In the speech, barge, water, retinue, and Cleopatra herself become an intertwined whole, an exhilarating landscape of overpowering immanent sensation. Anchoring the speech in Cleopatra’s person, that “beggared all description” (AC 2.2.208), Enobarbus’s illustration animates even the landscape itself, as the described moment seems to brighten so that the city and its emptying become as responsive as those who inhabit it:
The city cast
Her people out upon her, and Antony,
Enthroned i’th’ market-place, did sit alone,
Whistling to th’air, which, but for vacancy,
Had gone to gaze on Cleopatra, too,
And made a gap in nature. (AC 2.2.223-28)
Under the influence of Cleopatra’s presence, Antony’s strength and majesty diminishes, becoming as empty as the air that only remains because it defines the vacancy that remains after everyone and everything else has gone. This foreshadows Antony’s decline over the course of the play, increasingly linking him to desolation and abandonment. Cleopatra’s being remains one of overwhelming strength of presence, with her petulance and passions only adding dimension and texture to her appeal. Her “strange invisible perfume hits the sense/Of the adjacent wharfs” (2.2.222) while Antony sits “alone/Whistling to th’air”.*** The landscape that Enobarbus describes is as much a landscape of water, of people, and of the city as it is a landscape of time–an isolated moment when Antony’s power slips in light of the weighty joss of Cleopatra’s significant existence.
In the song “If I had a Boat”, singer/songwriter Lyle Lovett sings:
And if I were like lightning
I wouldn’t need no sneakers
I’d come and go wherever I would please
And I’d scare ’em by the shade tree
And I’d scare ’em by the light pole
But I would not scare my pony on my boat out on the sea.
In fact, as the song suggests, Lovett is like lightning. His observations and perceptions reflect a manipulation of consciousness that effortlessly transports him to and from various hypothetical situations and settings in and around his envisioned boat. Like Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, he not only changes shape, but fluidly moves between the worlds of mortals and immortals, playhouse stage and audience, song and listener. His lightning remains conscious, assuming a choice of what and where to scare, stepping across boundaries of boat, shade tree, and light pole like a fairy, or like a player stepping from the shadows of fiction to become a voice for the play itself:
If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended –
That you have but slumbered here
While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream,
Gentles, do not reprehend.
If you pardon, we will mend.
And, as I am an honest Puck,
If we have unearnèd luck
Now to ‘scape the serpent’s tongue,
We will make amends ere long.
Else the Puck a liar call.
So good night unto you all.
Give me your hands if we be friends,
And Robin shall restore amends. (AMND 5.1.209-24)
The famous call for applause, asking to “Give me your hands” also suggests a friendly clasping or shaking of hands, with the image of the fairy or the player reaching out of the dark, dreaming shadow of the playhouse to take the hands of the audience in amity while accepting their praise.
Notoriously liminal, fairies as boundary crossers range far beyond Shakespeare’s Dream, and Diane Purkiss reminds us that “no one would link fairies with reason”.**** Yet, fairies are often linked with landscape, part and parcel of the nature from which they often emerge, and into which they may just as suddenly fade. But, as connected as these anthropomorphic spirits may be to landscape, they only reflect a singular aspect of ways in which our consciousness links to observations of the world.
The anthropic principle asserts that observations of the universe have a reciprocal participation with those sentient beings who observe it. The idea that we co-create our own universe is hardly new, and neither is the idea that the universe may only be here because we are here to perceive it. Yet, somehow, in creating our landscapes (be they literal or conceptual–if there is a difference), we also may become walled up within them. Hamlet’s prison Denmark does not seem a prison to Rosencrantz or Guildenstern. Denmark may well be a prison to Ophelia as well, judging by her attempts to escape the place or its events by retreating inwards–into the tangles in her mind, and into nature’s liquid embrace.
Hamlet steps into his revenge and becomes an inhabitant of a ‘revenge tragedy’ over which brooding Elsinore and its environs remain grim observers. Richard III assumes the mantle of power in an eroded and eroding landscape of kingship, only to gradually lose his previous fluid communication with the audience. Othello assumes command on distant Cyprus while Iago prompts the distant wilderness in Othello’s own mind to take command of the commander. The reciprocity, the mutual participation of genre landscape, psychological landscape, spiritual landscape, and emotional landscape remains deafening. Lear’s storm shaken heath and Lear himself are the same. The king is the land. The prince is his conception of the world. The commander is the sea eating at the rocks beneath his own feet.
Antony meets Cleopatra at the moment of her exhalation:
I saw her once
Hop forty paces through the public street;
And having lost her breath, she spoke, and panted,
That she did make defect perfection,
And, breathless, powre breathe forth. (AC 2.2.238-42)
Critics may favour one of two possible interpretations of that last line (for which I have left the original spelling here), but I wonder why might the line not assume both meanings–that Cleopatra was yet able to ‘pour breath forth’, or to breathe, and that she was also able to ‘power breath forth’, or to breathe or emanate power. There is an ancient Tai Chi exercise focuses on our exchange of energy or breath with the universe around us, and it is often described in terms of breathing, of exchanging breath with one’s environment. Given the tremendous variety of participations in, and exchanges with the environment that Shakespearean characters so often display, why might not Cleopatra’s exhalation be as grand and powerful as the rest of her descriptors?
This might explain why, when Antony beholds her, his already enriched susceptibility to, and participation in considerations of power bends before Cleopatra’s sway. He breathes vacancy while she exudes her powerful magnetism over populace and landscape alike. Like town and water, Antony responds to her already potent participation in the very air he breathes, and like the waves, the town, and the air itself, this commander of a third of the world turns, perhaps almost involuntarily, to participate in Cleopatra as well.
When the family finally leaves the great house in John Crowley’s novel, Little, Big, the great house that forms the central landscape for much of the story is abandoned too:
One by one the bulbs burned out, like long lives come to their expected ends. Then there was a dark house made once of time, made now of weather, and harder to find; impossible to find and not even as easy to dream of as when it was alight. Stories last longer: but only be becoming only stories.*****
In the end, Crowley’s story remains irretrievably intertwined with the landscape in which it takes place. The house empties because it had always been a stepping stone to a kingdom of which it had only ever been a pale reflection. With one notable exception, the characters’ lives no longer need the structure’s momentum in order to progress, in order to become or to evolve.
Events may also serve as such markers–pinning the consciousness of human experience, however obliquely, to particular moments in time, which may look either forwards or backwards, or even in both directions at once. In Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, Gus and Hannah begin to waltz while they remain separated by time from a fatal fire in the distant past, while simultaneously, in the same room but in a previous time, Septimus and Thomasina also waltz, insensible to the devastating fire that for them is yet to come.
For Antony and Cleopatra, doom is already integral to the landscape and the story they inhabit. Their love devours them, eating structure, story, and their being around them. Neither Rome nor Egypt can shelter them in the end because their passion outgrows their story and their place. Even their lives become too small at last.
In the end, the lilac blooms of childhood inform the lilacs of today, the latter never smelling as sweet as those that we remember. No summers like. No winters neither. Her laughter. The way he walked along a long ago road. Story and landscape, character and setting, moment and the play itself, all are as inseparable as we are from our own world of which all these elements reflect various facets of our experience. Weather, water, time, and the very stones describe our mutual promiscuity with, and our participation in the landscapes of our ever moving human lives, in spite of however removed from any given landscape we may believe ourselves to be.
*Schama, Simon. Landscape and Memory. New York: Vintage, 1996.
**Thoreau, Henry David. The Journal 1837-1861. Edited by Damion Searls. Forward by John R. Stilgoe. New York: New York Review Books (NYRB), 2009.
***Just a note that, for the purposes of this blog, I most often use the Arden series of Shakespeare texts, when I have them.
****Purkiss, Diane. At the Bottom of the Garden: A Dark History of Fairies, Hobgoblins, and Other Troublesome Things. New York: New York University Press, 2003. Even the title of the U.S. version of the book is locative, however small a place it may reflect.
*****Crowley, John. Little, Big. New York: Bantam, 1981.