I stumbled over some familiar words while reading Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia in preparation for a trip to Patagonia in early 2019.
The words are ones that have been stuck in my head, at various levels of consciousness, since I heard them first in autumn of 2006. Which was a time of transition for myself, a time when I was susceptible to the deep sentiment and nostalgia-for-what-never-was of the little suite-like threesome of The Island: Come and See/The Landlord’s Daughter/You’ll Not Feel The Drowning from The Decemberists’ 2006 album The Crane Wife.
Go to sleep now little ugly
Go to sleep now you little fool
Forty-winking in the belfry
You’ll not feel the drowning
You’ll not feel the drowning
I couldn’t get over that haunting phrasing, “You’ll not feel the drowning.” I also liked the fact that in some choruses I almost heard “you’ll not fear the drowning” rather than “feel the drowning”, what with Mr. Meloy’s fastness and looseness with the liquids [l] and [r], at least to my ear, at times. Or the way “drowning” is collapsed into itself, coming across my own Compact Disc Player of the era more like “drone.”
Any which way, pretty harrowing and memorable stuff.
It’s no stretch at all to think of Colin Meloy writing something like this. Which is why I never figured that he might not have. Lord knows he’s done it before. In these same conjoined tunes, he produced (or borrowed from something I haven’t accidentally read yet) such sonic gems as “the curlews carve their arabesques” and “Its contents watched by Sycorax and Patagon in parallax”.
Phrases which end up being quite sticky, have the tendency to rattle around one’s brain for years. Even though one may not know what a curlew, or an arabesque, or a Patagon, is.
With all that being said, in reading Mr. Chatwin, I was very excited to come across the phrase “Go to sleep, Ugly, you little fool, and you won’t feel the drowning,” in section 72 of In Patagonia. The phrase comes from a story about his ancestor Charlie Milward, who was essentially the impetus for Bruce Chatwin’s wordy wanderings around Patagonia, and therefore the impetus for the book.
A great part of me would love for these “you’ll not feel the drowning”s to be one of those happy happenstances that I get so excited over. But I think, in this case at least, I need to disabuse myself of that notion.
That other sticky verse, the one about Sycorax and Patagon, give another unfortunate clue to Meloy’s having read this book, rather than writing inside of the same Cosmic Image as Chatwin, or Milward. In section 49, Chatwin fleshes out a theory of the origin of the name Patagonia. Its origin in reference to the southern tip of the American continent, as Chatwin details, is an exclamation of Magellan upon encountering a Tehuelche indian at Puerto San Julian in 1520.
Chatwin supposes that Magellan was thinking of the Patagon, a half-human giant that a knight called Primaleon encountered on a voyage to a remote island in the 1512 romance of chivalry Primaleon of Greece.
Sycorax ends up being a Shakespeare reference, as many probably would have known without having to learn about it through Bruce Chatwin years later. Shakespeare was familiar with Magellan’s voyage through Antonio Pigafetta’s account. And he probably read Primaleon of Greece, as Chatwin figures it, due to some striking similarities between the Grand Patagon and Caliban, from his 1611 play The Tempest. Caliban, whose mother was Sycorax.
Sycorax and Patagon. Too many syllables in common to be a coincidence.
In Patagonia is a worthy read, if reading is something you’re interested in. To me, the book came across as one man’s trek towards some meaningful interaction with his family history, or brontosaurus skin, or just some wild tales in wild places from a wild era (Che Guevara, Butch Cassidy figure heavily). And who isn’t interested in these things?
The lovely background to some great lyrics from a great song by a great band was a welcome surprise. A happy icing on that adventuresome cake.
My final take-away from In Patagonia is this prayer from Chatwin himself:
If you walk hard enough, you probably don’t need any other God.
God, I hope so.
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