The title line is spoken by the character, Alonso, who is the King of Naples in Shakespeare’s The Tempest.
O, it is monstrous, monstrous:
The Tempest 3.3.115-23
Methought the billows spoke and told me of it;
The winds did sing it to me, and the thunder,
That deep and dreadful organ-pipe, pronounced
The name of Prosper: it did bass my trespass.
Therefore my son i’ the ooze is bedded, and
I’ll seek him deeper than e’er plummet sounded
And with him there lie mudded.
Having been confronted by the spirit, Ariel, who has magically disguised himself as an accusing Harpy, Alonso keenly feels his guilt at his part in the usupation of Prospero’s Milan dukedom. Ariel has told Alonso that he has been “bereft” of his son by the “ministers of Fate” who have judged the usurpers “most unfit to live”. Alonso believes that his son, Ferdinand, has been drowned in the shipwreck that has marooned the party on the deserted island where the play’s action takes place. Although this isn’t true, and Ferdinand is actually alive and well, the loss leaves the king feeling so despondent that he wishes to join his son in his grave at the bottom of the sea.
That Ariel should appear as a Harpy here is significant. Half bird, half human, harpies traditionally were associated with storms at sea, and Alonso’s internal tempest at this point seems much darker than the one that Prospero’s magic originally contrived to bring their ship to the island. In addition to the association with storms, Ariel’s harpy brings a concert of universal judgment on Alonso, and his fellow usurpers, his brother, Sebastian, and Prospero’s brother, Antonio (who currently occupies Prospero’s rightful throne in Milan).
Personifications of storms, harpies were also karmic forces, often leaving wreck and despair in their wake. Amongst his illustrations for Dante Aligheiri’s Divine Comedy, the engraver, Gustave Doré, pictured harpies lurking in the netherworld:
We may tend to think of these creatures, these embodiments of storm and guilty anguish as belonging to the province of Greek and Roman mythology, which is essentially correct. Yet, as storm birds, harpies are not alone. They bear great similarities to other storm spirits, especially, in North America, the Thunderbird, which appears in slightly different versions in various indigenous tribal mythologies.
The Thunderbird is a vast, seldom seen spirit in the form of a giant bird. It brings life giving rain, but can also dispense the thunderbolts of divine justice. Both terrifying and reassuring, both avenger and protector, the Thunderbird often travels concealed behind a thick cloud cover. Because it can be an unerring guide to those in need, the Thunderbird is often the subject of art, and its image is also frequently found on jewelry, especially in the galleries of the American Southwest. The mighty storm bird (in a brilliant artist’s interpretation of the creature by Arnaud Valette) also makes an appearance in the Harry Potter film extension series, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.
Rowling’s creative vision captures the blend of incredible power and unique sensitivity, the majesty, beauty, and danger that are all part of storms. Intelligent and wise, Frank (as the Thunderbird is named in the film) is also straightforward, like his name.
It seems as though there must a kinship amongst mythical storm birds. The mighty P’eng, mentioned by Chuang Tzu/Zhuang Zhou (莊子/莊周) sounds as though it might be closely related to the Thunderbird:
In the northern darkness there is a fish and his name is K’un. The K’un is so huge I don’t know how many thousand li he measures. He changes and becomes a bird whose name is P’eng. The back of the P’eng measures I don’t know how many li across and, when he rises up and flies off, his wings are like clouds all over the sky.
The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu*
Zhuang Zhou continues by citing a now lost text called the Universal Harmony**. “When the P’eng journeys to the southern darkness, the waters are roiled for three thousand li. He beats the whirlwing and rises ninety thousand li, setting off on the six month gale.”
Here the P’eng creates clouds and rides a great storm. He also rises to extraordinary altitudes, which Angus Charles Graham (who also translated the first seven ‘inner’ chapters of Zhuangzi) saw as “soaring above the restricted viewpoints of the worldly.”*** In this transcendant sense, he echoes Ariel’s Harpy, who has the advantage of the broad perspective. When he addresses Alonso, Sebastian, and Antonio, he knows their transgressions, and he also has a broader perspective. Ariel, of course, knows that he/it isn’t really a Harpy, just as he knows he isn’t human, and that he only assumes these kinds of shapes at Prospero’s bidding. He further knows that Alonso’s son has not died, and that Prospero has engineered both the shipwreck and the castaways’ subsequent experiences in order to confront those who betrayed him with their own guilt at being complicit in the usurpation of his throne, and for having set Prospero adrift with his infant daughter in an unseaworthy boat in an attempt to assassinate them through neglect.
It is worth noting, as it says in the notes, that Zhuang Zhou offers an oblique caution about idealizing this broad perspective, which he ascribes to the P’eng through citation after initially admitting (twice) that “I don’t know” how many li. The implication seems to be that the citation, which specifies a figure of ‘ninety thousand li’ may not be so accurate either, that it’s merely what some book tells us. In fact, it seems almost laughable that the book assign a precise figure to the flight of mythological creature. He also cautions about the dangers of trying to be too exact when it comes to describing vastness or variation, especially when it comes to human thought, imagination, or true understanding or perception of anything that might lie beyond our exact knowing.
Zhuang Zhou records a conversation between the ‘animating force or breath’ and the ‘body’. At one point, the animating force (ch’i, qi, or 氣) says to the body, “You hear the piping of men, but you haven’t heard the piping of earth. Or, if you’ve heard the piping of earth, you haven’t heard the piping of Heaven.”**** Perception, in terms of that to which we are exposed, but also in terms of our selective focus, tends to limit our understanding. Seeking to understand, categorize, encapsulate and explain may only further our misunderstanding. Zhuang Zhou says:
Joy, anger, grief, delight, worry, regret, fickleness, inflexibility, modesty, willfulness, candor, insolence–music from empty holes, mushrooms springing up in dampness, day and night replacing each other before us, and no one knows where they sprout from. Let it be! Let it be! [It is enough that] morning and evening we have them, and they are the means by which we live. Without them we would not exist; without us they would have nothing to take hold of.
Zhou, Zhuang. Burton trans. II.p.37-8.
Even as he acts on Prospero’s behalf, performing the role of a Harpy in a kind of play that Prospero has produced and directed, one can almost imagine Ariel’s internal dialogue echoing some of what Zhuangzi says. The stroke of forgiveness, of release, of freedom at the end of The Tempest develops from this kind of realisation. Freeing Ariel from servitude, releasing Ferdinand and Miranda to their mutual passion, forgiving his former enemies, and even leaving Caliban in his island home, all suggest that the bulk of the island experience has been “noises, sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not”. Stage lightning. Eclipses. Stages of the moon. These life storms are “sound and fury” as Macbeth calls them, but they seem to be authored in air and fire, and like the storm bringing Harpy who blames and speaks dire words, they are grounded in mere myth or limited perspective.
Broader vision, the true understanding, continually recedes before us, because each storm we weather, each experience we have, each state that we endure, each momentary enlightenment only occasions another in the distance. What the winds sing to us, and the thunder is the colour and motion of our moving lives. These are waves breaking over the banks out at sea under skies that variously threaten or smile upon us. Whether they are karmic or more like the eternal tides is impossible for us to say because our vision is curtailed through our standing on our insular little plot of time.
About the undulations of human experience, Zhuang Zhou says, “It would seem as though they have some True Master, and yet I find no trace of him. He can act–that is certain. Yet I cannot see his form. He has identity but no form.”***** The shape shifting spirit, the Harpy, the Thunderbird, the P’eng, each changes its form as its interaction changes with our lives, as it is formed from the variegated experiences from which those lives have been built. In the end, the ever changing colour and pattern of the vast quilt, the patchwork fields, waters, and woods that comprise the rolling landscape of human life. Our experience screams, sighs, weeps, dances, and sings as it undulates away from us, radiating outward and crossing other ripples on the way.
For we participate in the world, being intimate with it, as it is promiscuous with us. Our being shapes it as it forms and nurtures us. Our perspectives, mythologies, feelings, thoughts, our very being are not separate from what is around us, within us, or what we perceive, know, or understand. Neither is it distinct from what we do not know, or what our limited perception may have missed.
The reason that one of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s most famous poems is so often quoted may lie in this, in the way he captures the whole of human experience in a couple of lines in the second stanza:
Crossing the Bar
Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea,But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.Twilight and evening bell,
And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
When I embark;For tho’ from out our bourne of Time and Place
–Alfred, Lord Tennyson******
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crost the bar.
That moment at the end of sound and fury, the moment of the tide that “moving seems asleep, too full for sound and foam”, marks one of those perfect descriptions of how we imagine our final turning away from life’s cacophony, when the dissonance of our experience is swept away by moving water or the wind over a field of grass. Much as the storm birds may guide or harry us, they are tides too, drawing out our guilt or triumph, and leading us finally to a known and unknown end.
Perhaps navigating the vagaries of our lives is, in itself, the ultimate achievement. If only we can be tough enough to do that. In closing, here are (who else?) the Fabulous Thunderbirds, even if I’m not certain whether the ‘tough’ about which they are singing is the exactly the same as others’ experience of that quality might be. Patchwork of human life? Well, it’s an experience:
*Zhou, Zhuang. The Complete Works of Chuang-Tzu. Burton Watson, trans. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1968. 29. The Taoist philosopher Zhuang Zhou is thought to have lived from perhaps 369 b.c.e to 286 b.c.e. (1) Please note that Chuang Tzu, Zhuangzi, and Zhuang Zhou all refer to the same person, as they are different romanizations of his Chinese name. (2) A ‘li’ is a traditional Chinese measure of distance, often approximated to about a third of a mile. (3) I recommend Zhuangzi to anyone who might be even remotely interested. Zhuangzi was truly a genius and I see something new every time I look at his work, even now.
**Zhuang Zi may have been making fun of those who cited texts in order to prove points or lend their work authority. No, the irony is not lost on me here.
***Zhou, Zhuang. Chuang-Tzu: the Inner Chapters. Translated by Angus Charles Graham. Indianapolis (Ind.): Hackett Classics, 2001.
****Zhou, Zhuang. Burton trans., 36.
*****Ibid, 38.
******Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892) was poet laureate of Great Britain and Ireland for almost 42 years, from 1850 to his death in 1892, and many his works are still famous and widely known. The poem “Crossing the Bar” was written in 1889, and just before his death, Tennyson requested of his son that the poem be placed at the end of all editions of his poems. His request has always been honoured.