Marais: Star of the Sea
“marshes, teeming with all that mysterious life of the creatures that haunt them. A marsh is a whole world within a world, a different world, with a life of its own, with its own permanent denizens, its passing visitors, its voices, its sounds, its own strange mystery.”
- Guy de Maupassant
If you leave the farm, bearing right, and right again, you will find yourself on a cycle path which sits, like a boardwalk above seas of grass and reeds, pasture lands which shift in the breeze in waves and make up the threshold landscape the is the marais. The thing about the sea, of course, is that it is never where you left it. Its borders are uncertain, and it leaves votive offerings of itself to itself behind to reclaim later. Weed and water and scattered stone. It’s starting and stopping places are vexed by tides which heave and flinch. The Marais du Cotentin is such a stopping place. 8000 years ago this area was flooded at each high tide and at each low tide clay and sand were deposited, little by little, forming dunes which, 1000 years later, closed this land off to the sea. In its absence sweet, fresh water accumulated. Peat settled and fossilised. The marais emerged. Now, winter rains flood the marais every year, draining slowly into the sea with their memories of its ceded territory. This water freezes, shrouding the marsh in frost and mist and ice and turning it white, a phantom re-enactment of inundations thousands of years previous.
L’Adriennerie, late October 2021.
Here the parcels of marsh have long since taken on the names of the families who lived near them, acting as traces of households long since died out or moved away: the Sansuriére, the Adriennerie. The sea likewise withdrew and left in its wake a place like that at the beginning of creation where earth and water and the sky between were collapsed into each other. The binaries will not hold in this land of salt water, tearful with its own fertility. Mineral-rich alluvial mud squats beneath the marsh grasses and stunted trees and remembers the sea that left it behind. The pasture-land here grows in those memories, and the cattle and the sheep that graze it feed on them. Tameness and wildness feast together here. I watch a herd of cattle drowsing in the low afternoon sun, and as they shift to return my gaze a heron takes flight from behind their golden bulk, cruising, jerky and improbable, like a marionette, across the marsh and into the trees beyond. Christian theology understands the heron to be a representative of Christ’s suffering, on account of the belief that herons can weep.[1]
I round a bend in the road and confronting me at the apex of the junction is a shrine to the Virgin Mary. Marais. Marie. Near homonyms, in French. October is the month of the holy rosary. This is the month where the holy mother shimmers in the background of devotion, her name repeating and repeating, like a bell, as we approach Toussaint and Les Defunts and the things that might move in the dark. I saw the shrine first through the car windscreen, it filled it unexpectedly like a deer leaping from a hedgerow and darkening the glass. I come back on foot to find it and it is not what I expected. The usual enigmatic plaster Madonna is in her niche, penned in by a rusting white iron fence, clutching the Christ child aloft. She’s raised up above the road on a plinth and you must crane your neck to see her.
Roadside shrine, St Saveur de Pierrepont
From the road, this means you look straight up into the faces of the holy family and find there that the painter has chosen the palest lemon yellow, and a flicker of grey to indicate their eyes. The effect is unsettling, appraising. Bird eyes look out from human faces, watching my retreating back as I retrace my steps and return to the marsh. On my way I pass a fire hydrant, and two thoughts come at once. First, the thought that its man-made form in this landscape offers more reassurance, more grounding, than the figure at the shrine, in its squat, crimson lack of compromise, like a cartoon toadstool. Second, the thought of all the water held in reserve under my feet, in the ditches that a few days later will overflow with rainwater from the storm front that rushes in and half fells one of the farm’s oaks, from the five rivers which sculpt the marsh’s cushions and curvatures, from tides which are yet to come back in.
On the part of the Marais du Cotentin which is delineated by the village of St Nicolas de Pierrepont, and only on this part of the marias, the marsh rushes are parcelled out each year, with an allotment given to each of the five farming families in the district. The rushes, cut only after the young birds have fledged and flown, are used as bedding for cattle. Because the rushes are managed, they cannot take over, and nor can the brambles that would quickly dominate the ground cover. And so the cattle that graze the marsh sleep on it too, long after they’ve been brought in for the winter, creating space for the roosting places of ground-nesting birds. A high lonely cry falls through the stillness like a dart: a Eurasian curlew, one of the four mating pairs which live on this part of the marsh. The bird keens again and in reply the angelus starts to ring.
The incipit. ‘(Here) begins.’ The opening lines of a prayer which gives it it’s title. Angelus. From the prayer celebrating the annunciation, the incarnation, the word made flesh. It is the bell which is named for the prayer and not the other way around, the chimes that follow the ringing of hour, at six in the morning, noon, and six in the evening. Three peals of three, and then a longer peal with less structure. Some historians and anthropologists conjecture that this final peal is left over from the curfew bells of pre-modern Europe, the bells which voiced our fears of the dark, of strangers, but also of the wild outside and how it might call us to it. The angelus is the nodal point of the Manche soundscape, the intervention around which all other ambient noise feels organised, though in France it rings at seven in the morning and seven in the evening at this time of year, the practicalities of the agricultural day and the eking out of increasingly meagre daylight hours calling for an ecclesiastical compromise. From the tower of St Nicolas the angelus chimes, sonorous and old, and though I do not believe there can be a bell ringer, though this call to the faithful must now be automated, it never, to my ear, sounds the same twice, and if this is an automatic angelus, an act of faith performed by a robot, it has been programmed to sound human. Perhaps the temperature, the air pressure, bring the chimes to our ear differently each time. Or perhaps we cannot help projecting humanity onto a signal so human, a call across the fields to the spectral faithful, turning ghost rosaries through callused fingers, the beads falling through phantom hands into the soil.
The curlew’s cry dies in my ears. Curlew, from the old French corliu, meaning messenger. Naturalist and ornithologist William Henry Hudson described the call of the curlew as being ‘uttered by some[. . .] being half spirit, half bird.’ I think of Jean Francois Millet’s painting, The Angelus.[2] Of the two figures at what might be dawn or might be dusk, heads bowed to the land they are working. I think of how it is traditional, when saying the Angelus prayer, to genuflect, on the line, ‘And the word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.’ The final chimes dissipate into the clear evening air, like water wrung out of a wet cloth, as I stand and listen for the flesh that dwells among the reeds.
[1] In Irish folklore the heron is a guardian of the other world, a bridge between the living and the dead.
[2] This painting now hangs in the Musée D’Orsay, though was originally hung in the Louvre. The work had a profound influence on painter Salvador Dali who insisted that the couple in the picture were not simply agricultural workers, but were mourning their dead child. At Dali’s urging, the painting was x-rayed, revealing a coffin-shaped object where the basket in the final painting now stands. For more on this see Nathan Schrieder’s ‘The Angelus at Work’, America, 24th March 2015.