A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence
They thought they were rid of me. They thought it sufficient to run me through a tidal suction dredge, sliced up by the blade-like edges of countless shells of cockle and scallop, and then, reduced to a pink sludge, to be blasted right back out to sea, 100 meters from the Breton coast, by the onboard discharge hose. I suppose this would have been enough, at least, to despatch a mortal. But a witch you see is entirely composed of subordinate souls, ever miserable in their mutual yoking, like the galley slaves condemned to row a Viking ship until they collapse, but dutiful enough, still, to know what to do when torn asunder by the blades of a turbine or even after falling to the floor of the sea at Concarneau and passing through the digestive tract of a bottomfeeding annelid worm. We recomposed — I mean, they recomposed me. Carried along in the North Atlantic foam, these souls made up out of brine and dim perception lodged themselves first within bubbles, which, in the right proportions, as the ancients already knew, can serve at least as the temporary bodies of ensouled beings. Yes, of course, a good number of them popped, sending their free-floating souls into an indefinite atmospheric limbo I shudder just to imagine. But the only thing that matters for a successful reconstitution is that the bubble containing the Queen-Soul, which is to say yours truly, should make it back into the mix. All the others, even if we naturally prefer to keep the same pronouncedly human souls as before, can in fact be furnished just as easily by any rotten clump of seaweed, or festering medusa. Anyhow my bubbles came back together, most of them, and while a casual beachcomber would no doubt have said they were only drifting at random —I happened to hear a physics teacher from the local lycée, out clamming with his grandchildren, describing our frothy conspiracy as “Brownian”—, each of us knew, if only dimly, that our motions were in truth governed by will. We moved, and we clumped, and little by little we took on the appearance of something organic, some crude moles or mass which, that same casual beachgoer might judge, must once have belonged to some gross grampus or Neptunian hellhound. We clumped and clumped, late-arriving bubbles coming to complete our form, and we passed together through the whole splendorous history of our phylogeny, and soon we no longer had only the appearance of some other creature’s remains, but of a creature in our own right, still mostly sea-jelly, the primordial oceanic slime that birthed us all, but now, too, with visible appendages and, soon, with proud symmetry of left and right regained. It is from this first moment of regained bilateralism that I first started feeling like myself again. Next I sprouted legs and I stood on them, there on the Breton coast at the low tide just before dawn. « Faites gaffe », the clammer said to his grandkids. I stood again on the shore of my land — fierce Atlantica whipping and frothing behind me, stalwart Armorica before me. I thought of that jagged coastline before the lighthouses came, the maelstroms that returned again and again, swallowing up Norways, Basques, and Portugals alike. I thought of Hanno the Navigator, who, after traveling south down the Atlantic coast and winning for himself the trophy-pelts of those men-of-the-woods they call Γόριλλαι, next turned north, travelled up past the Pillars of Melqart, was given fresh water by the Celts at Asturia, was repelled from the shore by the Aquitanians, moved up past Burdigalia where later the Mithraists would perform their gruesome tauroctonies, keeping the cosmos in balance with the blood of bulls, and eventually arrived at our gloomy northern peninsula, where my grandmother, so they say, already a withered crone but not without her supernatural charms, welcomed that Carthaginian hero and gave him fresh water, and much more besides. I thought next of Richard Verstegen, who conjectured that the ancients must have dug out the channel that is called “The Sleeve” by the French, and “English” by the English, and of my grandmother’s great surprise (I myself was only a little girl at the time), when his Restitution of Decayed Intelligence, in Antiquities was first published and he triggered lively debate among gentlemen-scholars as to “whether the inhabitants of the one side or the other by occasion of war did cut it.” « Comment eût-il pu savoir de nos antiques besognes ? » grandmother muttered, puzzled by this mortal author’s astute conjecture. And I thought of young Proust too, of course, little Marcel at Balbec, a place that does not strictly speaking exist, but exists at least enough for our weird little mama’s boy to recall to memory his summers there, and even such vivid sensualities as the exquisite bouquet of his own asparagus-pee —each stalk of it was said to host its own rather mischievous, but ultimately benevolent, Celtic spirit—, which made him long to run and fetch Maman and to share it with her. And I looked out and I saw from the beach the pre-dawn lights of Penmarc’h, and I scoffed as I recalled the work of Théophile de Picpus, who in his Les sources latines des toponymes de Bretagne (1873) had the nerve to interpret that place-name as derived from Penna Marci, “Marcus’s feather” or “Marcus’s plume”, Marcus of course being the baptismal name of some otherwise unknown early Celtic scribe and convert to the holy Catholic and apostolic faith that our own JSR continues to find so attractive. And I thought of how my grandmother, enraged by this spurious etymology, trapped its author’s soul —a final act of supernatural wrath before she took her place permanently, that old Arthurian feminist, in an oak tree in the Forêt de Huelgoat— in a beveled ceramic tile composing the letter “I” inside the Picpus Metro station that opened, with great ceremony, in 1909. I thought of that rare mortal Kenneth White, his Ode fragmentée à la Bretagne blanche, and of the marvelous geopoetics of my own reconstitution, and it seemed to me fitting now that I should make me a toponym of this seashore. For I am in Breton a smith, cognate to the French Ferrier, Lefebvre, &c., which I take to mean that I am a maker, which I take to mean a ποιητής in every sense of the word. I emerge from the sea, and I give my name to the land, and I announce my inevitable return. If you are docile I will furnish you with old forgotten spells to alleviate your cattle’s bloat, and with hints and signs to lead you to our region’s numerous rejuvenating springs. I will also continue commissioning and editing the chicken-scratched pieces you call submissions. But hear me well: I will breathe fire on you mortal motherfuckers if you even think of trying anything funny again. I am Managing Editor here, and I’ve come back to do my job.
Welcome to Phase 3 of The Hinternet.
—Hélène Le Goff
