The Green Fuse and The Green Knight

 

I have been musing recently on a Dylan Thomas poem:

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower

Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees

Is my destroyer.

It describes a singular, sovereign force, possessing the ability to give life and take it away. Something that controls every movement of this world yet exists beyond it. Is this God? To Thomas, a Christian, perhaps. To me, it instead brings to mind something closer to earth - something which is given mysterious form as the eponymous “gigantic emerald-skinned stranger and tester of men” which haunts David Lowery's subversive retelling of the Arthurian poem, The Green Knight (2021). The supernatural creature appears twice throughout the film, yet pervades its every frame, symbolising both life and death. Summoned by the witch Morgan le Fay to the court of King Arthur on Christmas day, it represents a magical, paganistic intrusion into the “dull sanctum” of the Round Table.

It brings with it a challenge, albeit an absurd one, whoever can land a blow on it will win its green axe but, in return, they must travel to the green chapel one year hence, where the monster will deliver an equal blow in return. The young Gawain, who has yet to prove himself a brave knight to the Round Table (and is, crucially, le Fay's son), rises to the challenge. Rather than putting up a fight, however, the green knight stands down and appears to offer up its head. Wielding Arthur's sword, Excalibur – the phallic symbol par excellence – Gawain chops it off, whereupon the monster rises, picks it up, says, “one year hence,” and departs.

Thus, the foolish, young Gawain is marked for death. In his sheep-like desire to become a knight errant, a hero of the Round Table, he has unwittingly brought himself up against the totally absurd forces of nature. The film serves as a critique of civilisation, of toxic masculinity, of its underlying attitude of conquest over nature. It is a reminder that Death marks us all – it is the only certainty – and in our existential anxiety we seek to transcend this mortal condition through such acts of heroism, to build a civilisation in spite of nature and this overbearing certainty. The film's title screen attests to this enduring recurrence, flicking between different typefaces, the heroic tale takes on the air of an epochal (if not eternal) curse. But Lowery's retelling, its subversion of the patriarchal manifest destiny of Arthurian heroics, also attests to the equally-human capacity to retell and to recreate, to break the curse.

To return to Thomas's poem – I find that the image of the “green fuse” provides two overlapping meanings. The first points towards a kind of social-ecological vision, like an electrical fuse that reflects the potential unity of nature and technology – a machinic conception of nature and organic conception of artifice. This meaning implies a kind of creativity, something vaguely solarpunk and cyborg. But the following lines suggest another, more destructive meaning – the fuse on a stick of dynamite. This meaning works particularly well because a flower is an explosion of colour, its petals reaching outward in a slow-motion bloom-blast. In fact, I would say the poem means to embody both creation and destruction, and both meanings really come down to that one, mysterious "force".

The mythic recurrence of The Green Knight tale and the modernist-romanticism of Thomas's poem are further linked in their insistence on our ties to the natural world. It is contentious to speak of an “essence” of nature, particularly of “human nature”. Such a thing is only ever socially-constructed, embodied in a complex of myths, metaphors, maps and stories which, even if they ever were totally accurate, would still run the ever-present risk of misinterpretation and appropriation by those with too much power. At the same time, however, there is a reason why the old tales always return. We might not live in chivalric times, but we can perfectly understand what drives the foolhardy Gawain on his quest and ultimately towards his doom. It doesn't need a scientific or rational explanation, the story already tells it like it is.

However, the stories do not (and cannot) tell it as it is. In this regard, I take a lot of comfort in John Gray's maxim that: “The human mind is programmed for survival, not for truth”. The stories are contingent upon who, where and when we are, and thus the necessity of the retelling. To seek transcendence of this condition – to find the one true story that doesn't need retelling – is to be as foolish as young Gawain or, for that matter, old Arthur. Absurd, incomprehensible nature churns beneath the foundations of Camelot. This is also reflected in the wisdom of the Tao Te Ching:

The way that can be spoken of

Is not the constant way;

The name that can be named

Is not the constant name.

And yet we speak only in ways and names. This brings up the issue of who gets to speak, and to what ends. Who tells the best story about how things are? Those in the castle, or those amongst the wilderness? This is the ultimate comfort in the green fuse of nature, in destruction, in ruins, in death – that it permits us the freedom to retell the stories in our own image, to recreate our shadowy selves closer to the indecipherable language of the untamed body.