Psychedelic Regrets in “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”

The ancient Mariner kills his Albatross with a carelessness that stands in stark contrast to his impulse for confession. For several days he and his shipmates feed the albatross, play with it, and treat it as if it were inhabited by a “Christian soul.” The mariner never tells the wedding guest why it is that he kills the bird, but the casual and seemingly unmotivated act is followed by a psychedelic nightmare that gives us some clues. Why do we rebel against our position within the natural world, even to the point of self-destruction? What is required to restore us? Wes & Erin discuss Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s classic poem, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Thanks to our sponsor for this episode, HelloFresh. Go to HelloFresh.com/subtextsweet for free dessert for life. Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:19 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. 0:32 Wes: The ancient Mariner kills his albatross with a carelessness that stands in stark contrast to his impulse for confession. For several days, he and his shipmates feed the albatross, play with it, and treat it as if it were inhabited by a Christian soul. The mariner never tells the wedding guest why it is that he kills the bird. But the casual and seemingly unmotivated act is followed by a psychedelic nightmare that gives us some clues. Why do we rebel against our position within the natural world, even to the point of self destruction? What is required to restore us? Today we discuss Samuel Taylor Coleridge's classic poem, the Rime of the Ancient Mariner. This is Wes Alwan. This is Erin O'Luanaigh, and you're listening to Subtext. 1:18 Erin: Okay, Wes, here's how I'd like to kind of frame our discussion today. It's a philosophical question, I know, but I think it's foundational to our discussion of this poem. And that is, is it really ever a crime to kill a bird? 1:33 Wes: Is it ever a crime to kill a bird? Well, you're making me associate to something which I associated to when I started reading the poem, which is being an adolescent boy. And at some point the hunting instinct kicks in. As a teenager, you desperately want to bow and arrow and you desperately want a gun, or at least a BB gun. And then you go out and try to kill things with it and then you regret it horribly. So that's what happened to me. I had several BB guns early. I forget the age that I was when I first got them. And then I had a friend whose name I remember, but he will remain unnamed. I don't want to out my partner in crime, but yeah, I ended up shooting a bird sitting on a branch and it flew down to the ground. I'm taking this in a much sadder direction probably than you expected. Yes, sorry, but. And then we went over to the bird and it was just lying there dead with its eyes open, but it was kind of nestled in the grass. Like it didn't just topple over, it looked like it was just sitting there. And that filled me with horrible, horrible guilt and cured me forever of wanting to hunt Anything. And that's the. You know, that was my way into this poem, that experience. 2:51 Erin: Really? Wow. 2:52 Wes: Yeah. 2:54 Erin: No, I just think in reward for doing that, you should get some sort of stipend from the Tippi Hedren Fund for removing birds from the world. I don't. I don't hate birds, but I do have, like, a performative hatred of birds, which. Which motivated my question. 3:10 Wes: What is. So what is that? Yeah. Did it all start with a bad experience with Big Bird and. 3:18 Erin: No, actually, I. I always liked. I always liked birds. Okay. You know, it's a poet thing. Like, poets love birds. Everybody in Florida, when I was down in Florida, you know, everybody's a birder. Everyone's obsessed with birds. And I just started reacting against that. Performatively, I think birds are fine, but, you know, there are lots of epithets you could. You could swing around. Rats with wings. Who cares? 3:41 Wes: Well, if you really don't like birds, you can. You know, it's not too late to become a hunter. 3:48 Erin: No, thank you. I don't want to kill any birds, but. But I. I want to be pro bird murder. For the purposes of this podcast. 3:56 Wes: They have to be controlled. 3:57 Erin: Yeah. 3:58 Wes: Otherwise they could easily take over the world. 4:01 Erin: Yeah. Especially the ones with cameras in them. 4:04 Wes: Right, right. What is that site? Birds Are. It's a parody kind of conspiracy theory site that claims that birds are a hoax. 4:11 Erin: Yeah, it's really funny. You know, who knows? Like, maybe the Albatross was going to kill them. I mean, it was following them. It obviously is like waiting for them all to die so that it can have lunch. Right? Yeah. 4:26 Wes: You're getting at the arbitrariness of that killing, which we should talk about. 4:30 Erin: Oh, you mean like a real conversation? Okay. All right. This is. The postscript is just infecting the real episodes now. This is what's happening. 4:39 Wes: No, it's good. It's the way it should be. 4:42 Erin: No, but I mean, in all seriousness, I spent. I spent a long time, Okay, I spent like an hour or two, but that's a long time for me, trying to figure out exactly what the motivation for this might be. You know, this is a poem I hadn't. I hadn't read since maybe college, but I feel like in college I just kind of glossed over it. I. You know, I really loved this poem in high school. I saw it in high school, I'm sure, as being some kind of very simplistic Christian theological, you know, symbolism, something which I'm sure I interpreted in an extremely simplistic way. And, you know, Re encountering it now, I see how incredibly complex its symbology is and how you can't really locate it in any one tradition. Like, I had forgotten about this spirit that goes, you know, that travels nine fathoms deep under the ship. Incredibly bizarre. I mean, among the many bizarre things in the poem. Right. The original sin, if we want to. If we want to call it that, which I'm a little bit reluctant to. Of shooting the albatross really does come out of nowhere in the poem. And it really. It seems like Coleridge has taken pains to make it seem as unmotivated as possible or at least to like, remove any idea of. Of a potential motivation. Though I did find a couple of things in the poem that might have been potential motivations, I think. But I'm not sure if I was over reading. But I'm just. Anyway, I'm just curious as to whether or not that was a preoccupation of yours or if. If you have a clear reading of that act. 6:12 Wes: Yeah, I don't. You know, I think the lack of psychology to the poem or psychological plausibility or the lack of. It's not. Not. That's the wrong phrase plus plausibility, but the unmotivated killing of the bird. And in general, maybe it's the surreal quality of the poem, but I think Wordsworth criticized it for that and they thought of leaving it out of this volume. Lyrical Ballads. What I think about with such an abrupt turn in the poem and seemingly unmotivated, where there's a. You know, but this seems like a friendly bird. Maybe he shares your irrational hatred of birds. But I think, okay, well, you know, maybe. Maybe one ought to reflect here on one's own sort of thoughtless acts of. Cruelty isn't the right word, but thoughtless acts of. Or maybe one's careless acts that harm others, that one does unthinkingly. But I think even. Even beyond that. Well, here's an association I had to. It was to St. Augustine's Confessions, taking the pears. And he has the famous passage where he says, well, it wasn't really even about being hungry or needing the pears or anything like that. It was completely motivated by the thrill of doing something evil or illicit or transgressive. Now, I'm not suggesting that that's what's going on with the bird killer, with the. With the Mariner. I don't know that we're supposed to ultimately come up with any psychological explanation except maybe the death drive. You know, that's another thing I thought of which. Where it's, it's something that in a way transcends psychological explanation, except to the extent that we want to destroy life in the sense that we want to destroy all tension within ourselves. Because the life drive or what it means to be alive comes with desire, comes with longing, which is to say, comes with tension. And at some unconscious level, if Freud is right, we are trying to get rid of that even. Even if it means doing something really destructive or self destructive, and even if it's completely unmotivated at a conscious level. And some people, if they're engaged in repetition compulsions, they're doing this over and over and over again without knowing why. And that's another, I think, apt association to this, the death drive, because it does, you know, it becomes a death ship. What's your whole take? You know, before we get into the actual poem and start going line by line, I think this is a good idea for you to set us off by just giving a little intro about what we think about the, the shooting itself. 8:59 Erin: Yeah, yeah. I like this idea of self destruction. I think the, the singleness of the albatross really was. Was interesting to me. You know, it's not a. It's not a bird in a, in a. In a flock and it's kind of going after this, this ship and you know, they treat it as like a pet, but it is solitary in some way. And I think like the mariner's isolation, he's set apart at the beginning of the, of the story, you know, the frame narrative. He's. He's obviously someone who's an outsider from, from society. And so in a way, you know, the, to. To connect the two. So I would want to connect this, this isolated albatross with the mariner who, who goes to kind of like the depths of isolation and solitude on being, you know, the lone survivor on this, on this voyage. By, by equating those two, I'm kind of eliding the time, right? The whole. The killing of the albatross is what really induces his solitude. But I think that there's something not just in the order in which the story is told, in which we get the old mariner telling this story from his youth before we get the young mariner. But I think there's something here about the mariner's isolation, even on board the ship already before the killing of the albatross, in which there's maybe some kind of identification and therefore the self destruction happens in, in the act of killing the albatross. That's one theory I Have. I think I mostly arrived there after reading that line about how the spirit was motivated to follow the ship because it's the. The spirit, I think the line goes, loved the bird that loved the man who shot him with his bow. Right. So. So the idea here is that the. The bird loved the mariner in particular, so there's like a kind of an identification between the two of them. And so having shot the albatross is like this desire for self destruction, you know, I also think that there's a reading in which maybe the opposite of that is also true. Right. In which the albatross is the other, you know, that the mariner can't deal with, can't kind of integrate into his. How do I want to put this? Something about the albatross is an unknown quantity which then must become, through story must become like integrated into the mariner's psyche. So like, maybe the mariner is kind of. Maybe it's not aloneness, maybe it's more like solipsism. Right. And so he can kill the albatross because he doesn't care about the albatross because the albatross has nothing to do with him. But then, then must kind of like integrate this albatross into. Into himself through the perpetual telling of this story. So that like, the punishment is to live inside the story forever with the other now integrated as kind of like the main character, the main actor in your own story does that. I don't know if I'm putting that very well, but, you know, so maybe. Maybe that's almost like the flip side of the. Of the identification with the albatross. Or maybe maybe they're both the same, you know, like two sides of the same coin. I'm. I'm not sure, but, you know, I was thinking a lot about it and obviously thinking about it hasn't made me any more articulate as to like how. How I can explain these, these various thoughts. And they're all very. They're all very hazy, I think, because we never really get very close as. As you suggested, like we never really get inside the mariner psyche for, for all of the length of this poem in which he's telling us the story, we don't really get a tremendous amount of psychology. So. 12:37 Wes: Right. All the psychology I think we would have to see as played out, allegoric, allegorically, symbolically. 12:44 Erin: Right. And the symbols are very, very complex. So. 12:47 Wes: Yeah, I like that about identification. I hadn't thought of that. Let's revisit that when we, when we get There. I want to dig into that. Should we read a little bit about the background of this poem? Coleridge later on wrote about what occasioned the poem in his Biographia Literaria. I could read that. If it's boring, I could cut it out. It was a little bit long. 13:08 Erin: No, I think that's great. I like the idea that this is all Wordsworth's original, original idea. 13:16 Wes: Let me. Let me start reading and we'll see how. During the first year that Mr. Wordsworth and I were neighbors, our conversations turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry. The power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colors of imagination. The sudden charm which accidents of light and shade, which moonlight or sunset diffused over a known and familiar landscape, appear to represent, the practicability of combining both. These are the poetry of nature. The thought suggested itself. To which of us, I do not recollect that a series of poems might be composed of two sorts, the good ones and the bad ones. I wrote the bad ones. He wrote the amazing. I'm just kidding. In the. In the one. The incidents and the agents were to be, in part, at least, supernatural, and the excellence aimed at was to consist in the interesting of the affections, by the dramatic truth of such emotions as would naturally accompany such situations, supposing them real and real. In this sense they have been to every human being who from whatever source of delusion, has at any time believed himself under supernatural agency. For the second class subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life. The characters and incidents were to be such as will be found in every village in its vicinity, where there is a meditative and feeling mind to seek after them or to notice them when they present themselves. In this idea originated the plan of the Lyrical Ballads, in which it was agreed that my endeavours should be directed to persons in character supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment which constitutes poetic faith. Mr. Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to propose to himself as his object to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural by awakening the mind's attention from the lethargy of custom and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us, an inexhaustible treasure. But for which, in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude. We have eyes yet see not, and hearts that neither feel or understand. With this view I wrote the Ancient Mariner and was preparing, among other poems, the Dark Ladie and the Christabel, in which I should have more nearly realized my ideal than I had done in my first attempt. Okay, that's Coleridge. And then Wordsworth said of this. The Ancient Mariner was founded on a strange dream which a friend of Coleridge had who fancied he saw a skeleton ship with figures in it. They should have, by the way, trademarked this before Johnny Depp and everyone else, I don't know. We had both determined to write some poetry for a monthly magazine, the profits of which were to defer the expenses of a little excursion we were to make together. The Ancient Mariner was intended for this periodical, but was too long. I had very little share in the composition of it, for I soon found the style of Coleridge and myself would not assimilate. Besides the lines in the fourth part, quote, and thou art long and lank and brown as I in the ribbed sea sand, unquote, I wrote the stanza in the first part. He holds him with his glittering eye the wedding guest stood still and listens like a three years child. The mariner hath his will. And four or five lines more in different parts of the poem, which I could not now point out, basically all the good lines. The idea of shooting an albatross was mine, for I had been reading Shelvocke's Voyages, which probably Coleridge never saw. I also suggested the reanimation of the dead bodies to work the ship. Yeah. So I think that's a. It. It's a very interesting background. You know, we did. From this volume, we did Tintern Abbey. Very different kind of poem. Very interesting idea to put their poems in a single volume and say, okay, here's two varieties of the romantic disposition. In one of them, we take things in everyday life and we rediscover what's extraordinary about them by ripping off that film. Right. That Coleridge mentions. That covers up the senses. The way we become inured to the wondrousness of the world, we try to undo that. And then the other one method is just to take a tab of LSD and see what comes. I'm just kidding. Sorry. 17:38 Erin: Opium is. 17:39 Wes: I'm really. Yeah. To take. Take a lot of drugs. No. So to. The other method is to really get into the realm of fantasy. And in this case, something very dreamlike. And it's odd because it's. You Know, again, these are. I can see why you would think of these both as variations on the Romantic, but they are also just very, very different endeavors. And Coleridge and Wordsworth couldn't be more different. It's. It's a very odd couple. You know, you could make a sitcom with them as the. Wonder how they got along, as how they got along as neighbors and until they didn't. 18:18 Erin: Yeah. 18:18 Wes: So, yeah, it's an interesting collaboration, but yeah, it's funny. 18:23 Erin: I, you know, I think we'll talk about this quite a bit more when we get to the preface to the Lyrical Ballads, which I'm sure we'll cover at some point. But, you know, it's funny too that this is one of the actual ballads in the collection. So, you know, at once it's kind of outside of the purview that Wordsworth set about for the book in a way. I mean, obviously they had this kind of like joint understanding of which arenas each would cover. But I think ultimately, you know, Wordsworth was not the biggest fan of this poem and certainly it exerted a huge gravitational pull over the. Over the whole collection by having it be the longest poem in the book by far and having it come first. So that when it was reissued a couple of years later with, with Wordsworth's preface, it was, I think, shunted to the back of the book at that point because the poem pretty much dominated the reviews and everything. You know, that. That's really kind of what swayed people's opinions, I think about it, because it was so mammoth, you know, right at the beginning of this thing. And then to have a bunch of, you know, Wordsworth's kind of quieter poems later on. It's definitely a book that is trying to coalesce two completely different styles and put them under one sort of like guiding principle which doesn't quite, I think, capture both of them in this scheme, I think. But I mean, it is worth saying that like, this is a ballad, it's a book called Lyrical Ballads. And of course, like, there is obviously there's this desire, the whole project of Lyrical Ballads to get at real speech, to get it, you know, something having to do with the lives of real people. Obviously this is supernatural and doesn't have much to do with that. But in terms of the ballad tradition, ballads were considered a kind of lower class form of poetry, often oral. And so I guess there's something here about Coleridge trying to fit in with like, what was Wordsworth's particular project by producing a long ballad. 20:21 Wes: Anyway, I want to think more about that, but let's get into the poem. 20:25 Erin: Okay. It is an ancient mariner and he stoppeth one of three. By thy long gray beard and thy glittering eye. Now wherefore stoppest me. The bridegroom's doors are opened wide and I am next of kin. The guests are met, the feast is set. Mayst hear the merry din. But still he holds the wedding guest. There was a ship, quoth he. Nay, if thou's got a laughsome tale, mariner, come with me. He holds him with his skinny hand, quoth he. There was a ship. Now get thee hence, thou graybeard loon, or my staff shall make thee skip. He holds him with his glittering eye. The wedding guest stood still and listens like a three years child. The mariner hath his will. The wedding guest sate on a stone, he cannot choose but hear. And thus spake on that ancient man, the bright eyed mariner. Mariner. 21:13 Wes: Marinera. 21:14 Erin: Marinera. Sauce. 21:16 Wes: Mariner. Yeah. I think one of the things that Wordsworth didn't like about the poem was kind of some of the ancient diction and spelling, the old sea yarn affectation. But you just have to let yourself get entranced by it. Just like the bridegroom. I mean, sorry, not the bridegroom, but the wedding guest. 21:34 Erin: That's right. 21:35 Wes: You look into the mariner's eyes and they become little whirlpools, little spirals. And then you let yourself go. 21:48 Erin: Well, you know, a lot of this though, is pretty easy to clean up. And he does, you know, I mean, Coleridge gets rid of some of this in the next edition. The problem is he keeps going and going and tinkering with it for 40 years or something, but. And of course, some of it is just Scottish because it's. He's supposed to be Scottish. Yeah. So. So we have this idea of the wedding. So lots of questions already coming up. Why this one guy? Why is it important that he's a wedding guest? You know, we have this repetition of the mariner holding him. Very tender. No, he's. He's transfixing him with his eye, making him stay. What kind of, as you're suggesting, hypnotic power does. Does he have over him? Why the compulsion? All of these questions and more. 22:31 Wes: So he's like a wedding crasher, but he's not going to go in and have fun. 22:36 Erin: He's like. He's the opposite of a wedding crash. He's trying to prevent people from. From going in and having fun. 22:42 Wes: He's a wedding blocker. 22:45 Erin: Yeah, he's the Bouncing guest blocker. Turns out this guy was not wanted at the wedding and they hired this guy to stay outside and just tell this one guest a story until he went away. 22:58 Wes: Yeah, so it's one of three. The wedding guest is walking, I guess, in with two other people and he's the one who gets stopped. So I guess that's symbolically significant. I don't know if it has something to do with the Trinity or not or some other, you know, three is a symbol with very wide ranging possibilities of interpretation. But what do you make of that? Is there anything else to say about that? About the one of three? 23:24 Erin: I don't think so. I was trying to figure that out myself, but it didn't, you know, a trinitarian explanation wasn't really satisfying to me. This is more just like a, like a psa, like one in every three people will be stopped by the Ancient Mariner. But, you know, take precautions. 23:41 Wes: He's a business. He's a busy man. 23:43 Erin: No, I just, I guess I just thought, thought more and more about this idea of the guest and the, the bridegroom's feast. Of course, like, this is a common way of thinking about heaven. You know, Christ is the bridegroom and, and heaven is the sort of like eternal wedding feast. And so this guest seems to me to have been chosen for some purgatorial. Right. Waylaying and needs to hear this story. And if anyone has ever heard a long story told by an old man, it is, it does shave off some time in purgatory, I think. But anyway, yeah, you know, so, so, so perhaps he's being waylaid because he's not ready to go into the feast. In other words, he's not ready to go to heaven. He needs to be, he needs to be purified in some further way. He needs some sort of further knowledge, some, some greater understanding before he can partake. But I was also thinking about just this idea of the guest. Like why, why not the, if we're not going to read this as a, as a heavenly symbol, why a guest? Why not the bride or the bridegroom? You know, the, the people that the event is actually about. Thinking about the significance of a guest as, you know, having the enjoyment of the feast but being ancillary to the marriage itself, to the sacrament. So like a looker on, you know, someone who's coming basically for entertainment and celebration and probably food, but who's not directly partaking. And whether or not that's significant either as a kind of a mirror of the Mariner in some way in terms of, you know, someone who seems set apart from the crux of the event or if the guest like needs. Not that if, if you're just going to go to a wedding that you need some kind of admonishment for being there. But you know, but there's, there's something about this idea that, you know, the guest wants, wants merriment and wants enjoyment and wants to, and thinks at first, oh, I'm going to bring this mariner inside and have him, oh, you have a great story. Is it a laugh? You know, come in and tell it for everybody. The guest maybe can be accused of a certain kind of unseriousness or something. I'm not, I'm not sure. You know, all of these things are just kind of swirling around in my head as I, as I approach the poem. 26:00 Wes: Let's pause to talk about our sponsor for today's episode, HelloFresh. With HelloFresh you get farm fresh pre portioned ingredients and seasonal recipes delivered right to your doorstep. Skip trips to the grocery store and count on Hellofresh to make home cooking easy, fun and affordable. That's why It's America's number one meal kit. HelloFresh's menu includes over 45 recipes. 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That's HelloFresh, America's number one meal kit. Now, you had me thinking of the Mariner being the best man or something and giving one of those embarrassing best man speeches. But instead of revealing too much about the private life of the groom, he just tells this crazy tale. He's really drunk and says this weird poem, and everyone has to sit through it. But in this case. Right. It doesn't happen at the wedding, but outside the wedding, before the wedding. Or is the wedding already happened? This is the feast. So I guess this is like the reception, right? 29:17 Erin: Yeah, I think so. 29:18 Wes: After the wedding. And. And yeah, the. The wedding guest's response is to threaten him and get off me or I'll. My staff will make you skip. Yeah. And that's when he gets, you know, arrested by the glittering. 29:31 Erin: I. 29:31 Wes: He gets mesmerized, which is, to my mind, the best way to experience a poem. It's in a state of mesmerization. 29:40 Erin: Well, I love the fact that you're pointing out that he's rude to this. To this Mariner, because I think I totally glossed over that and that. I think that's really important, you know, the Peter. 29:51 Wes: Peter moment. 29:52 Erin: Yeah, exactly. And also the. It's downright Greek. You know, he's. He's an old man. He deserves respect, perhaps. Or, you know, you should. You should listen to him. You should care about him. You should extend him some kind of hospitality. Maybe, you know, maybe. Maybe someone's doing wrong by not inviting him in so that he. 30:11 Wes: That's a great point. 30:11 Erin: Bring down the whole party. 30:12 Wes: Well, it's like the. The uninvited witch who shows up in the fairy tale. Or it's the soothsayer or the prophet. Right. A Tiresias figure there to deliver some sort of truth, and that's what's being pushed away. 30:27 Erin: Mm. Yeah. So I think. Yeah, this question of ordering and how the. How the Poem seems to know, you know, as I, as I kind of suggested earlier that the, the mariner's solitude is sort of prefigured in the poem even before he becomes, in the course of this story that he tells, the solitary figure that mirrors the albatross here. It's as if, you know, the mariner already knows that this particular guest is the one who will reject him, who will not extend him hospitality, and therefore knows that perhaps he's the one who needs to hear this tale. Right. There's a kind of like super knowledge or before knowledge that seems to, I think, come up again and again in the poem. 31:06 Wes: Yes. There's an opportunity here to write another poem from the perspective of the wedding guest. 31:11 Erin: Yeah, exactly. 31:13 Wes: It's a much more boring poem. All right, shall we keep going? 31:17 Erin: Yeah. The ship was cheered, the harbor cleared Merrily did we drop below the kirk, below the hill, below the lighthouse top the sun came up upon the left out of the sea came he and he shone bright and on the right went down into the sea Higher and higher every day Till over the mast at noon the wedding guest here beat his breast for he heard the loud bassoon. The bride hath paced into the hall, Red as a rose is she nodding their heads before her goes the merry minstrelsy. The wedding guest, he beat his breast, yet he cannot choose but here. And thus spake on that ancient man, the bright eyed mariner. 31:54 Wes: This is really interesting because I didn't give a lot of thought to the fact that the wedding guest is so torn up about not being able to be at the celebration. 32:05 Erin: This is like the easiest application to basic Christian symbolism I think for this reason, right, he's instead of partaking of the feast, he's in the outer darkness, right? Like this is, this is very biblical. So he can, he knows what's going on, he knows what he's missed out on or what he is missing out on. And he's, he's rueful over, over this. What's interesting though of course is that, you know, he has the desire to go in and partake and was intending to go and you know, had his invitation in his hand or whatever whatnot. And the mariner is like forcibly holding him, preventing him from going in. Normally there would be more agency on the wedding guests parts. You know, something that he had done that would prevent him from going in. Like, you know, he shows up and it turns out, oh, he doesn't have an invitation, right. He's been. If we want to imagine a scenario in which this has A more easy application to this idea of. Of the wedding feast as heaven. Right. He did. He. He had forgotten to plan for. For, you know, needing the invitation to prove that he. That he belongs or hadn't had left something important behind. Right. Something that indicated his own ineptitude or, you know, a respons dropped instead. You know, this is like outside of his own will. And yet it does seem to be necessary in this idea of like a. It's. It's purgatorial in nature. He needs to hear this before he can be allowed in or before he can go in. Of course, in the end, he doesn't end up going at all, which is a further complication to this easy Christian symbolism. Right. 33:41 Wes: So he's gonna miss. Miss the whole thing. 33:44 Erin: Right. 33:44 Wes: I want to back up to. Before we get this little interlude about the wedding guest being upset. You know, we get. He launches into his account. So we get this little isolated stanza of what is going to be a very long account. And the stanzas is very representative of what's to come include. Which includes a lot of personification of nature. So you have the sun coming up out of the sea. I think, at this point. Right. You can just read that as straightforwardly a matter of a creative way of describing the sun. And visually the way it looks like it's coming out of the sea, even though we know it's not. But I think as the poem goes on, it becomes so surreal that we can no longer say that anything is just a matter of imagery. It's not to be taken literally. It's figurative or imagistic. And in this case, we get the sun comes out of the sea, shines bright, and then on the right goes back down into it. Makes me think of, you know, one of those. Those cartoons where you see the sun actually emerging from the sea and the sun's got a face and then it looks around and then it plunges right back down on the other side. So. So to my mind, cartoonish. But also time is accelerated here. We get. Correct me if I'm reading this wrong, but we. We. We get a whole day in which nothing happens before we get the interlude about the wedding guest. 35:07 Erin: Yeah, that's a great point. I also love the fact that, you know, the sun is personified as a he. It shines like God's own head, I think is the expression that'll come up later. Right. There's a very clear identification here between the sun and God. And yet what you're pointing out about this stanza is that the sun is subservient to the sea in a way. Right. It rises up out of the sea and then goes back down into it. So the sea has a kind of supremacy here. Later, when. When the mariner will describe the sea as rotting, it's. It's as if the sea is itself kind of like this supreme body in which. In which everything else is. You know, we're all just kind of like organs, you know, in this. In this giant body of the sea that is decomposing. So there's. There's this supremacy maybe, of. Of nature. I mean, obviously the sun is. Is part of that as well, but almost this idea that, like, nature is supreme over. Over God contained within the stanza. 36:07 Wes: Yeah, good point. I mean, the sea is a much more. Well, it's a maternal image. It's where life comes from. It's amniotic. It's a big womb, in a way. 36:16 Erin: And. 36:17 Wes: And Right. So typically, the associations to the sea are associations to the maternal, but also to the organic. So, you know, yes, the sea is nature, the sun is nature, but the sea is essentially organic and therefore, in a sense, more Dionysian and more about life drive, if we want to connect it back to. Ultimately to the whole death drive theme that we may get into. And the sun is more Apollonian and it shines light on things later on in the poem. It's gonna. I think it's gonna pin down, right. The ship, it won't be able to move. It's like a pin of sunlight comes down and goes right through the ship. And so the sun can be associated with stillness and with the static, because that is often what the concept of an image, I think, produces in us when we. Well, let me just think of a less convoluted way to say this. Yeah. I think the sun is. Despite the fact that it's moving, it's more associated with stasis and in the sense that it's more associated with being. So traditionally in philosophy, being as opposed to becoming the only true beings or the absolute eternal beings, like the Platonic forms, for instance. And they can't live in the world of becoming because if they did, they would be unknowable. They wouldn't serve as a good foundation for knowledge. So anything that comes out that discloses itself and the light of day, in a sense, is associated with the static. So I like your. Yeah, I like your point about this opposition between sun and sea. 37:52 Erin: This is tangential, but I'm also just, you know, looking at the form of the poem too. The words of the wedding guest. And later a few other people will speak and they'll. They'll be quoted in the. In the poem as well. These words have the. The kind of. The membrane of quotations around them. But the mariner's speech and the poem itself, the implied poet, perhaps we could call it, who's telling the whole story, who says at the beginning, you know, it is an ancient mariner. So we get a voice other than the mariners to start the poem, right? So. 38:25 Wes: But then he disappears and he doesn't show up again until the end, right? 38:30 Erin: But there's a collapsing where the mariner's identity becomes then the poet. Or at least there's no differentiation. There's no membrane between the speaker of the poem and the mariner himself in his own speech. So there's a kind of. Again, I just think of a body, like, for me, it's a kind of a bodily association where. In the same way that the sea contains these various creatures in it. Maybe I'm thinking too much of one of my favorite poems, Marianne Moore's the Fish kept thinking of that over and over again. And in reading this poem, when she talks about the turquoise sea of bodies. But it seems as though some of these characters, right, they have these membranes, they're almost like organs, whereas the flow of the poet and the mariner are collapsed. It's as if they're in the same. They're like the blood. They're in the same bloodstream that runs through the whole poem. And I think that'll become important because I think there's a lot about embodiment and blood and being embodied and things that are flowing versus things that are stagnant or more contained. 39:35 Wes: Cool. Shall we? 39:36 Erin: Okay, so this is the mariner speaking again. Listen, stranger, storm and wind, a wind and tempest strong for days and weeks it played us freaks like chaff we drove along. Listen, stranger. Mist and snow and it grew wondrous cold and ice mast high came floating by as green as emerald and through the drifts the snowy cliffs did send a dismal sheen. Nor shapes of men nor beasts we ken. The ice was all between. The ice was here, the ice was there. The ice was all around. It cracked and growled and roared and howled like noises in a swound. 40:12 Wes: Okay, so now we get the elements played us freaks. 40:16 Erin: Yeah. 40:16 Wes: What is that? I. Is that a. Is that idiomatic or. For the time, it's not idiomatic for. Not idiomatic for us. 40:24 Erin: But in my edition, it says freaks is glossed as unexpected changes of mind. Capricious tricks play games. Yeah. Still doesn't really explain grammatically how. How freaks is working there. Yeah, but I. I was stuck on that line so for so long that it actually made me miss the significance of the following line. The, like, chaff we drove along. And I mean, as fun as the freaks line is, because it is really fun. And I love the internal rhyme of the. Of the third lines. My favorite line, maybe my favorite single line in the whole poem is, and ice mast high came floating by. But chaff. I'm just thinking about, you know, separating the wheat from the chaff. And I'm also thinking about the idea of these sailors as chaff in a way, right? Like we. We don't ever get an explanation for what it is that they're doing on this journey. We don't know what type of sailors they are. Are they explorers? Are they whalers? Are they. You know, like, we never get. We never get a reason. But the one thing I think that all sailors have in common is, you know, they tend to be people who are cast out from society. You know, they tend to be people who are. Have lost everything, you know, and are looking for a way to make a living that would. They're looking for a way to make a living, and it wouldn't matter to them that they would be gone for upwards of two years at a time. No one would particularly miss them, unfortunately, was often the case with these. With these sailors. Right. So we have. We have a very interesting class of people to begin with here. And I just. I just wanted to point that out because I feel it's. It's easily glossed over, but the reality at the time was that if you were a sailor, you would often be potentially a criminal, a desperate person of some kind, you know, so this is a group of people that's already. I don't want to say morally suspect, though that that comes into it. But this is already a group of people who are separate from society. On top of the separation that then we'll already see, or that on top of that we'll see that the mariner will come to experience. I don't know. I just. I think that's important for context here and understanding something of the world of this poem. 42:41 Wes: Maybe that's another thing that I hadn't thought about. As far as I know. It's a weird way to use chaff, Right. Normally you would be separating wheat from chaff. Secondarily, maybe you could think of chaff as being something that's driven or it's usually More passive. Something is acting on it, right. Or it's being spit out by a 43:01 Erin: machine or being winnowed and blown away. 43:03 Wes: Yeah, right. But in this case, like chaff we drove along. They're the ones performing the action. But I, you know, it's a weird simile. 43:13 Erin: It's like they're exiling, right? 43:16 Wes: Perfect. They are separating out themselves and they are the extra in a way. Or they. They are the unusable husk. This whole wheat from chaff thing, I think that originates with the Bible or its use as a metaphor for human worth. Right. What is that? Well, this is the wrong translation. The new living translation. He's ready to separate the chaff from the wheat with his winnowing fork. Then he will clean up the threshing area, garnering the wheat into his barn, but burning the chaff with never ending fire. Ooh, that's not nice. The chaff go to hell. Well, it's very apt. That's what's about to happen with them, so. Or him, he. Everyone else dies, but he gets to go to hell and back, I guess. Yeah. So hints of that with the just thinking about the hell thing. You know, the hints of the Odyssey there, there too. But it played us freaks. Maybe. Maybe that means it's. They. They went nuts. They went crazy. But based on your. Your gloss, there's so much storm that it's making them crazy. And like Chaff we drove along. I mean, obviously the images of them being driven by the storm, but oddly it makes it. It's as if it's their own agency. So I think that that suitably collapses the difference between their own freak minds and the natural elements. Because the storm, the outer storm, has become the internal storm. 44:43 Erin: Yeah, that's great. I think too that the membrane of the. Gosh, I don't want to keep using this word membrane. So I apologize, but. But I think it's important here, this idea of internal versus external. I guess Auden was interested in this, in that collapsing throughout the poem. But I'm thinking about the ship too, as kind of its own little universe. And I love this. One of the reasons why I love the. And ice mast high came floating by line is not just because it's beautiful and majestic and has a great sound to it and everything, but also just, you know, this is the beginning along with, in line 34, the viewing of the sun as then coming to stand over the mast so that we know that they're at the equator. But in this line, you know, the mast is like a measuring Stick. It's. Everything is kind of viewed from the perspective of, like, where it is in relationship to the mast. Both the people on the ship, you know, the crew members themselves, will kind of be standing around the mast at various times. And also the outside world, the, you know, the natural world is measured in relationship to the mast as though this is like the center of the universe. It's their own sun. This. This particular master. And I think that this. What I take to happen later, shortly after this point, with the introduction of the superstitions of the crew members, etc. You know, that all, I think, is being prefigured here with this idea of the mass, that they're measuring everything. They're measuring the world in relationship to them and their ship and their perspective. And so they're going to start reading, or we're going to see that they read signs in relation to how things are affecting them. And I think that this is an important psychological theme that occurs over the. Over the course of the story, which is everything is about its relationship to the ship. All natural signs are just about. I'm sure you would be better than me at giving a psychological kind of like, definition of this. But it seems like they view the natural world purely as something to be interpreted in its effect on their own fate and their own psyche. Right. Which I think is their downfall with the Albatross Incident. The Albatross Incident. It's a subtitle of this poem. Yeah. 46:55 Wes: Right. Now, that's a very good point. They're used to thinking of nature in terms of hypothetical imperatives. What can you do for me? Nature. 47:03 Erin: Right. 47:03 Wes: And how. What do I do? You know, hypothetical imperatives, as in, what should I do to accomplish goal X? And how can I use the natural world to do that? And the highest manifestation of that is, of course, science. It's built on experimentation, built on hypothetical imperatives. If I do X, then Y happens and I gain some sort of power at the level of navigation, manning a ship. Very old art, but involves some very interesting technology. And it's not just about navigation, but it's also about survival and having all the supplies on board and then knowing what to do when you get to shore in some distant land and all of that stuff. So, yeah, so the tendency is to look at. I think this is very good. The tendency is to start to look at the world in terms of. As something to be navigated or exploited. And this. This helps a little bit with the whole shooting of the albatross and the seeming arbitrariness of It. Because it's as if it is just one more thing outside of the ship, or it's one more aspect of nature. You know, there's the sun, there's the storms, there's the winds, all these things that need to be circumvented or dealt with. And the bird is just one of one more of these indifferent things. It's not appreciated as organic and it's not appreciated insofar as it's. It's a sentient being as being akin to humanity in any way and deserving of non hypothetical imperatives. The categorical imperative, like you owe something to the bird. You can't. Yes, you can shoot birds if you're hungry, but not this bird. And not for no reason, not in this circumstance. So I think that's a very good point. And I don't know what to make of this line about seeing cliffs in the distance through the drifts. So they see land, I take it, but they don't see shapes of beast or men. So it's an uninhabited land that they get a glimpse of. There's too much ice in between them and it. For. For them to make out whether or not there's any living thing on that land. And then that I think is the last we hear of that. Is that right? 49:18 Erin: I think, I think so, yeah. I'm sure you're right. Now, you know, looking at this, I thought that the snowy cliffs were just like a kid continuation of the icebergs and the. 49:27 Wes: That's what I thought at first too. And now I'm just, I'm. This, this thought is new, but now that we are reading it together. Yeah, because it's through the drifts, the snowy cliffs. 49:36 Erin: That's right. 49:37 Wes: Initially I just thought it was a metaphor for the ice, but. 49:40 Erin: Right. No, that, that must be. Right. So there, this is, you know, they do see Antarctica, I suppose. 49:46 Wes: Right. 49:47 Erin: So. And that would explain why then the, the albatross will, Will shortly appear and if there is a land mass. 49:52 Wes: Exactly. Yeah, right, of course. 49:55 Erin: Right. It's all coming together. 49:57 Wes: Realizations. Yeah, a lot. There's actually some logic to the poem. They wouldn't see an albatross if they weren't near land. Yeah. I mean, the albatrosses do go far out. Right, but. 50:08 Erin: Right, but yeah, but they need to eat their, Their penguins and their, Their. Their sea. Sea people, their sailors. 50:15 Wes: And this is, this is based on a account of a voyage to find. In, you know, in the area of the Antarctic, to find Australia. Right. To. You know, there were rumors. 50:27 Erin: Yeah. 50:27 Wes: Rounding the existence of Australia, but. 50:30 Erin: Right. Yeah. This is what Wordsworth was talking about. I think this was an account of a sea voyage that rounded Tierra del Fuego. Right. And. And someone on board a ship actually did shoot a. I believe it was a black albatross. Now, those are okay to shoot. I think they sound creepy. 50:51 Wes: You can shoot the black albatrosses, but not the white. 50:53 Erin: Exactly. 50:53 Wes: I don't know. Do you want to. 50:54 Erin: Do you want to retract statement? 50:59 Wes: I don't know if you were conscious of the political overtones of that statement, but. 51:07 Erin: Oh, good Lord. That's hilarious. I was kidding. 51:13 Wes: So that is interesting. Yeah. It's based on an actual account of the killing of a black albatross. 51:19 Erin: Could you imagine, though, in a. In a. In all seriousness, how terrifying a black albatross must look in a. In a place in which everything must be blindingly snowy and icy and various shades of white? You know, I mean, it must look. And they're. They're enormous. You know, depending on the time of year, could look quite skeletal. It would look like a. Yeah, like a corpse, I'd imagine. So. 51:46 Wes: Interesting. 51:48 Erin: Don't speak from experience, but. Yeah. 51:51 Wes: I think that brings us to the end of part one. If people want to listen to part two immediately, they can do that as subscribers. Subscribers. If not, you'll have to wait till next week. Thank you. 52:04 Erin: Thank you. And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast Please send your questions, feedback, and episode requests to [email protected] if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook subtextpodcast and on Twitter enjoysubtext. You're listening to an Airwave Media podcast. or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. 53:24 Wes: Okay, welcome to part two of our discussion of the Rime of the Ancient Mariner. We had just gotten done discovering that the Mariner's ship was actually near land before the sighting of the Albatross. And now we are ready for the grand entrance of the Albatross. Go to it. 53:43 Erin: Okay. At length did cross an albatross. Through the fog it came, and an it were a Christian soul. We hailed it in God's name. The mariners gave it biscuit worms and round and round it flew. The ice did split with a thunder fit the helmsman steered us through, and a good south wind sprung up behind. The albatross did follow. And every day for food or play came to the mariners' hollo in mist or cloud, on mast or shroud it perched for Vespers 9 whiles all the night through fog smoke white glimmered the white moonshine. God save the ancient mariner from the fiends that plague thee thus. Why looks thou so? With my crossbow I shot the albatross. Dun, dun, dun. That's the right one. 54:32 Wes: Yeah. 54:34 Erin: Picked the wrong. Wrong tune. All right. 54:38 Wes: So out of the fog and albatross and they. As if it were a Christian soul, they hailed it in God's name. So this thing I had said before about them being in the disposition of treating everything as if it were something to be used or navigated around everything natural, that that's not the disposition that they have on their first encounter with the Albatross. In fact, not only are they treating it as if it were a human being, but they're treating it with a soul, but they're treating it as a Christian soul. And that's the way they hail it. And it. It's a we. It's not just. It's not like, yeah, and the rest of the crew really love this bird. And I'm like, God damn fucking bird. You know, it's eating all our biscuit worms. And like, you know what? We can't. We don't have time. We don't got time for this. We don't got the resources for the. No, no, He's. He's part of the welcoming committee himself, which is what makes the turn to the killing of the Albatross so strange and abrupt. 55:44 Erin: Yeah. Could you demonstrate this? So hail the Albatross in God's name. What would you say? 55:52 Wes: How do you hail anyone? How do you hail anyone in God's name? 55:55 Erin: I know. I'm serious. Like, what do you say? 55:58 Wes: God. God be with you. Fair. 56:02 Erin: Okay. How come I can only think about damning someone when I. Isn't this awful? 56:07 Wes: God or God bless. Yeah. God bless you or. Oh, okay, what would you. Right, so what does it mean to hail another person or an animal in God's name except to say something like God bless you? I don't know. 56:19 Erin: I think God bless you is the good answer there. Okay, so why would they be saying God bless you to like, why would they be so happy to see the albatross? Because this is probably the first living thing they've seen in ages. Besides biscuit worms. Nobody likes to see a biscuit worm. Which leads me to the. 56:36 Wes: I take the biscuit worms to be the. The maggots that they're. That they don't exactly what they are, but they're pulling out of their biscuits, which is completely disgusting. 56:46 Erin: Which leads me to the real reason why the albatross was killed. The only reason that makes sense. 56:51 Wes: Which is you stole a biscuit. We said you could have the worms. The biscuits are for us. 57:02 Erin: Oh my God. Yeah. No. God damn. 57:05 Wes: You give them a worm and they take a whole biscuit. Eventually. It's always the way if you give 57:10 Erin: an albatross a biscuit worm. My favorite childhood book. No, they were hungry, right? They had maggoty maggoty biscuits and that's it. And you know, Larry over there was starting to look pretty tasty. Am I wrong? 57:25 Wes: Yeah, no, I don't, Larry. Yeah, well, that would be the sensible explanation for the killing, but of course that is not given as a motive. And the albatross is not eaten. He ends up being hung around the guy's neck. 57:36 Erin: So, yeah, I don't know. I just feel like if they weren't hungry, he would devote a couple stances to describing their, you know, the five star cuisine on board or the three different restaurants with Michelin star chefs next to the swimming pools. I don't know. Anyway, obviously this is not given as motivation. I'm just being right. Silly. But I will say that, you know, they do definitely break the. The taboo around killing and eating. Or killing. Okay, I don't think they eat them, but around killing your pet. Right. Because this thing is obviously their pet, came for food or play and he came to their hollo. So yeah, half a pet. 58:15 Wes: He's got one foot in the family, but not quite. 58:18 Erin: Okay, he's their mascot since he's a. 58:20 Wes: He's a wild bird. But yes. So taboo, symbolically. I think we know why it's taboo. Or do we, we could say something about that. But in some less figurative sense and some sense not related to religion. What is it other than what you've just mentioned? They've made friends with it and in a way it's like their pet. What is it that makes it such a terrible thing to kill it, other than that some relationship of kindness has been established to it and that the killing is arbitrary? 58:51 Erin: I mean, I guess I'm thinking again of its singleness. Were it part of a flock, you know, there would be an abundance from which you could then cull some. Some of these birds for. For food purposes. So the fact that there's just one, and I don't know if they're. They must be. Because they're very large birds, they must be relatively solitary compared to birds that move more regularly in flocks. This is entirely speculation on my part, but. But that seems logical. I don't know. 59:21 Wes: Well, they go out on these enormous. These long flights. I only know this from watching the. They're featured in part of the Planet Earth, one of the Planet Earth documentaries. And it's a crazy. They lead crazy lives. Let's just put it. They go out on these ridiculously long flights. Once they get old enough, they go out somewhere to mate, maybe. But in any case. Yeah. So I think solitary is a good. You were singling out the solitariness of the creature. 59:50 Erin: Yeah. You know, to kill a lone bird is in this kind of context seems like the destabilizing of an entire population of one. Right. Versus if you come across a herd or a flock or, you know, any number of animals together somehow that it seems that it would be logical that you would have less of an impact on culling a few animals from a larger group. This albatross, its singleness seems to imply that there aren't many of these around. And also the fact that they have. Oh, well, the fact. The fact too, that they like, relate to it as. It as a soul, I think has to do with the fact that it is a single bird. They have a relationship to it that's allowed like, you know, maybe in this pet like way. Right. Like you have. You have your dog or your cat or you may have a couple of them. Right. But that you have a. Like a personal relationship with it because it's just one. It's not acting in a. In a group with others and therefore kind of like excluding you. This albatross seems to kind of come in and not intrude in a negative way, but enter the psychology of the ship and become something that they are like, they look forward to seeing. They call it out, you know, they call out to it and it comes in an extremely barren landscape. This Seems doubly wrong to kill a single animal in a place that's so barren, where there aren't perhaps large populations or at least a large population that isn't visible readily to them. And also the fact that, like, this is something that's comforting them in their. In the ships solitude. This is the only living thing they've seen in ages. 1:01:26 Wes: So, yeah, yeah, it's interesting because they're enormous birds, right? And they're white. They apparently they have the largest wingspan of any living species of flying bird. I think up to 12ft. I'm just thinking back to my. To the documentary I watched. They have a lot of trouble when they're first learning to fly. They have a lot of trouble getting off the ground. The young adolescent albatrosses who are flying for the first time will tend to fall into the sea, which is dangerous because the sharks know exactly when, you know, there's a bunch of albatross adolescents reaching, you know, they. They all reach adolescence at the same time and they all try to fly off at the same time and they're falling into the water and getting eaten by sharks. So we know they are, you know, they're enormous. They have these huge wingspans and they fly these very long distances. So in a way they're like, you know, I'm thinking of you. You were talking about identification earlier. They are like sailors in a way. They're in a place that sailors encounter when they're very far away from home. And like, say, sailors, in a sense, they're taking these long sea voyages, except they're doing it high up in the air. And in general, once they're in the air, they're much less vulnerable, practically invulnerable to predation, and certainly much less vulnerable than human beings are on a ship. They can be very far away from land and resources and. And yet, unlike human beings, be in there in their element in that kind of isolation. So the, the albatross can, unlike the human being, can be very solitary without being imperiled by that solitude. Whether we think of peril in terms of predation or threat to life, or we think of imperilment in terms of social isolation. So I think that's another. I think they pair bond for life, but they do end up with a mate. Albatrosses are unlike the sailors, right? They're married for life, but I think they're solitary for long periods of time. And that's something I often think about this. The, the human sort of severe dependence on being part of a social Fabric, which many animals just don't. Don't have. Many species of cat. Right. Can just live very contentedly without ever running into another cat. Except during breeding season. Big cats, certain species, but some species are more social. 1:04:00 Erin: But this is especially true for women. Right. Rather than men like that. Like these famous Oregon Trail stories. Right. Where men are more capable of going off and living on their own. And then their wives go crazy, not only because they, you know, because apparently their immediate family also isn't enough for them. Right. They need other. They need other people besides just their family. 1:04:21 Wes: Yeah. Well, men. Men can channel their social needs into hunting and killing. Killing animal. Other animals, for some reason, that seems to do the trick. Killing albatrosses, but, you know, or killing anything. But in any case, it's. Yeah, I think there's something about that. There's something about the size of the bird which brings it closer to being more like in the. In the physical domain of the human, especially if its wings are outstretched like. Like arms. And then the solitude of the bird, its success in navigation and travel. 1:04:58 Erin: Yeah. 1:04:58 Wes: So I think there are conflicting reports on whether it was actually taboo for sailors to eat albatrosses. So James Cook, for instance, says they would regularly catch the birds and eat them, and then other sailors apparently would catch them and free them and believe that they had the souls of lost sailors and that killing them would bring back luck, bad luck. So I don't know what the historical verdict is on that. There might have been a superstition around the killing of albatrosses by sailors, but maybe some sailors just saw them as food. And we don't. From the poem itself, we're not informed of that background. So within the world of the poem, I don't know that we need to read this as, hey, you know, it's. Hey, man, it's bad luck to kill albatrosses. Don't you know that that could have occurred in the poem. That could have been a plot point within the poem, but it doesn't happen. No one warns him that, hey, don't do this. It's just implicit in the relationship that's been established with this animal. And then he. He does it. So we don't know his motivation for doing it and we don't know which sort of taboo he's violating. 1:06:07 Erin: I really like this idea that this bird is like, you know, both a kind of a perfect sailor and a. An ideal ship, you know, ship of one. This crew is obviously not. Not doing so well by comparison. 1:06:21 Wes: Exactly. 1:06:22 Erin: Yeah. I also am thinking Too, just about like the, the face of the albatross and the fact that it has a kind of dodo quality to it. You know, it's, it's a little bit goofy looking. It's kind of like the. 1:06:34 Wes: Oh yeah. 1:06:35 Erin: You know, it's kind of like the opposite of the charismatic megafauna. Right. That's. I think that's the, the term that's used for like the species in zoos that get the most attention. You know, they're called. They're. Yeah. So, you know, the things that look big and spectacular and that zoos put on their logos, you know, the things everybody wants to see. You know, the, the albatross, like the dodo is kind of like the inversion of that where, you know, the dodo's appeal it seems, is like how uncharismatic it looks. Right. And therefore it's a bit more human. I think that the, the fact that the albatross kind of has that look or is maybe the closest looking thing to a dodo that, that yet exists. Of course, at the time of the. This poem's writing, dodo still existed. There's a kinship there that's. That's intense. 1:07:24 Wes: Do you ever see the rescuers? 1:07:25 Erin: Yes. I loved that movie. 1:07:27 Wes: Disney. Is it Disney? It's a cartoon. 1:07:28 Erin: Yeah. 1:07:29 Wes: So there's a, there's an albatross in that movie. 1:07:32 Erin: That's right. 1:07:33 Wes: Orville. Named after Orville, right? 1:07:35 Erin: Yes. Oh my gosh. 1:07:37 Wes: And it always has trouble getting off the ground. Right. So it's a goofy. It's a Goofy character, Goofy bird. And it's like the, the amount of Runway that's required. Right. To get off the ground is enormous. And that's true. They do. They have to do a nice big run up to get in the air. They are at the very edge of being a bird that's so large that it no longer can fly. You know, getting up to the ostrich level or whatever. And, and it's interesting, you know, since birds are really the, the only surviving dinosaurs. I think the larger they get, the more akin to being a dinosaur and being something that's just alien, that belongs to another age. I think that might be an element of this. So, yeah, the weird, the weird look I think enhances that. It's both comical and goofy, but I think it also highlights the alien ness of the creature. Anyway, are we ready? 1:08:37 Erin: Yes. And the good south wind still blew behind but no sweet bird did follow no any day for food or play Came to the Mariner's hollow and I had Done an hellish thing, and it would