London-based Spanish artist Gemma Pardo this year exhibited (in Nottingham and Hastings) a video work entitled "Finisterre." The video offered over- and under-water explorations of the coast of the English channel. "Finisterre" is a word I've been thinking about lately in relation to my previous post on brinkmanship. From the Latin Finis Terrae, land or earth's end, the word has always seemed evocative of the negotiations between land and water, not simply their meeting point. Further poetic resonances attach to the word through its appearance in the shipping forecast (although not, alas, since 2002, when the name for this sea area became the considerably less poetic FitzRoy). The word is perhaps most familiar as a French departement in Britanny, although it's interesting to note that the Breton term for that region is Penn-ar-bed, meaning not end of the earth, but "head of the earth." Such reverse perspectives are drawn out in Pardo's film.
"Finisterre" is also one of the best known of Sylvia Plath's poems (in full here), which begins:
"This was the land's end: the last fingers, knuckled and rheumatic,
Cramped on nothing. Black
Admonitory cliffs, and the sea exploding
With no bottom, or anything on the other side of it,
Whitened by the faces of the drowned."
[...]
Aside from ruining the operation of "(There'll Be Bluebirds Over) The White Cliffs of Dover" as a successful exercise in patriotic romanticism, the poem is also worth noting for its image of the last grasp of the earth - a real sense of the brink.
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