Stone Fidelity

Kate, Will, and the cloud of witness.


The 10th Earl (ca. 1306-1376) and Countess of Arundel, apotheosized by Larkin: "They would not think to lie so long."*

The other day I said next up in contemplation of the royal wedding was the childhood of Sir Oswald Mosley and the pagaent of British history, aka eternity, in Woolf's Between the Acts. I can't find Sir Oswald's bio and I am reading BTA for the salient quote.

Sir Oswald's childhood has to do with the vision, or a vision, at the heart of fascist, secessionist, green, hippie, survivalist, peak oiler, Mennonite, kibbutznik, Islamist, whatever you want to call it, of Utopia. A closed society, self-sufficient, pastoral, feudal, with women and serfs meeting their obligations -- the culture of artisanal, and perhaps pagan, perfection among the argricultural workers in plowing the perfect furrow, as described in Akenfield, the profile of an ancient hamlet disappeared by agribusiness, a place for everyone in the closed society, including the congenitally incontinent young woman, unemployable, unmarriageable, penniless and cared for by her grandmother -- the same closed society Mrs. Gaskell writes about in Cranford, where the old lady's young servant vows to take care of her when the money has run out, and it is not the kindness of strangers but the kindness of people your family has known for hundreds of years which literally sustains you. It is the proverbial closed room of the murder mystery, in which everyone in the room is well known to everyone else, and yet one of them has a secret. It is a society in which everyone is seen; in a mobile society such as ours, the emphasis is on a rigid standard of acceptable appearance on which -- as the cruising homosexual Tennessee Williams/Blanche DuBois certainly knew -- the kindness of strangers depends entirely.

At Sir Oswald's enclosed property, with its own castle and villages, everyone with their own place, there can be no one who is too ugly to see or to take their place in a self-perpetuating, seasonally-impelled, productive pastoral machine. Except, of course, the usual scapegoats like Jews, the upwardly mobile, the capitalists, and witches. There is an energy, Eros and Thanatos, which binds the artisanal peasantry and their laird. As my Old Hell Freezes Over Friend put it, aristocrats and serfs are the only people who do it outdoors. The tie to the land -- a Duke of Bundled Mortgages, the Earl of Soybean Futures, Jews and barren usurers, all, will never command the magick -- the growing where you're planted, the knowing where you will be planted, intertwined, as Woolf writes, with the Warings, the Elveys, the Mannerings or the Burnets; the old families who had all intermarried, and lay in their deaths intertwisted, like the ivy roots, beneath the churchyard wall. Intertwisted, too, with the loaves of bread the plowmen of the perfect furrow buried in the fields in the spring. To insure the continuation of the pagaent.

Princes and kings are dinosaurs, too, resurrected from Jurassic Park, perhaps by our affection. All their ancestors are apparent. We can trace Queen Mary's (1857-1953) face through the generations, in the Duke of Windsor's eyes, George VI's cheeks, a certain simian caste in Elizabeth's face, the shape of Charles' face and William's. The mystery of immortality and incarnation lies in idle thoughts about how the Duke of Windsor's eyelashes are just as oddly pale and moth-like as his Maman's, and how his sense of entitlement to other people's wives, droit de seigneur, might be related to Mary's habit of showing up at the homes of people who had stuff she wanted -- paintings, antique side chairs -- and admiring it and waiting for them to give it to her.

Persistence through the ages, as if one were a time capsule of feudal virtue, is the theme of Larkin's poem, An Arundel Tomb, which deftly describes, in fast forward, the 600 years between the deaths of the 10th earl and countess and Larkin's 1964 encounter with their holding hands in stone effigy at Chichester Cathedral. The persistence, as the very cynical Larkin -- 'sexual intercourse was invented in 1963, a bit too late for me' -- could not help but perceive, of love, and nothing else.

They would not guess how early in
Their supine stationary voyage
The air would change to soundless damage,
Turn the old tenantry away;
How soon succeeding eyes begin
To look, not read. Rigidly, they

Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths
Of time. Snow fell, undated. Light
Each summer thronged the glass. A bright
Litter of birdcalls strewed the same
Bone-riddled ground. And up the paths
The endless altered people came,

Washing at their identity.

Amor manet. Love remains, along with Queen Mary's eyelashes, the Black Prince's 13th century egg-sized ruby in the imperial state crown, and Lady Diana's engagement ring. Like eternity, these rocks don't lose their shape. They're taking a poll, at TMZ, on whether or not it is the sapphire of death or a sweet and sentimental gift from William to his bride. With 119,626 people interested enough to vote, sweet and sentimental is winning, by a mile (72 per cent). And therein lies the moral authority of the king: his enormous accession of luck at birth is luck so good it overrides sin and evil and karma and time itself. It confirms our optimism about paradise. We will all live happily ever after.

Next up, the dharma rajah.


The future Queen Mary, 1893.


Princess Margaret with Mary's necklace, on her wedding day, 1960. It sold for $1.8 million 46 years later to pay her death duties.


Lady Diana, with the affection of the Prince and the L30K sapphire she chose from Garrard's, 1980.


Kate Middleton with Diana's sapphire.


_________________________

*An Arundel Tomb

Side by side, their faces blurred,
The earl and countess lie in stone,
Their proper habits vaguely shown
As jointed armour, stiffened pleat,
And that faint hint of the absurd -
The little dogs under their feet.

Such plainness of the pre-baroque
Hardly involves the eye, until
It meets his left-hand gauntlet, still
Clasped empty in the other; and
One sees, with a sharp tender shock,
His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.

They would not think to lie so long.
Such faithfulness in effigy
Was just a detail friends would see:
A sculptor's sweet commissioned grace
Thrown off in helping to prolong
The Latin names around the base.

They would not guess how early in
Their supine stationary voyage
The air would change to soundless damage,
Turn the old tenantry away;
How soon succeeding eyes begin
To look, not read. Rigidly, they

Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths
Of time. Snow fell, undated. Light
Each summer thronged the glass. A bright
Litter of birdcalls strewed the same
Bone-riddled ground. And up the paths
The endless altered people came,

Washing at their identity.
Now, helpless in the hollow of
An unarmorial age, a trough
Of smoke in slow suspended skeins
Above their scrap of history,
Only an attitude remains:

Time has transfigured them into
Untruth. The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.

Phillip Larkin